Category Archives: General Chaos

General Chaos

D-Day

In 1944 on this day, my grandfather went ashore in the first wave at Omaha Beach. His company took over 50% casualties that day.

My grandfather landed on Omaha Beach as a platoon sergeant. Shortly afterward, he was battlefield-commissioned; he was a first lieutenant by war's end, and took a medical retirement.

I never was able to get my grandfather to talk much about that day; most of the wartime stories he told were about when he returned to the US, where he spent the last days of the war in an Army hospital. The closest he got to talking about D-Day itself was about how he met his brother a few days later.

I had often wondered why he didn't say more about the war; that is, until I got little tastes of it myself in the Navy. And then I saw “Saving Private Ryan,” and I understood all too well.

My grandfather died a couple of years ago of congestive heart failure. He took his stories with him. I don't think he could ever find the words to let them out.

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Administrivia, General Chaos

Go, go, Mozilla…

After a couple of weeks of using the Mac OS X beta of Opera, I've grown tired of some of the more insidious rendering problems. It renders a page, I scroll down, and the content, it ain't there. Sure, it's beta, so I don't expect it to be perfect. But aside from it not crashing as often as Microsoft IE for OS X, it hasn't really been a winner in the usability department.

Just as I was getting ready to give up and run IE again, Mozilla 1.0 ships. Yesterday, I downloaded it. Today, I am dropping Opera and IE into the Trash Can.

Mozilla outperforms the latest Netscape browser, and renders faster than IE, on my G4 Cube. It's got all of the functionality (and more) of the Netscape browser, in open source form: multi-account e-mail, a simple WYSIWYG HTML editor, and a chat client for IRC called ChatZilla.

I still have a problem rendering the graphics for my Radio desktop website (though the CSS works fine for my hosted site–go figure). But it's a relatively minor thing(Dave, any ideas on this?)

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