Saturday, June 13, 2009

And This Is For You, Mister Fish

Speaking of 'Dad jokes' and everything... soon-to-be-nine-year-old Elder Son unleased a joke on his mother and I yesterday. It was a bit of a 'moment', because for the first time, the joke worked properly. Not as in "it was funny", but as in "it has a punchline and it makes sense."

Happily, Elder Son didn't think it was all that funny either. I think he was offering it simply to show that he's understood the nature of the Crap Riddle Joke, and can manage the genre as well as any. And to be fair, I think his new creation could easily stand up for itself in any collection of Crap Schoolkid Riddle Books.

It is as follows:

What is a cannibal's favourite lunch?

Hand sandwich!


...and the hilarity just never stops, does it? Heh.

By the way: I've been having trouble with Firefox lately. I use the latest stable version, to maximise browser security. But something in the interface with my XP machine and possibly the satellite so-called "broadband" system has been really kicking Firefox in the nuts. It's been sucking up system resources like crazy. Not memory -- this isn't the infamous Firefox memory leak. No, it's been eating CPU cycles like crazy. Open two or three tabs at once; maybe one of them hangs on a site that has too many bells and whistles and bullshit (I'm looking at YOU, Yahoo) and suddenly all of them stop receiving data, and just sit there.

The only way to fix it has been to turn off Firefox and restart, which is incredibly irritating. Of course, I discovered that if I gave it a serious nut-shot by stopping it with Task Manager instead of simply turning it off, then when I restarted it, Firefox would ask me if I wanted to open the same set of tabs. And if I said 'yes', why, usually it would load all of them without hesitating.

But that's a stupid fucking way to browse the web. So I looked for an alternative. Not Internet Explorer: I have no desire to bend my poor computer over and spread its cheeks to every secondrate skrypt-kiddy and trojanator on the Web. Figured I'd try out Google Chrome.

Guess what? I'm using it right now. It's fast. Simple. Clean. And it's not hanging up on me all the time.

I won't get rid of Firefox. The ability to customise it by adding plug-ins and the like is far too useful. But I'll be using it only for very particular purposes from here on. Chrome is excellent for everyday webwork.