Economy of Effort

This is on the glass door of the local Pizza Factory.

The synopsis, from the site’s homepage at PureFlix:

Sarah Collins is a young woman on the elevator of success, poised to attain her dream of an executive corner office. There’s only one thing that’s going to keep her from getting it, an unexpected pregnancy.

Sarah is now faced with a moral and potentially career ending choice.

She is torn between keeping the life growing inside her and her legal right to abort the baby. In the midst of her turmoil, a mysterious stranger foretells the coming of three visions that will challenge her heart.

With financial pressures mounting and her dream career at stake, what will Sarah choose?

What, indeed. My guess is that she has the baby, and after about 5 minutes of peril, the pendulum quickly swings to “happily ever after”.

The girl on the poster looks 17, but it’s 32 year old Aussie Christian pop singer Rebecca St. James – who I have seen before and who is pretty hot.

YouTube has TRAILAR!:

I took this photo on my shoddy phone camera while filling up my truck with gas.

It’s a guy, with long hair, jeans and no shirt, sitting on a stool out behind a little hippie clothing shop. He was sketching a drawing of, I think, some random bush in front of him.

If we assume he smoked some hemp beforehand (and I’m sure we can), that’s Santa Cruz in a nutshell right there.

I love open source software. A lot.

There are times, however, when a silly lack of attention to detail drives me absolutely nuts.

Software applications come with a lot of options, usually set to reasonable defaults. Can you ever think of a time, in using a normal desktop application, where you would want the ability to change the default setting, but in doing so, forever lose the ability to revert back to that default setting?

Well, Firefox and gnome-terminal think you do, when it comes to colors.

Let’s start with Firefox. I’m not a fan of visited links having a different color as normal links. I like being able to change this setting so that they match. What I found out last time I did this, though, is that the default colors for visited and unvisited links aren’t available options in the color palette that appears when you click to change these.

Seriously, look:

You’ll note that none of the available color boxes are highlighted. That’s because that default blue color is not one of the options. In other words, once you change it, you can never change it back (though, I imagine, you could by digging through your profile or about:config or something like that – but not with the GUI you just used to set the color).

Sure, some blues are in the same ballpark, but why in God’s name is the exact default blue not even an option??

Same thing goes with the visited link purple:

None of those purples you can click on are the same as the default. And once you click on one and save the change, there’s no going back. Why??

It turns out this problem exists in Opera too, although to a much lesser extent:

The default blue still isn’t an option in the default clickable palette. (Yes, the blue in the first column, three spots down, is very close. It’s RGB 0,0,255 and HSV 240,255,255 instead of the default’s 0,0,204 and 240,255,204, respectively). But at least I can type in the RGB and HSV values if I know them and get the color back. In Firefox, all I have in that GUI is the clickable palette, with no apparent way to ever get the original color back.

(Chrome/Chromium, meanwhile, don’t even offer changing link colors as an option, though there is an extension that lets you do it).

And for the second half of this braindead-fest, we have gnome-terminal. Now, I’m not sure if this is a default in gnome-terminal itself, or if this is the doing of the Ubuntu package maintainers. But in gnome-terminal in Ubuntu, the “Default” profile has a Custom color palette:

If you click on that drop-down box where it says Custom and choose another palette, you can never, ever, ever get back to the default color palette. You don’t even have the ability to hit Cancel. Once you click on something other than Custom, whatever was set in Custom gets sent right to /dev/null.

So, for my sake, I went through the palette and recorded all of the values:

Column 1:
#2E3436
#555753

Column 2:
#CC0000
#EF2929

Column 3:
#4E9A06
#8AE234

Column 4:
#C4A000
#FCE94F

Column 5:
#3465A4
#729FCF

Column 6:
#729FCF
#AD7FA8

Column 7:
#06989A
#34E2E2

Column 8:
#D3D7CF
#EEEEEC

What we have here are two examples of Humane Mouse Trap usability (I just made that up). You know the traps, the ones with the door that only can be pushed inward, never back outward:

Shame on you, Firefox, and shame on you, gnome-terminal. While these are far from the biggest usability problems in the world, they’re just so mind-meltingly stupid and unnecessary that they can’t help but rile up my anger.

On Twitter, @philcooper asked me:

OK, so technically he didn’t ask me specifically. But I think it’s safe to say that there was an implicit “*Legion*! Yousosmart! Helpme!” at the front of it.

The answer is, yes @philcooper, Windows and the NTFS filesystem support symbolic links (or “junctions”, as they call them). However, Windows Explorer has no friggin clue how to create these by default. It is not enlightened like bash. Luckily, the Link Shell Extension exists to allow you to create these links from an Explorer context menu.

Basically, what you need to do is:
1. Install Link Shell Extension
2. Right-click on the source folder you want your link to point to, and select Pick Link Source
3. Right-click inside the folder where you want to create your new link, and select Drop As… Junction

Bam! You now have a symbolic link.

Why would you want to do this? Well, the reason I bothered to learn how is the same as @philcooper‘s reasoning: to store savegames in Dropbox. Not every game supports savegame storage in Steam Cloud yet, so we must engineer our own solutions if we want to bounce from desktop to laptop (to laptop, to laptop…) and always have our savegames on hand. In fact, it was this post on the Runic Games forum explaining how to do this for Torchlight that got me started. (Ironically, I think Torchlight actually supports Steam Cloud now).

I have a Dropbox folder named Saved Games. When I first start a game and create my first save game, I cut-and-paste that entire savegames folder into Saved Games/gamename, then right-click on it, Pick Link Source, and drop a junction right where the savegame folder used to be.