Opera8 has won me over... Corrections, additions

Well, Opera has won me over as my default browser.

I discovered that there IS find-as-you-type built-in to Opera. Simplytick off the "enable inline search" box on the preferences page andyou're set. From then on, just hit CTRL-F to search for any matchingtext or , to search for links only and you're intoinline/search-as-you-type mode. Just like Firefox. Granted, you dohave to hit one more key, but it's not a function key so you can do itwithout looking. ;~j

I also overlooked the awesome notes feature built into the browser.See something you like on the web? Select it, hit CTRL-SHIFT-C ratherthan CTRL-C, and it automagically saves it and the original URL youpulled it from to a note. Your notes are instantly searchable usingthe same instantaneous search/filter feature as with email and RSSfeeds.

I still wish Onfolio were integrated with Opera - I love its newspaper view -- but this is not technically possible. But this isless of a deal-killer than I originally thought. I think I can probably get by using Opera's built-in RSS reader and then capturing content to Notes and/or saving them the "old fashioned way", thensearching them using a desktop search tool, rather than Onfolio.

Opera is also a FANTASTIC browser for those who do web development. It enables you to easily figure out how your web page will performagainst web standards, with various browsing featuresenabled/disabled, on small-format browsers, with images disabled, etc.But, then again, most people who do web dev already know this.

I also forgot to mention gestures. There most common mouse gestures are built in: Such as hold right button, click-left to to move back a page.

I also discovered the "browse to parent directory" (aka the "up" directory command): CTRL-BACKSPACE. Very nice.

For those interested in evaluating Opera deeply, you really shouldread a couple of fabulous tutorials: The Opera7 tutorial (still mostly relevant to Opera8) and the Opera8 tutorial.

Over the hill at age 30?

Yesterday, I played basketball for about 2 hours. While I made several poor shots and a couple bad passes, on the whole, I did alright for someone who has only played a few times in as many months.

Ok, so this wouldn't be anything to blog about except for my body and mind's reaction these past 24 hours afterwards.

After I got home, took a shower, and ate dinner, I was completely prostrate and useless. I was a physical and mental zombie. Not only that, but today, after sleeping nearly 9 hours, I could literally not get out of bed. It wasn't just soreness - it was total, utter physical and mental exhaustion. Even now - almost 30 hours later, I still feel vapid, unfocused, physically and mentally a hollow shell of a human being.

Dehydration? Possible - but I drank quite a bit of water and other fluids last night and have continued to drink them today.

Glucose/glycogen depletion? Possible, but nothing has really changed around my diet these past few days. I've also tried recharging with pasta, cereal, bread, and pizza.

Several years ago, I could think of few things that would raise my spirits and energy like the vigorous exercise that only a sport like basketball can provide. Now, it seems at age 30, I am over the hill. Maybe I can only handle basketball 1 hour increments or face a horrendous physical toll in recovery the next day. Obviously, I'm not in the physical condition I was when the first hour of basketball was just warmup for the second. But I would have never expected to be so utterly decimated as I have felt these past 36 hours.

It is a painful part of growing older: Coping with physical limitations you never thought you'd have to deal with. And dealing with long recovery times. Better get used to it. I'm not getting any younger.

Opera vs. Firefox

I've been trying out the latest version of Opera 8 (Beta) for about 2 weeks now in order to get a better personal feel for the browser feel, advantages and disadvantages. I've been a Firefox user for about 1 1/2 years and have written about my reasons for favoring Firefox.

Overall, my impressions of Opera are extremely favorable. It is very well suited for power surfers, but is even better for first-time non-IE users than FireFox.

Keyboard shortcuts: It has a few really nice keyboard shortcuts for those of us who dig that sort of thing (space bar scrolls the web page down / shift-space bar scrolls up), it supports continuous page scaling to increase or decrease text size (use 9 and 0), and has nice keyboard shortcuts for switching tabs (1 and 2). Tab support and keyboard shortcuts are very similar to FireFox, with the addition of nice touches like undo close built-in for those times when your Control-W gets out of hand.

Tab behavior: I wish Opera gave me a choice after closing a tab to move to the adjacent tab left or adjacent tab right rather than directing me back to the original tab from which it was opened in the first place. FireFox's Tab Browser plug-in enables you to choose.

