aaron c beals

• Comic for June 27, 2010
  - this is why i’d be better off forgetting everything i ever knew about computers.

Paul Pierce opting out of his contract seemed like a slam-dunk in theory a few months ago: he’d opt out, sign back with the team for less money per year (so we could tap into the rich free agent pool of 2010) but over a longer period of time, and retire a Celtic.

suddenly, the reality of the free market has hit me. if Doc doesn’t return and the team doesn’t re-up Ray’s contract, they might start re-building around Rondo now, and we might be Pierce-less. *gulp*

i realize that I’m being more sentimental than practical — if i were GM, i’d be letting Pierce walk unless he re-signed for much less money so we could start building for the future. barring a miracle, the current aging core is not going to bring us another championship. i’m not the GM, though. i’m a long-time, hard-core fan. so i’m now devoting my remaining mental energies to thinking about anything and everything but this.

more info from around the web:
Celtics Blog reports and has some nice analysis
Boston.com rolls out a photo montage of Paul’s time in Boston (ease up. he’s not gone until he signs elsewhere, guys.)
Mazz represents the non-sentimental approach i’ll probably talk myself into if Pierce walks away

• Twitter Feels Like Falling in Love, At Least From a Hormonal Perspective
  - scary. also, i wanted to feel better, so i’m sharing this with all of you.

well, it seems everyone else is commenting on the omnipresent vuvuzelas at the World Cup, so i’ll throw my hat into the ring with two quick links:

1. apparently, soccer is disrupting the concert

2. some sheet music, if you have the instrument on hand

• Comic: The Universal Analogy
  - clearly, the BP engineers didn’t spend enough time as children camped out in front of their video game console.

• Worst-Case Scenario
  - three sarcastic cheers for the US media…

• Chrome-To-Android Extension: Awesome, Deadly
  - oh so very dangerous. great Jack Bauer reference.

• Infrastructures

…so photos will have to do. first, a photo i took in Bangkok in late June outside CentralWorld. next, a photo from earlier today in the exact same location [Boston.com].

at the beginning of the year, i upgraded from firefox 3.5 to 3.6, not for any particular feature, but because i do web development and like to test out the site with all available browsers.

i’m a tabbed-browsing fanatic (most of my sessions have 20+ open tabs), so one thing struck me right away: new tabs don’t appear where they used to. in all prior versions of firefox since they added tabbed browsing, new tabs appeared at the end (far right) of the tab list. suddenly, in 3.6, they changed the default model to one in which the new tabs are inserted right next to the current tab. this is seriously flawed, but not for the reason you may think.

i don’t have an issue with the behavior itself — Google Chrome and IE 8.0 both have this behavior for their tabbed browsing. it doesn’t even deeply bother me that they changed the default behavior rather than rolling the feature out as an option in this release and then changing the default in a future one (a model i prefer). my chief complaint is that they took a core browser behavior, changed it without notice, and didn’t provide an option in the preferences for changing the behavior back!

i’m not the only person to complain about this, and luckily there is a fix. however, your average firefox user is not going to know that they can hack the about:config registry.

frankly, this is poor product management on Mozilla’s part — and a rare miss for a team that has historically done an excellent job of keeping their users in mind.