Aris Katsaris

Google Chrome
Gave Google Chrome a few minutes' try when it first came out, but some oddities gave me a bad first taste of it -- bookmarks only appearing when you click the "new tab" button for example. I wasn't in the mood of fiddling with it, so I dropped it and went back to Firefox.

A few days ago I gave it another try. This time I fiddled with the options -- added the things that were not present in the defaults: bookmarks now appearing as a toolbar all the time, homepage icon added. And voila -- I'm suddenly loving it. Chrome is fast, elegant, and I keep loving that Google-style simplicity of its interface. I made it my new default browser.

Only one major failing compared to Firefox, and one minor one. The major failing is that when I'm downloading a file it doesn't seem to store the location for my next download -- that makes it a burden when I'm e.g. downloading five dozen wallpapers into one particular folder - I ended up switching to Firefox for that task.

Minor failing is some search-engine oddity. I've not seen yet as easy way to search wikipedia as there was in Firefox.

Mystery series
Ended up downloading several crime/mystery series lately. "Jonathan Creek" - a British series about a magician's assistant solving mysteries. "Numb3rs" - a series about a mathematician using the power of um, mathematics to solve crimes. And "Medium" - a series about a psychic using her own powers to solve (or prevent, or punish) crimes.

I abandoned Numb3rs after a few eps, once I realized that the *only* thing I liked about it was the application of the math, skipping everything that wasn't math. I disliked pretty much every character, with the possible exception of the mathematician's physicist mentor.

Jonathan Creek had both great and lame eps -- at its best an ep has several interconnected mysteries, none of them with obvious solutions (or with several obvious solutions, none of which are actually workable), and punctuated with humor. At its lamest (and the writers' laziest), an ep only has one mystery that I solved in five secs flat -- and it was utterly implausible that Creek wouldn't solve it even faster. Creek's female co-protagonist (Maddy) is utterly unlikeable to me though -- a lying manipulative scumbag who lies more often than tells the truth, even to Creek himself. I'm glad they switched her away eventually, though I'd have been even gladder if they'd had her, you know, apologize to him, grow as a person, forgo her evil ways, etc.

I've only seen five or six eps of Medium so far, but up to this point I seriously like: Much more likable characters than either Jonathan Creek or Numb3rs -- the medium's daughters especially are cute as hell. But in that series there's *nobody* I don't like so far. The medium, her boss at the DA's office, the husband, the kids... all great characters.

Sea of Insanity
Sea of Insanity is back. This was one of my top favorite webcomics some years back -- but it suddenly and inexplicably stopped updating. Turns out the reason was the creator's personal life meltdown. Anyway, it's back now. Enjoy.

Google is rapidly reaching the level of a megacorporation similar to stature and importance of Microsoft. And I'm something of a Google fan in the sense that I often find myself looking forward to the next announcement about a Google service or tool the way I look forward to announcements of new books by my favourite writers.

I like Google. I like its vaguely stated "mission" about providing access to information, which for me synopsizes not only the whole mission of computer science (which in Greek after all tends to be called Πληροφορικη΄"Pliroforiki", loosely translated as "Information science") but perhaps the whole of science in general, and even mildly reminds me of some mythical knights' dedication to capital-T Truth. I like its "Try not to be evil" self-declared guideline, mainly for its humour.

My Gmail account at katsaris@gmail.com has freed me from dependency on my old ISP's mail account at katsaris@otenet.gr -- and even better from dependency from Outlook Express -- and even better from the annoyance of spamming.

Google News has become the most convenient way to staying informed about the world in general.

And I've drooled over my few sessions with GoogleEarth. Its probably the one tool that has shown me that even high-speed ADSL will soon prove inadequate. Even at version 3.0 it's still at its infancy I think.

Or such my imagination tells me, given how much more I think it can be expanded.

( What I want from Google Earth is... )

Google Earth is the one I'm drooling over, but Google Print is the one that has caused controversy - and Google Base is the currently much-anticipated new service, which mostly seems to mean to take Ebay head-on but to me also seems to have wider consequences...

More about this on other posts, as I find the time and mood.