CSS Mastery is now on my ever growing shopping list, along with upgrading my ageing copy Photoshop 5.5.

So I’m wandering around looking at various bits and pieces when I notice there’s a G5 and large tft monitor vacant. So I walk up have a look in the applications folder as I usually do, spot Quark and fire it up.

I’m used to a 17″ crt at work and suddenly find I have loads of desktop space for toolbars, pallettes and, well everything. Quark is running even worse than it does on my G4 at work so I’m unimpressed although I now suspect it’s Quark that’s the problem and not OS X on a G4.

Anyway, we leave, Kim with new black iPod and me with head full of widescreen monitor. This isn’t good. Not for my bank balance anyway.

Last week I gave in and splashed out on a Dell 2405FPW, possibly the most expensive, non-essential thing I’ve ever bought.

I was a little disappointed initially as I was used to running at 1600 x 1200 on a 19″ crt and windows and text was larger on the 2405 although the resolution was set at 1920 x 1200. I still have more desktop space for apps than the 19″ but it’s took a little while to realise this.

Games on the other hand are incredible. I haven’t tried a DVD yet but can imagine the effect to be the same. It won’t be long before I’m used to things this way so I’m trying to make the most of things now before the shiny effect wears off.

Damn you Apple. Thank you.

I saw him for the first time in December when we got together to celebrate my dads 70th birthday and I realised that rather than being just another baby he was actually related to me. I understood for the first time why and how children can affect people. I look at him and see a connection rather than something I can’t (or won’t) understand.

Welcome to the world Lewis.

While I have no strong feelings about Opera one way or another I can’t see it happening.

Opera has always had a free version, y’know, the one with the banner ads?. Opera didn’t gain much prominence when it was “free”. I can’t see that changing now it’s free.

I don’t think that users really care about banner ads if it allows people to get what they need. Look at Kazaa. That had banner ads (and spyware) but was installed and used by many people - I don’t know the figures for installation/use so I’m being purposely vague. Anyway, my point is that I don’t think banner ads was ever really Opera’s problem.

I’ve tried various versions of Opera over the last few years starting with either 3.x or 4.x (I can’t remember) and have found the claims of it being a fast loading browser to be true when using the back or forward buttons on a cached page but it didn’t grab me enough for me to use as a main browser. It’s number 3 on the list of browsers I reach for to test pages in which is why it still lives on my dev machine, doing strange things to my layouts. That could simply be my coding although Andy Budd seems to think it’s all Operas fault.

Let’s face it, Firefox isn’t even that great a browser. The underlying engine (Gecko) is but I’ve never been very happy with the browser UI. Any browser UI for that matter but that’s a story for another day.

So, Opera’s problem? Mozilla has been around for a number of years but was only used by those looking for an alternative. IE users were still saying “so what, I’m happy with things as they are”. Firefox only took off once people started spreading the (security) benefits of it over Internet Explorer. Even if Opera started marketing their browser along the same lines are those that made the switch from IE to Firefox going to switch again. Why would they? Too little, too late.

There we have it then. Opera doesn’t sit behind IE and Firefox because it has/had banner ads. It just wasn’t sold to the masses very well. It’ll be interesting to see what Opera does on Linux where desktop users are more likely to chop and change apps and try new things but I won’t be holding my breath.

Just kidding. It’s 27 years difference :)

Things are starting to come together.