(Found in Henzell's learndb, grammar preserved intact.)

Some fundamentalists continue to cite the Holy Buglist as concrete evidence of the eventual Return of NetHack and the subsequent Rapture of RGRN, while others question the very historicity of the so-called "DevTeam" itself. Most rational people fall somewhere in-between.

Personally, I do think NetHack seems too complex to have come into existence without a "DevTeam," but if it does in fact exist I'm not convinced it bothers to interact with the universe it created. I remain agnostic on the issue.

Last.fm is a perfect example of a site that is doing it right. For all that iTunes records play counts and dates added and whatnot, all of that becomes useless as soon as a hard drive dies without the iTunes database being backed up properly, or when I use it on different machines that aren't synchronised.¹ Last.fm, though, provides me with not only proof of my listening habits (with graphs!), but also a whole lot of data about other people's! Combining statistics, music, and spying on people using the internet - could any site be more perfect? The Last.fm staff would probably call this "community-building" rather than "stalker-enabling", but to each their own.

To tell the truth, the social aspect of Last.fm has never really taken off for me (I can only keep up with so many social-networking-web-2.0-buzzword sites) but sometimes it's just what I need to save me from myself. Witness what I have been listening to for the last seven days:

In tangentially-related statistical news, I love all the intriguing information (and graphs!) that Google Analytics gives me for this blog. The vast majority of the search keywords bringing people here are, unsurprisingly, Mountain Goats related; this has also been bringing in the spam-bots, with a good 25% of spam comments since the blog's inception coming in the last week or so. There have been a few surprises, though, such as:

cack handed anathem
Not sure why two people were searching for this. I also don't know how they got to me using this search; I can manage it using "cack handed" +anathem, but the keywords on their own generate pages of results for "anthem" and "anathema". One of the internet's great mysteries, I guess.

exceptional skeleton price is
No idea why anyone was searching for this. Did they really expect the internet to tell them what an exceptional skeleton price is? And is that the price for an exceptional skeleton, or an exceptional price for a skeleton? Why did they even include "is" in the search?

gene wolfe john darnielle
I'm sorry, what? I don't even know who Gene Wolfe is. At least, I didn't until I looked him up just now.

Also, a map overlay showing what country visitors came from - and then what city, if I ask nicely - is just plain cool. So are graphs showing visitors vs. pageviews per visit, visitors vs. new visitors, and almost any useful or useless thing I might want to see. Nom nom nom.

1. Or when I finally find something to replace iTunes to my satisfaction and leave it forever. Any day now. Any day.

Eat what? a - the +3 blessed rustproof Magicbane
You stuff yourself and then vomit voluminously. --more--
Your intestinal flora are cancelled! --more--
You are starving to death even though your stomach is full! --more--
You die ...

"Your intestinal flora are cancelled!" That kills me. It really does.

Of course, the whingers of the world got what they wanted when Mozilla's servers fell over just before Download Day was officially set to begin. Nerds everywhere grabbed at the chance to sit at their computers, frantically hitting Refresh and/or complaining on Twitter about how stupid Mozilla were for not anticipating and preventing the problem.

All of this took place at 3 a.m. here in the future, so by the time I woke up everything was better¹ and I downloaded the precious .dmg file. However! Ungrateful sod that I am, I didn't install it right away. My pathetic dependency on some of my possibly-incompatible Firefox extensions made me fear the upgrade; what if I suddenly became unable to use the internet in the manner to which I had become accustomed? Life as I know it would grind to a halt.

Fortunately, days before Download Day I had been reminded about Flock, the "social browser" built on Firefox. I had tried an infant version of Flock a couple of years ago, but I didn't need the extra features and there was too much blue and orange in the colour scheme and, besides, Firefox was just better. Fast forward two years, and a new Flock beta built on Firefox 3 code has just been released. Perfect! I installed the Flock beta and imported all my Firefox settings, then proceeded to try to make everything work the way I wanted it to. If things went wrong, at least I wouldn't have futzed around with my precious Firefox installation and I could return to its welcoming, familiar arms.

The extension that I was most worried about was Vertigo, just about the only "critical" extension that hadn't been updated for Firefox 3. After using Firefox with a vertical column of tabs for quite some time, I dreaded the thought of going back. Vertical tabs take up only space that I have in abundance (mmm, widescreen), and they make it possible to have twenty or more tabs open at once and still identify them at a glance. None of that multi-row or tab-scrolling nonsense, thank you.

Sadly, my hours of fiddling with compatibility checks and ridiculous kludges were fruitless. Every time I thought I had Vertigo working properly (or properlyish) I would restart my browser, only to see it break in yet another unexpected way. The few Firefox-3-compatible extensions that offered vertical tabs either included an indenting tree structure or were unavailable for Mac.² Rage! I even installed Firefox 3 itself in the faint hope that the problems I were having were specific to Flock. No such luck.

I should note that several extensions I had previously relied on to fix silly problems with Firefox (most notably Long Titles) have become unnecessary with the new release, because the silly problems have been fixed at last. This is a Good Thing, as are the many improvements to prettiness and performance. However, the lack of sensible vertical tabs made me decided to return, shamefaced, to Firefox 2.

But disaster awaited me! Either my fickle nature had offended Firefox 2, or I had released some new gremlins, because Vertigo now failed to work reliably in Firefox 2 as well. What's more, the whole browser crashed repeatedly and for no apparent reason.³ What to do, what to do. The thought of meekly upgrading to Firefox 3 again and re-learning how to live a horizontal-tabbed life made me sad.⁴

Then - inspiration! If I had to adjust to a new browsing experience, why not adjust to one with a whole lot of extra features that were actually tremendously useful to me? Flock integrates nicely with Gmail and almost all the silly "Web 2.0" websites that usually eat far too much of my time, taking all the pointless and time-consuming aspects of participation out of the equation. It also comes with all the performance improvements⁵ of Firefox 3.

I still want a few more things from Flock. Integration with Google Reader, Last.fm and Tumblr, and maybe Google Calendar; word wrap in the People sidebar; vertical tabs, although that's something that I expect will have to come from an extension developer. But the awesome thing is that they have sane, friendly, responsive employees who are interested in feedback from users, and requested changes actually get implemented, so I may actually get what I want and have nothing to complain about.⁶

So, Flock makes this whole internet browsing game more efficient and less frustrating, while also giving me the opportunity to thumb my nose at Mozilla for not doing everything exactly how I wanted them to. Brilliant.

Alternate reading: Firefox, like rickrolling and cat macros, is just too mainstream for me to like it anymore.

1. Except for all of the snarky comments and forum posts that still litter the internet, that is.
2. When did that start happening, anyway? Stupid extensions.
3. I realise that, for some people, this has always been standard procedure for Firefox. All I can say is that I never had any problems before, damn it.
4. Why, yes, I do spend too much time on the internet. Why do you ask?
5. Well, the jury is still out on this "AwesomeBar" nonsense, but it will probably worm its wormy way into my heart eventually.
6. Please don't ask what I'll do then. I just don't know.