Built-in RSS reader: Very nicely done in Opera - much better than Sage or "active bookmarks" for FireFox. I've also used Onfolio with FireFox, which is a killer combo. Unfortunately, Opera and OnFolio are not integrated. The interface in Opera is identical to that of it's built-in email handler. The quick-search feature is very nice - just start typing in the search box and the results are immediately filtered. The effect is similar to that of several of the desktop search engines (X1/Yahoo! Desktop Search, MSN Desktop Search toolbar, Copernic).

Speed and stability: I found the start-up speed, shut-down speed, and browsing speed to be outstanding, although on broadband, the difference is probably imperceptible to most. It also never crashed or even hiccuped at all during my trial period, even after browsing for hours and hours and hours and hours.

Pop-up blocking: Absolutely perfect in my brief experience with Opera. FireFox is good, but occasionally fooled and seems to be no better than IE SP2 at stopping pop-ups.

Session support: Opera comes built-in with easy session management. Save and retrieve tab sessions. I definitely prefer this to needing a plug-in, as with FireFox.

Built-in Email client: I played around for a bit with Opera's built-in email client and it is fantastic. If I were not an avid and extremely satisfied Gmail user, I'd definitely use Opera Thunderbird or Outlook express. The program nicely supports flat or threaded (conversation) views, uses labels, offers quick search to instantly find items you're interested in, enables saved searches, attachment search, has contact lists, filters, and a spam filter, and supports POP and IMAP.

Web site compatibility: My main problems with Opera are really with its compatibility with certain third party products and web services. For example, I can't edit posts on Blogger with Opera. I don't get access to rich text editing in Gmail. OnFolio -- a superb product for information management -- doesn't plug into Opera. These problems almost certainly stem from its very low market share, which I believe is under 2% of the overall market. Granted, with FireFox, inexplicably, some sites simply refuse to open at all with no visible error message. I never have that problem with Opera, which never had a rendering problem or a problem displaying pluggable content (flash, real media, windows media, etc.).

Download management: The download manager is very good, although I'd like the ability to delete downloads if I don't want to keep them, rather than simply removing them from the download list. I'd also like an easier way to access where downloads are saved. It's a bit buried to access and the first time it is used, Opera should prompt the user where to save future downloads.

Other features: I'd like Opera to be a bit more flexible in setting up search shortcuts. I couldn't find a way to create a Yahoo! search shortcut, for example. Also, I absolutely LOVE the way that FireFox, by default, begins highlighting web pages for string matches as you begin typing on any web page. This makes keyboard navigation very simple - just start typing the first couple letters of a link you want to nav to and they're instantly highlighted. Hit your return key and you're off. Hard to describe, but great for power surfers. Opera does have a nice "scroll up or down" from link to link feature by simply pressing Q or A to scroll up or down through the links on a page, then you hit ENTER. But it's not nearly as fast or elegant as FireFox's behavior.

Voice features: Although I haven't used Opera's new voice features to input voice commands, it's ability to read web pages to me is sometimes handy if I want to clean my desk or do other things while listening to a long article. Just highlight the text you want to hear, right click and hit Speak. I haven't used it frequently, but it's a very nice addition.

Bookmarks: Opera's bookmark manager readily imports from IE, Firefox, and other sources.

Plug-ins: Although skinnable, Opera lacks serious splug-ins, which is a mixed blessing. On the one hand - I like many of the plug-ins offered by FireFox. On the other hand, I hate the fact that my plug-ins break every 3 months whenever I need to update my FireFox browser. I then have to track down all the new versions, reinstall them, reconfigure my preferences, etc. It's a complete buzzkill. I'd prefer that my favorite features are simply built right into the browser. Opera does a very good job of integrating most of these features (althouh voice is a 10MB download) right into the browser. For me, this is preferable to having tons of plug-ins to download and manage, as is the case with FireFox.

Memory/system resources: Opera seems to be about the same as other browsers I've with respect to memory use and management, which is to say, they are all massive resource hogs. After a full day of surfing, reading RSS feeds, using email, etc. my memory use is around 100 MB with up to 200 MB of virtual memory used. However, Opera seems to be able to release from virtual memory much faster and more efficiently when I quit than FireFox, which seems to grind away at the hard drive for several minutes when closing after a long day's work.

