Nerd Corner: Opera Portable

it's software pimping time and i am pimping my favourite thing again.

a good number of people are heading back to school next month, myself included, and there will come a time when you need to use one of the school computers. if your school is anything like mine, the computers will be running Windows and the the internet browsers will be either Internet Explorer 6, Firefox or a combination of the two. and if you are anything like me, having to use either IE6 or Firefox will make you feel unclean. chances are you are using Firefox and you've tweaked the grease out of the monkey. what i'm trying to say is, using someone else's browser configuration is uncomfortable.

enter portable applications. these are your favourite pieces of software, stripped down to fit on a portable drive (e.g. USB flash drive), allowing you to use the programs you are comfortable with on any compatible computer.

i personally use Opera Portable (hereafter denoted as OP). Opera, the desktop browser, is already designed to have a small memory footprint. my current installation (Opera 9.23) is 4.88 MB; OP is 4.66 MB. while most portable versions of applications tend to be nearly neutered or slower than Tarzan on a Japanese IQ test, OP is essentially the same as the desktop (non-portable) version. it is merely repackaged and streamlined to save space.

to prevent caching and stuff from decreasing your flash drive's lifespan (flash memory has a finite number of writes), OP creates an invisible, temporary folder on the computer you are using (so you won't accidentally run out of space on your protable drive). after closing OP, the folder is overwritten and erased, eliminating all trace of your internet tracks from that computer.

the benefits of using OP, rather than the provided browser on a public computer, are rather obvious. with your portable application you carry with you all your bookmarks and customizations and tweaks and blah blah blah. sensitive information (online banking, juicy emails to your long-distance paramour, etc) are not blabbed to the computer's hard disk in the event that you forget to log off or whatever. personally, i can spare myself the frustration of trying to use mouse gestures or keyword searches on browsers that aren't configured to do so.

my foray into the urban jungle

i took a trip downtown today, as a result of laziness and circumstance.

i missed a deadline for handing in some required documentation to teacher's college. it was supposed to be mailed in on June 29th, the day before i headed out for Longlac. naturally, the whole thing completely slipped my mind until i decided to check on school stuff a few weeks after i came home. if i were a spazz, i would've spazzed. missing deadlines really sucks, especially if it's important.

fortunately, this deadline was softer than a cashmere kitten in a dryer full of cotton balls. my cohort supervisor recommended that i hand in the papers to the registrar's office personally. i thought i would take the opportunity to explore downtown in a little more detail.

i parked at fairview and subwayed down. since it was nearby, and since she asked, i visited Jacqueline at work. because the escalators to the Bloor line seemed to be congested with people, i thought it would be easier to just walk from Bloor and Yonge to Sherbourne station -- they looked pretty close on the subway map. it took me twenty minutes at my usual leisurely pace.

when i was introduced, the first thing one of her co-workers asked Jacqueline was, "is he your boyfriend?" to which we both laughed and snickered "no"s. it was expected, but i did not have the presence of mind to come up with a witty retort beforehand; opportunity squandered =(

after a brief lunch and sudoku at the Timothy's downstairs, i hiked to Bloor and St. George at my brisk pace, making it in 20 minutes. i did my business at the registrar's office and proceeded to explore the campus a bit. i padded to the library to use the computer. bumped into Dan P. from high school and we caught up a bit. since he is on Facebook, he had a bit of the inside scoop on the friends i haven't seen or talked to in forever. almost makes me want to get Facebook. almost.

i walked back to Yonge and Bloor after some 2 pm lunch, ducking into the new ROM gift shop to check it out. it is one ugly facade, like big giant disco-dice were chucked at, and embedded into the old museum. the rest of the day involved loafing around in malls and then hanging out with a lot of people and being sleepy.

what's the point of this post? i walked a lot and felt that everyone should know. i also act too much like a boyfriend. huzzah!

mystery bug

on Friday, i roamed around the church parking lot with my camera, hoping to get a few shots of anything interesting. the wind was rather gusty that day and it apparently picked up a bug and flung it at me. the bug struck my shirt around the abdomen and clung on for dear life. naturally i brought my camera to bear, toggled the focus to macro and tried to get a good shot of it.

normally i'm pretty good with identifying animals, but this one completely eludes me. it defies any categorization of insect that i am familiar with. it is not a butterfly/moth, not a beetle, not a social insect, not a flier... i can only describe it as... a kiwi bug, on account of its resemblance to a kiwi bird.

it is about the size of a large housefly, but denser. its 6 legs (making it an insect) are rather muscular, like grasshopper legs, indicating some jumping ability. this might explain why it was on the wind in the first place. its carapace looks fairly sturdy with all its parts arranged very compactly. the eyes are relatively large in comparison to its head, suggesting that it relies mostly on sight to do its business. its business seems to have much to do with its huge red proboscis, from which some antennae seem to be attached. i initially believed it to be some sort of bloodsucker, but it doesn't appear to have the penetration power, nor the storage capacity. the drab colouring suggests that it is a tree dweller, so the proboscis could be for more benign use, such as sap sucking or nectar drinking.

through the course of writing this post, i did some digging around online based on the above information. there is no dedicated search engine to finding insects based on physical characteristics, so i had to search the hard way. i looked up "tree insects" can came upon a list of the most common types. a quick image search of the closest type yielded the answer i was looking for. the mystery kiwi bug pictured above is the pecan weevil. i knew all those hours spent reading The Boxcar Children and Nancy Drew in grade 3 would pay off.

Paper Bumblebee

as seen on Engadget: here is a little something for the Transformer fans. even if you hated the Michael Bay movie, you've got to give this guy props for building a scale model of the new Bumblebee out of KFC buckets and custard cake cartons.

whimsy

on a lark, i did some cheap redecorating of this blog. and by cheap, i mean i only used the predesigned stuff -- none of that fancy html/xml/php/javascript stuff.

the colour scheme is more neutral; white and grey and black match with pretty much everything on your (the reader's) setup. i shrank the font size because i like it that way and i don't respect the visually impaired (use Opera to zoom if you need to). i moved the sidebar to the left because the template i picked had it there. i changed the header text to something less russian -- brownie points to whoever actually could tell what that old header line (Это курам на смех) means, or where it was used prominently.