Wilf Wilson

Here are a few screenshots from my time spent in Facebook’s iPhone app.
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Bugs are usually annoying, but sometimes they can make me laugh.

Take this image for example. I must have right-clicked just as Mozilla Firefox loaded and became visible, although I had intended to click on whatever window had been there previously. The context menu that came up was fucking crazy.

Why? Well, maybe because the program lacked the context to know which list items to show. This suggests to me that the context menu is populated with all possible items (including those from addons) when the program loads, but they are hidden and shown as required depending on the context of the right click.

Whatever the cause, it was a nice WTF moment to my day ((FYI, this happened on 22nd February 2010 at 22:06.)).

From Balloon Juice:

The blogger who posted as the always hilarious Jon Swift has died.

He had so many funny posts that it is hard to choose one, but this take-down of Mark Noonan ranks near the top.

I started reading RSS feeds ((Just after the debut of the iTunes app store.)) when I downloaded NetNewsWire 1.0 for iPhone. To fill my greatly expanded reading appetite that I soon developed, I explored the blogrolls of those sites which I already read. Many of them linked to Jon Swift.

The Jon Swift blog has lain dormant for quite a while, but when Al was posting I thought he was producing some of the best satire on the internet. I think sticking to his conservative persona really paid off – only after his death was his identity revealed ((By his mother!)). I remember lying on a recliner in the hot Nice Sun, sipping a cool drink and reading Jon Swift on my iPod between dips into the pool. It’s how life should be ((I was even happier when I discovered that the local mall had Wi-Fi, so I could get the newest posts straight to my iPod. Heaven.)).

Maybe my memory of the blog is distorted by my holiday memories, so I’m going to re-read the archive in full. I think I’m going to appreciate it even more this time ((I’m older, more knowledgeable.)).

Anyway. I always feel sad when someone I know dies, particularly the young. As well as the loss of ((In this case, anyway.)) a beloved blog, it’s also a reminder of my own mortality. Death’s a strange thing and we all learn to deal with it in our own ways, but I feel that, at 18, I’m still largely untouched by death. Even though I have only one surviving grandparent (and her brother died last week),I’ve never been to a funeral. I don’t think I’ve yet felt the grief of losing someone close to me.

How long can it last?

On a walk today I finished listening to the audio version of Jonathan Safran Foer’s book, “Eating Animals“. I heard that Natalie Portman became a vegan after reading this book, so I wanted to read it too.

I eat meat and I love it.

I also want to hold clearly defined principles, and to live consistently with those principles.

Before “Eating Animals”, I’d never read a book about meat, and I hadn’t really thought about whether I should eat it ((Usually stopping after ‘well, it’s natural so… why not?’)). Even after reading the book I don’t think I’ve properly started to consider things, but now I have the information necessary to re-examine my position.

It’s tricky. I think I will most likely stay an enthusiastic meat-eater, but I still have an uneasy feeling that I’m eating meat without having my opinions on the matter in order. I don’t want to be a hypocrite.

I’m going to think about this over the coming weeks.

As this post is published, I will have started my long journey to visit my sister and brother-in-law, along with their month-old son, my nephew. I’m staying with them for about a week.

I’ll be on a train for most of the day, which is alright – when there’s no disaster I quite enjoy it. Usually.

Whilst I’m travelling, please enjoy this music:

By the way: I’ve greatly expanded my French page (it’s now called Wilf’s Guide to Advanced Higher French omg!) and added essays in order to help people taking Advanced Higher French. I hope someone’ll use it.

And I looked at the word count of my blog, it’s now over 60,000 words. Oh dear.