Bottom line: Opera is a very close second behind FireFox as my favorite browser. I could live quite happily with Opera by itself if it were to do four things:
1. Integrate a tool that enables me to quickly capture the web page I'm viewing to a local saved directory - similar to Slogger plug-in for Firefox or Onfolio's capture function.
2. Offer an "Up" button that enables me to navigate up a level on a web server's URL hierarchy.
3. Offer the ability to browse in "fast search" mode where you just start typing letters and the selection moves to the first matching string on a page -- similar to FireFox's built-in search behavior. Make this toggleable on or off by a keyboard shortcut - like Alt-F.
4. Since it can't always control what features are supported on their browser, offer a right-click link to open the page in IE -- similar to a FireFox plug-in that does the same thing. This will help when we need it. It won't hurt our usage or loyalty to Opera - it simply gives us an easy way to deal with the problems we face living in an IE-dominated world.

Postmodernist deconstructionist metaphysical epistemological ontological Marxist constructivist nestructuralist babble

I wonder sometimes if some people way out on the fringes of literary and social criticism, modern philosophy, and even social "scientists" realize how completely absurd their doctines come off sounding. Their ideas might be substantial, maybe even valid and useful - but the problem is that they have become so untethered that, like the ingredients list on the back of a shampoo bottle, they are completely incomprehensible, sometimes even to other non-specialists.

Proof? Or at least, an amusing reductio ad absurdem in support of my argument?

Check out this postmodernist essay generator.

Another enlightening and amusing read along the same lines is a story from the mid 1990s of a New York physics professor named Sokal who submitted an article to a respected social science journal describing the social and political implications of the latest advances in physics. It was reviewed by the editorial board and published. To the board's chagrin, it soon emerged that the article was a satire intended to show the lack of intellectual rigor and even political favoritism found in today's reviewed academic journals.

It's a fun read and an excellent reminder that there is a fine line between artful abstract arguments and pseudointellectual sophistry.

How did I arrive at these links? Credit goes to the amazing MIT Computer Science Artificial Intelligence Lab that generated a random computer science paper generator. The underlying techniques for creating these papers truly are fascinating. I wonder if the mechanisms are similar when inscrutible academics begin to drone on about the phenomenology of feminism...

Caffeine withdrawal: Not so simple

Is Caffeine Withdrawal a Mental Disorder?

Research seems to show that a certain percentage of caffeine users suffer pretty serious withdrawal symptoms.

I've been rethinking my use of caffeine lately. I'm finding myself increasingly dissatisfied with the peaks and troughs it's creating in my energy and concentration patterns. I definitely believe it helps me to feel highly motivated and focused. I learn more quickly, and feel fully engaged in tasks.

Sometimes, this peak mental focus can last 4-5 hours, or even longer. There have been periods where a single large cup of coffee (8 oz.) can have me focused and productive from 9 pm to 4 am (although, strangely, a single cup of coffee at 9 am never seems to sustain me until 4 pm). I always seem to "get more done" when I've got a cup of coffee at hand.

But on the other side of that peak, as I come down from the caffeine high, I find myself not just returning to baseline, but dipping into a deep trough of mental energy. I begin, ever so slowly, to feel drained, devoid of motivation to begin tasks, as if my brain is starving for oxygen. I avoid what I need to work on, I sit like a zombie browsing news sites or drifting in and out of a talk show or IT conversations episode. I want to nap or watch TV or play video games. I don't want to get out of bed. I move sluggishly between tasks. I cook the simplest meal possible. I forget things. I find myself with a greatly reduced supply of mental energy.

In short, I feel hung over days later.

In my undergrad days, I began drinking coffee as I studied. This began at coffee shops. I would study for hours and hours on end, never seeming to run out of energy. To some degree, I believe age and fitness levels buffered me a bit more from the negative effects of high levels of caffeine usage. But even then, I would have huge crashes after finals ended. I would go home and sleep for 13-14 hours a day for 3-4 days at a time to recover from the tremendous energy drains.

In high school, I did drink a fairly large amount of diet soda, but that only began around age 17. Before that, I remember having much more even energy levels.

I think what I'm slowly acknowledging is that mental energy is malleable and manipulable over a period of hours, but fixed over a period of days. There are probably ways to increase the level of fixed mental energy the same way as one can become more physically fit -- through proper diet, physical and mental conditioning, management of stress, etc.

