Words

I learned today that the word crosshair is a portmanteau of the words "cross" and "hair" as in "crossed hair", I don't know why I had to take me 30 years to make that connection, but I'm glad I finally did. Language is interesting, but I am not particularly skilled at it, and English is my second language. I find it refreshing when I discover some rational reason behind a word, and I often do that, more often in my own language though.

Icons

I'm typing this on my only windows machine (by connecting to my server via openvpn and using vim there), and the only reason this is a windows machine is that I've failed to have it play nice with Linux (though I only tried briefly in Oslo airport). Anyway, it's a HP Stream 11, it was very cheap and it is actually a very nice little piece of hardware for travelling and doing a bit of coding and Internet surfing. It has really nice battery life and I was going to write about Icons, not about my travel PC.. But, this laptop has windows 10, and one thing that struck me, is how ugly the icons are. For example, when opening a directory the window displays a little blue help icon, and the questionmark is not even centered, it looks like some one threw it together in ms-paint in 2 minutes. The other icons are lazy at best, I know "simplistic" is what they were aiming for, but lazy is a better term. We have high-dpi, high-resolution displays that are capable of displaying a gazillion colors, and yet the images they chose to put on them are white-against-black symbols unworthy of an apple se/30. I remember the Windows 95 icons, they were great, I'm looking at them now. They were crisp, colorful, simple and yet detailed and full of expression, they were ICONS! Then came windows 98, and many of the icons were refined and even more beautiful, little pieces of pixel-art. It was clear that effort had gone into making them. Moving on to windows 2000, the icons became perfect, it was the height of the classic windows-look, and while the operating system certainly had its shortcomings, it was beautiful to behold. I feel lucky that work is still using windows 7, where I have switched the GUI to classic mode and am enjoying the last dying breath of what to me encompasses how a computer operating systems GUI ought to look like. I don't like how windows 10 looks, I don't like how the default ubuntu looks. If there's one thing I've missed in the 12 years I've ran Linux as my primary OS, then it is the look and feel of windows 2000.

The mess of skins and gui toolkits

Much bad can be said of windows, and I've certainly done my part in saying it, but credit must be given where it is due, and it should be given to the visuals of the earlier windows GUI. It was clean looking, and I've no dout, fast and efficient, applications using it looked consistent, they looked like programs made for windows. QT actually does a good job of producing such applications, at least for windows. But looking around in my own personal computing environment, I realize that an enormous amount of work would have to be done in order for it to become visually consistent. I'm using applications that I like, and I refuse to select them based on their visual appearance or the frameworks they employ. So I'm using GTK+/2/3 and QT4/5 all at the same time, and while I get to enjoy exactly the programs I like, it generally looks pretty terrible, with GTK3 taking the cake by no small amount, when it comes to being unwieldy, it is all over the place with graphical oddities and getting the damn thing to switch theme feels like attempting to invoke a favor from the depraved spwan of Cthulhu and Satan. I long for simpler times. Stop wasting time trying to invent new GUI toolkits or new versions of them, GUI is done, now stop wasting more time (and everybodys CPU cycles and RAM) on having multiple differents ones. Spend all that effort making software that does actual work.

Random Thought

I remember being entertained by the news that the Canadian immigration website was overrun and crashed as Trump got the lead. Now, I don't think Trump will become a good president by any account, but I'd like to know how many americans are going to actually immigrate when he is reinstated (assuming he does not put some kind of law in place, preventing americans from leaving, like the DPRK).

Work

I'm doing it tomorrow.

New Years

Was great, saw the fireworks display in front of Atlantis in Tartu, and it looked fantastic, very grand, and so many people were out to watch it. Ate a nice dinner with the SO, baked potatoes, steak and fresh salad with mango & chili dressing (sold under Beauvais and Felix brand) and mozerella. Spent the rest of the evening playing games (the non-digital kind) and drinking glögg. Was a quiet and lovely evening.