but no more!  i'll be taking matt's advice, and fixing things up.

the screenshot doesn't really explain the new ads as well as it needs to. unfortunately, i lack the technology to take a screenshot which shows you the next 4 pages full of feeds boxes with 1 or 2 posts, and a full screen height of advertising in between them. It probably wouldn't be so bad if the posts weren't excerpted. That's weird, because on their own, the AJAX-expanding-collapsing-excerpts are actually really cool. But the auto-clearing boxes that make sure the floated ad block on the right shows all the way to the bottom isn't cool. I could be okay with having that many ads on my feedreader if, you know, it didn't interfere with my ability to read feeds.

At the same time, i've been really enjoying the wp.com friend surfer. There's no 'mark as read' button, which i thought i was going to miss.  turns out, being able to load posts by how long ago they were written pretty much makes read/unread irrelevant.  it's not like bloglines and google reader, where once i've glanced at an article, it's marked as read, and then dissappears forever.  And the 'latest posts' view, which shows exactly 1 post from each feed, elimanates that 'nagging feeling'  i get when i've been neglecting my reader.   The multiple view options and the speed make it better than i was expecting.

Previously, my gold standard feed reader was akregator, because it shared konqueror's cookies and allowed me to read livejournal/suicidegirls feeds that required authentication.  Then i got fascinated by john zeratsky's read this! concept.  now, i think i want a friend surfer for non-wp.com blogs.

with, you know, a better name.  preferably one that doesn't involve cheesy 90's california lingo.

In the Find what box, type IECUSTOM: Key is still unwriteable.

That search got me nothing. I actually had to just search for "unwriteable". and the registry keys i had to change were none of what they suggested. they were all under HKCR, and things like /.application/.xaml. oh, and i ran the install in safe mode.

archGFX looks fine, since despite the star-html hacks not working, the transparent *.PNG's do, and the menu that looks so jumbled in 6 looks fine. at least until you hover over it.

the thin line has the same issues it's always had, and i'm still not sure what to do with that.  the only place it's really popular is on deviantart, and i doubt those downloaders are actually installing it.

i need to stop installing them.
the rest of the world is off enjoying the new internet explorer 7. while i get to sit around with ugly, non-compliant old IE6. i got to dabble with beta 1 a few months ago, for a brief while. after which point, upgrading to beta 2 became impossible for reasons undefined.

It's like an addiction. I can't stop installing them. they're all new and shiny, but they always hurt me. This week's poison? AIM lite.

c'mon. how can you not love a program with a WTF (what's this for?) button? it's brilliant. (you can tell i'm a beta addict by the number of strangely named contact groups i'm unable to permanently merge).
I'm also loving the tabbed editor in wordpress, which allows me to actually insert an acronym, without having to write code for the rest of my post. i would love having tarski as a theme, except that they keep doing this thing where they take out all the cool features of themes they install that made the beta self-hosted versions so cool (cf. daydream, k2, etc). at least they fixed the links widget so there's less to complain about