December 3, 1999

Friday, December 3, 1999: The Dark Side

I had an interesting question this morning from someone who saw my desktop screenshots from yesterday's journal entry. She was commenting on the number of applications I had running, and the number of background applications that showed up in my system tray.

My start menu has Internet Explorer, Show Desktop, and Show Channels, then HomeSite, Netscape, WS-FTP, Pegasus, and Dial-Up Networking. The applications I'm currently running are HomeSite, Pegasus, Netscape, Photoshop, Netscape, and, uh, Netscape. And Netscape. What can I say? I like Netscape. Obviously.

I tend to keep a browser window open with whatever I happen to be working on at the time, plus another one with whatever site I was browsing last, and then when someone sends me a site through email or an instant message service, I usually open it in a new window so I don't forget what I was doing before. Works for me. It only seems to cause a problem when it gets up to around six instances . . .

The system tray holds: Task Scheduler (whatever that is), the Infrared port, the power indicator (I'm using a laptop), an icon for the PCMCIA card modem, display properties, volume, SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Life screensaver), AOL Instant Messenger, Dimension 4 (an application that synchronizes my computer's clock with the one at the Naval Observatory), PGP (Pretty Good Privacy encryption application), TurboNotes (sticky note application), Browsersizer (a program that automatically resizes browser windows to simulate different screen resolutions), Real Audio, Norton Utilities, ICQ, and Pegasus. Whew. Lots of stuff. Seems to work okay for me, though.

There's a lovely Jon Carroll column today, Engage Brain Before Eating, about Robert Fripp and saying grace before meals and about how we tend to try to deny that the food we eat had a consciousness before it became "food," whether we recognize it or not:

I have seen salmon swimming upstream in the endless twilight of an Alaskan summer, leaping over waterfalls, displaying characteristics that look very much like courage and tenacity and fidelity -- how do I decide that I have the holy spark and that salmon does not?

I no longer try to be vegetarian; a friend of mine said once that she was vegetarian when it was convenient, and it has sort of evolved into that for me. I don't eat beef or pork, but I do eat chicken and fish. I do so with some degree of discomfort; it still doesn't seem right to me, but I've come to the realization that I'm not willing to spend the time and thought that it requires for me to eat in accordance with my conscience.

So if I'm in a restaurant and they have a suitable meatless meal, I'm delighted, and that's what I order. Pasta and sauce is good, wonderful in fact. One of my favorite meals. Bean burritos in a Mexican restaurant. Vegetable fajitas. There are lots of choices, it's just sometimes difficult to find restaurants that are interested in offering them. [Aside: The veggie fajitas are a choice at one of our favorite restaurants, or were—I have a flyer from them in front of me, offering five dollars off on one of their new entrees: "Introducing the new burgers and steaks at Houlihan's. Good enough to bring a vegetarian back from the dark side."]

Author Barbara Bretton is one of my website clients, and she has a new book out, The Day We Met, which is on the Waldenbooks/Brentano's romance bestseller list, at #5 this week. The Fed Ex guy dropped off a copy of it for me this morning. I'm very much looking forward to reading it.

I've been working on a postcard page for her site with some of her own photographs, mostly of the Atlantic City area, along with some taken by her husband and her father.

Barbara also runs various contests from time to time. The current one has a prize of a box of Godiva chocolates for Valentine's Day. To enter, visit the front page of the website and click on "Win Chocolate!"

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