Joining the flock

I read about the demise of Netscape today, which makes me feel a little melancholic, since like a lot of Gen X-ers, I first discovered the real value of the “world wide web” on Mosaic and then on the must-have Netscape. But now like most people (it seems) I’ve abandoned, many months ago, MS Internet Explorer for Firefox (and now that I’m on a Mac, I can’t even choose IE if I wanted to), which was created by “the Mozilla group,” which itself comprised (I think) a bunch of folks downsized from AOL/Nestcape, and so the more things change etc.

Well among suggestions for people forced to abandon Netscape are for them to adopt Firefox, of course; another (which I had to find out for myself, actually) is for them to migrate to an “internet suite” called SeaMonkey, which is great for me since it has an almost-identical-to-Netscape’s HTML editor called “Composer.” I need this for uploading my course materials to my teaching site, and it’s nice to see that the learning curve for this new product will be nice and flat.

Another suggestion for the “Netscape community” is to try a new browser (albeit one with the same “engine” as Firefox) called Flock. It’s interesting, because it integrates all these features from social networking sites–facebook, myspace, flickr, youtube, the whole damn web 2.0 social world–into the browser; this means… well actually I’m not entirely sure, but I can have my facebook friends and their status updates and such in a sidebar on my browser 24/7. How this is going to help me, I dunno, but one thing I like is that there is a photo upload applet built right into the browser that lets me (I think) upload pics to my facebook page, and even cooler is that I can create and upload blog posts from a standalone blog editor, which is what I am doing right now.

Flock also quite seamlessly absorbed my Firefox bookmarks and cookies, which is cool and which I could not do with Safari (the Mac browser from Apple- which is a superbly fast browser but with too little of the firefox bells and whistles, especially an addictive thing called Stumble Upon and its associated toolbar that everybody should avoid because it’s too much fun). So this should be an interesting test drive.

I joined another sort of FLOCK today because Brian and I went to a rally for the Alberta Liberals at Crossroads Market (link at “places I like”), which is the more depressing of the two year-round farmers’ markets in Calgary. I say “depressing” because Crossroads has–in addition to a nice assortment of fruit/veg, very good and well-priced meat and cheese sellers, and excellent little “food court” with, among other things, Turkish-style bureks–a very sad “flea market” with just the most depressing bunch of trailer-trash accouterments being sold- blankets with Harley logos, paperbacks, cheap imported garbage. ANYway, the rally was upstairs in the “Artspace,” a great art market that COMPLETELY makes the flea market seem out of place and doubly skanky, and there were hundreds of people there. Very inspiring. Do I think the Grits are going to win? Not a chance, but I do have high hopes that they’ll take more seats and that we’ll continue to evolve a meaningful opposition in Alberta.

We picked up a tonne of produce at Crossroads (Chongo’s Produce there), including big, SWEET strawberries from Cali I assume but really, really delicious. On the way home we stopped at Bite Groceteria again (note previous post about this wonderful little foodie boutique) and scored some Italian jarred tuna with hot peppers (a sample sold me, good enough to eat straight out of the jar in one expensive sitting) among other things; we then had one of the best sweet things I’ve ever, ever tasted at Nectar Desserts; ’twas a dark choco and caramel tart, which B and I split. Completely amazing. THEN we headed downtown to Caffe Artigiano for two traditional macchiatos and split a smoked turkey panino, which CA does on cranberry sourdough, a beautiful sandwich.

Great day for body and mind! And the weather continues to astound. The tulips are a good 5cm out of the ground now.

Happy March!

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