Farewell to an old friend

Sounds ominous, doesn’t it?  It’s not really that bad — I shipped my old slow laptop back East this afternoon so it could be put to use by someone else (who, I hope, is not reading this article and won’t be upset about getting a third-hand machine). 

Artificially dark chocolate?

A friend came back from a trip to Switzerland today, bearing the obligatory chocolates for consumption by those of us who stayed behind.  One of the brands he brought was Nestle’s “Frigor” — when I tasted it, I thought it was too bitter (like the 77% cocoa bars I’d tried to eat in Switzerland two years ago), and so I was surprised when I looked at the label and found it was only 44% cocoa.  I wonder how they make it so bitter with so little cocoa?

If you’d like to try it for yourself, Swiss Luxury Chocolate will happily sell you a box.

WYSIWYG editing in Manila

This evening when I went to edit this page, I found myself looking at the old Manila edit control — the one which shows you the tags.  Since I am, after all, a trained HTML professional (I was a member of the original HTML ERB at W3C, back when we were standardizing HTML 3.2), it would have made sense for me to stay with that version; tags don’t scare me at all.

But after typing in a couple of paragraphs, I went to the preferences menu and chose the WYSIWYG control.  There are times when I want to work close to the metal and hand-craft my HTML — but those times are rare.  Most of the time, WYSIWYG editing is more than adequate — now, if there were just some shortcuts for the tags I use most often (like <h4>), I’d be in hog heaven!