Stephanie and I finished Super Paper Mario over the weekend.  It was a pretty good game I guess, although it had quite a lot of reading.  Voice actors next time please?  Anyway, what I was going to mention here is something that’s pretty unique to the Paper Mario games (at least the last two, I don’t remember if this was the case with the first one).  After you beat the game, you are given the option to save, and then you can go back into the game and still do stuff, with the final boss defeated.  It’s not a “second quest” type of thing where you start the game over and play through a harder version.  And it’s not that you start over just before the boss, with the option of backtracking.  You’re actually in the game world, and the final boss is defeated, and the people are no more on the edge of doom.  In fact, some of the former bad guys can be seen around town, moping about how they messed up but they’re going to start over fresh and do things right this time around.  There is even a challenge that doesn’t open up until after beating the game.  Although really there’s not that much of a point then, I still think it’s kind of neat that you get a glimpse of the world restored to order that you can still interact with.

You may have heard that Apple is bringing the Safari web browser to the Windows platform.  In fact, you can download the beta now.  I wanted to see how compatible my own website is, since Safari is not a browser I’ve ever tested.  Unfortunately, proxy support seems to be broken right now.  Whenever I try to go to a website, I get prompted for my name and password to get through the proxy (this is on my PC at work).  After entering this information, Safari immediately crashes.  This is beta code, so I won’t fault them for having bugs.  I do, however, question the validity of this chart:

From my own experience, this is completely backwards.  Opera is much faster than IE, which is faster than Firefox (when I say IE, I mean IE 6, whereas the chart says IE 7; maybe IE 7 is slower).  I’m not sure what kind of HTML they used to conduct this test, but it must have been much more complex than your typical webpage, in some way that made Safari look good.  Of course, I still use Firefox, the browser that feels slowest to me, because 1) I need my precious extensions, 2) IE is teh suck, 3) Opera cheats with overzealous caching, 4) the speed difference is not really significant, and 5) Opera doesn’t support ctrl+enter, which I rely on to type URLs.

The other thing I noticed in my brief time with Safari is the font smoothing technique, which must have required a lot of work to port over.  I’m not going to get into a discussion of whether it is better than the Windows technique or not; if you’re interested, Joel Spolsky has already done a pretty decent job of covering that topic on his excellent blog.  The problem I had is that my monitor at work is a little unusual in that its sub-pixels are aligned backwards (BGR instead of RGB).  You can fix font rendering in Windows to account for this, but I couldn’t find any such option in Safari.  For an illustration of the problem look at this image:

If you are on a CRT monitor, both probably look OK to you.  If you are on an LCD monitor, one of them probably looks significantly easier to read.  For most people it is the text on the left; for me, it is the text on the right.  This means that the text in Safari will be really difficult for me to read.  Again, they are in beta right now; they might fix this issue by the time the final version ships.

My screen at home is normal, and I don’t go through a proxy there, so maybe I will actually get to try it out tonight.

My site may disappear briefly sometime in the next week.  Or it may not.  I thought it would be gone already apparently not.  I’m switching registrars to GoDaddy, since it costs less than half what my hosting provider charges.  But rather than saving that extra eight dollars, I spent seven of them to buy vacantnebula.com (that’s without the hyphen), which redirects here.  The main point of this is to make it easier for me to tell people my URL, and subsequently to help people who forgot about that hyphen.  The phrases “vacant hyphen nebula dot com” and “vacant nebula dot com, with a hyphen between vacant and nebula” seem to confuse people.

Dane Cook has a stand-up routine where he addresses the misconception that all men care about is sex.  As counter-example, he points out that every man in the world would like to be a part of a heist, running down main street with a machine gun yelling “Where’s the van??  The van was supposed to be here!!”  Even more than that, he says, every man wants to have a monkey.

This is all good, but there are other things that should be added to the list.  In particular would be to have someone break into your house, and then defend yourself with awesome ninja skillz.  (I heard in a movie once that girls like guys with skillz).  For that reason, I name Damian Fernandez, who waited in his bedroom for an intruder to enter and then stabbed him in the chest with a ninja sword, the coolest fifteen-year-old ever.

Note: you can follow this link to listen to the Dane Cook bit I mentioned.  But that link is not in any way an endorsement of the extremely not-funny-or-interesting Halo machinima.

No, and I don’t care.