It is NOT a blogosphere meme pool tag game!

No, really! Well, sorta. Kinda. Maybe

*sigh*

Diane (Diane’s Stuff) sorta halfway almost kinda semi-tagged me with this NOT-a-blogosphere-meme-pool-tag-game she was herself sorta halfway almost kinda semi-tagged by Cathy at Sunday Morning Coffee to play.

Here’re the NOT-a-blogosphere-meme-pool-tag-game instructions:

Go to Wikipedia and search your birthday (not the year). Then you post three (3) items: two (2) births and one (1) death.

Make it easier on yourself. Just google “your birthday” (month and day only) and “wiki” and you’re there. Don’t even use the quotation marks.

OK,

May 23, 1910: Artie Shaw, born Arthur Arshawsky.

…an accomplished jazz clarinetist, composer, bandleader, and writer.

He was born in New York City, United States, and began learning the saxophone when he was 15 and, by age 16, had begun to tour with a band. He returned to New York and became a session musician. During the Swing Era, his big band was very popular with hits like “Begin the Beguine”, “Stardust”, and “Frenesi”.

More at the link.

And how about Humphrey Lyttelton?

In the late 1940s and early 1950s Lyttelton was prominent in the British revival of traditional jazz forms, from New Orleans, recording with Sidney Bechet in 1949, necessitating the break of Musician Union restrictive practices which forbade working with jazz musicians from the USA. In 1956, he had his only hit, with the Joe Meek engineered recording of Bad Penny Blues, which was in the UK charts for 6 weeks. As the trad movement (not quite the same thing as revivalism) developed, Lyttelton moved to a mainstream approach favoured by American musicians such as trumpeter Buck Clayton; they recorded together in the early 1960s. By now his repertory had expanded, not only including lesser known Ellington pieces, but even “The Champ” from Dizzy Gillespie’s band book. The Lyttelton band — he sees himself primarily as a leader — has helped develop the careers of many now prominent British musicians, including Tony Coe and Alan Barnes.

More at the link, again.

May 23, 1498 – Girolamo Savonarola executed on the orders of Pope Alexander VI. Savonarola was a particularly nasty piece of work, perhaps best known for burning much of the great art—books, paintings, etc.—of Florence in his attempts to stifle the Rennaisance. The famous name of his infamous act(s)? The Bonfire of the Vanities. Dumbass. (Warning: typical Wikipedia lack of depth. Mentions “it’ as a single event, and only peripherally mentions the on-going bonfires, as well as past book/art burnings sponsored by other dumbass religionists. *sigh* Still, the article’s not a bad place to start… )

I may tag some folks later, but since there are no tagging rules to this NOT-quite-a-blogosphere-meme-pool-tag-game, I’ll just ask that whoever reads this post your own NOT-quite-a-blogosphere-meme-pool-tag-game version of this and link here and track back, OK?

For now. You don’t want to make me come on over and tag you, now do you? Hmmmm?

😉

Opera 9 (beta 2)

I’ve been reluctant to begin using Opera 9, partly because it’s still in beta and partly because i have so much invested in Opera 8.54.

Invested? Yeh, all my passwords and usernames (neatly encrypted so that no one I’ve yet discovered knows of a way to recover them if lost–hence a hardcopy backup of alla that data–*heh*) stored in the Wand.dat file. All my email. All my RSS & Atom feeds. You get the picture.

But still, it’s not a MessySoft beta. All reports have it as very,very stable. And I’ve used the Opera 9 beta on a coupla different Linux distros. Besides, importing alla that data, well, there just has to be a way.

So… I’ve made the switch. Installed it into a new folder (already had an older beta that I’ve not used a lot). Imported all my data. Actually, not that hard, and it probably would have done it with no effort on my part if I’d installed it over my old Opera.

Some niggling lil quirks. Like keyboard shortcuts. *sigh* The Opera programmers gave in to the Firefox app’s keyboard shortcuts on a few behaviors. I was not pleased to find ctrl+d for “Paste and Go” missing. And ctrl+n opened a new browser window instead of opening a new tab, as I’d become used to for the past five or six years.

Sooo…

Tools>Preferences>
Advanced>Shortcuts

Opened the Keyboard shortcuts, added ctrl+d and told Opera what I wanted it to do. Edited ctrl+n to do what I want. Saved it and I’m now a happy camper.

Mail is still slick, just a lil slicker. Page loading is still snappy. My fav Opera skin’s been updated, and it’s much nicer than it was before. All-in-all, a pretty neat experience so far.

And only one very slightly buggy behavior (Opera 9 seems to be rally picky about some java compliance problems. Applets that are not-so-compliant are likely to only partly work… *heh* If you could hear my bad Billy Crystal immitation, you’d get the Princess bride reference.)

From the Opera website,

Opera 9 Beta 2 includes Widgets, content blocker and BitTorrent…

And more.

9b2.png

Versions are available for Windows, Mac, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, OS/2 and QNX.

And Opera 8 is available for your phone, Pocket PC, and a wide array of other devices. In fact, Opera makes its income off all the other devices (phones, etc.) it is used on, and the computer browser is just an offshoot of all that, now.

Minor Update: detailed (and I do mean detailed) User Prefs can be defined pretty easily, if you can access the user prefs page, which is kinda buried… and for good reason. You can royally screw up your install if you do really wonky things. but… OK, bookmark this and use it if you want:

opera:config

Most of the things found there can be accessed directly via Tools>Preferences, but not in the detail that the above link will offer.

Today is “Write Your Own TWC Post Day”

Open trackback post. I’m mulling over a coupla “thinkpost” assignments, so just link to this post with some good stuff of your own and track back, OK?

If you want to host your own linkfests, check out

Also note the other fine blogs featuring linkfests at Linkfest Haven.

Linkfest Haven