But in any given period of, say, a week, caffeine can help to concentrate mental effort - but you're borrowing from the future. The fact that you're approaching a "zero balance" on your mental energy account doesn't materialize for a couple days, though, and that's the insidious part. Instead, you feel okay, continue to have a cup or two throughout the day, but suddenly, by Thursday or Friday, or on the weekend, even after a cup of coffee and a diet soda, there is no motivation or energy left. You have the 10,000 yard stare. You don't want to get out of bed, and all you can do is think about trying to get a nap in. You've borrowed from the future, and now the future is demanding you pay back that debt of mental energy.

I credit futurist John Smart with reminding me that, as much as I would like things to be otherwise, evolution has bred into us a certain constraints due to necessary physiological homeostatic mechanisms. And our brain is, ultimately, a physical biological system. Like all such systems, it gets fatigued and needs rest. It's capacity for sustained work is, like our physical bodies, impressively malleable in the short term, but relatively fixed in the longer term. By analogy, I could probably slow jog/walk a marathon today if I absolutely had to, but there's probably not a chance I could slow jog/walk a marathon for three days straight without a massive breakdown which would require weeks or months to recover from. Granted, I'm probably more mentally in shape than physically, but even trained marathon runners or extreme distance runners do not train all-out for 12-14 hours a day. They structure recovery time into their plans. And they spend years developing their capacities through structured diet and careful periods of exercise and recovery to get into such condition.

These principles are compellingly covered in depth by Dr. Jim Loehr and Dr. Jack Groppel, authors of The Power of Full Engagement. I highly recommend the book and a visit to their web site.

So, getting back to the caffeine question: What to do about it?

The simple and obvious answer is to dump caffeine. But the more complete answer is less obvious and more complex than that.

It has to involve a change in behavior and beliefs about the way the world works. I need to shift away from the belief that I can do 5-6 hours of concentrated work at a stretch to one where I only expect I can do 1-2 hours of concentrated work at a stretch. It involves a shift in comfort level from needing to start tasks only if I can finish them, to a comfort level starting and stopping tasks several times without tasting the satisfaction of completion. It has to do with being content to work on something for 20 minutes, then changing tasks. It has to do with recalibrating my expectations of what I can get done in a sitting, a night, or a week - and that affects how I schedule my days and weeks.

In short, it's less about leaving behind caffeine and more about leaving behind a decade-long, caffeine-distorted world view that has deeply shaped my perspective and experience with time, space, work, and energy. It's about acknowledging a different set of personal limits.

A minor headache is an irritation. A few hours of withdrawal-induced fatigue and depression are annoying. I love the taste, smell and experience of good coffee. I love the refreshing fizz of diet cola. But there's decaf alternatives for both.

But changing to a decaf world view? It's going to take some serious discipline, pain, and reacclimation. But as I get closer to starting a new life with my new spouse, I'm ready to re-examine a lot of old habits and beliefs and let go of them. Not just for my own sake, but also for the sake of her and our shared future.

Excellent weight training program, particularly for hard-gainers and time-pressed individuals: Hypertrophy-specific training (HST).

I came across this site while comparing several programs in an attempt to determine a more effective and efficient way to build strength and muscle. I'd been working out very inconsistently, was dissatisfied with my results, and wanted something that would help me achieve the following goals in 3-4 months:

• Increase lean body mass to 90% (10% body fat)
• Increase total body strength by 33% - measured by maximum weight of 5 reps with good form on squat, pull down, bench press, and bicep curl
• Keep time in the gym below 2 hours per week

Tall order? You bet.

I'm now 7 weeks into the program, though, and I can say I'm happy with the results so far. With all weight training and fitness programs, mileage varies, and, of course, gains come faster and easier early on in any program. It's just a simple question of diminishing returns as you approach higher and higher levels of fitness. I'm very skeptical of some of the miracle claims on the front page, but if you're meticulous about diet and making sure you get enough calories and protein (I'm not) and don't do any cardio work (I do a little bit), and you have the right body type (easy-gainer), it's not inconceivable to me that you *could* gain 8-12 pounds of muscle in 2 months.

Anyway, I've not had my body fat tested, but I have lost some amount of body fat (6 pack is becoming quite a bit more clearly defined), gained 4 pounds, and my 5-rep maxes have increased by 20-33%, depending on the exercise. Not sure what my current body fat is. Anyway, all this in just three 30-40 minute workouts a week.

Bravo, Bryan (site owner).