iRider is a new browser that I’ve been playing around with for the past couple of hours, and that I wanted to share with you guys. I know some of you have hopped on to the Mozilla Firefox bandwagon, and I’ll admit that I was pretty impressed with its features when it was in early beta, but I was expecting a bit more from a community-supported project, and it just hasn’t delivered. Needless to say, when I stumbled upon iRider last night, after reading a very positive writeup by John C. Dvorak, I couldn’t help but think, “Damn, this is what Firefox should have been like.”

iRider hasn’t actually done anything revolutionary with its interface and approach to browsing, but it did improve on certain concepts in ways that no other browser has. Here’s a brief list:

1. Tabbed Browsing … only better
   
   One of my favorite Firefox features was the ability to open an unlimited number of tabbed pages within one parent window. It even had a feature where you could visit all of the links in a particular Favorites folder simultaneously, which really helps a lot when I’m looking for news or interesting content. The problem is, each of my Favorites folders have anywhere between 15 and 40 different links in them, and when they all load up, sorting through dozens of tabbed pages can be really confusing.

   iRider’s approach is a lot more intuitive, although it takes up quite a bit more space. What it does is it has a sidebar which contain thumbnail views of each of the pages you have loaded. This helps remind you what the pages contain, especially if you have as bad a memory for URLs as I do. You can even “pin” the cached pages so that iRider will retain them even after you’ve closed the browser, which is helpful if you’re following multiple forum threads or if you’re waiting for new nudies to pop up in our galleries.

   You can even scroll really fast over the cached pages by dragging your mouse over the thumbnails … iRider’s page-renderer is that good.

2. The Right-Click Revolution
   
   The one thing that iRider does really differently is that they’ve changed what right-click does. Instead of popping up a context-menu, it loads the link you clicked on in the background. You can navigate to it by pressing F4, or the asterisk on your NumPad, or just clicking on its thumbnail in the sidebar. To get the old-fashioned context-menu, you have to hold the right-click for about a second before it will appear.

   (Folks with a more modern mouse can bind the “background-loading” command to the middle mouse button instead.)

3. Select Multiple Links Simlutaneously
   
   This is one of those “why-didn’t-I-think-of-that”-type features, in that it’s so bleedin’ obvious, but nobody has ever bothered to implement it. iRider allows you to select a whole bunch of links, and right-click to load them all simultaneously. I’m sure that not all of us have a need for this particular feature, but let me tell you, this feature by itself convinced me to try iRider. Why? Because I always find myself at link-dump sites and photo galleries that have masses and masses of links, and I have to right-click-then-click-”open in new window” dozens of times to view them all.

   With iRider, I just select the entire group, right-click, then go and make myself a cup of coffee. By the time I sit down again, I’ve got 30 new pages waiting to be viewed, each with its own explanatory thumbnail. No fuss, no clutter.

4. No Importing Favorites
   
   This is one of the things I hate most about Firefox, and is the primary reason I gave up using it. Why the hell does it need to import favorites from IE? Is it so difficult to just share the default My Favorites folder? It’s just text for goodness’ sake.

   It’s too much work to have to maintain two sets of Favorites, and the people at iRider understood that, and fixed the problem.
   

Apart from all these features, iRider also has a tiny hard-disk footprint: it’s only 3.7mb to download, half of what Firefox’s installation file currently weighs. Keep in mind though that the currently available version is a beta build only, and will probably have a few bugs here and there which I have not come across yet.

And now, for the bad news.

iRider is not a free product the way Firefox is, but if you’re of the notion that good work deserves equivalent compensation then you may not find that too disagreeable. They do let you try it out for free for 3 weeks though, which should be long enough for you to decide if you want to shell out for it or not. The price is $29.95, which is about right for an application of this size, and is a hell of a lot less than I’d be willing to pay, personally. When you consider that Trillian, which is little more than a graphical front-end for multiple IM apps, is already $25, it kind of puts this cost into perspective.

• Weezer is currently in studios working on their fifth album, and will hopefully finish in time for Rivers to start studying again. … I’m serious.
  
• A 30-year old man has been charged with stalking the punkiest punk in the world (not so, says The Superficial), and says he would like to “knock fists” with Avril at her next concert. “Knock fists” … what is that, like the “Keep it real” for punk poser wannabes?
  
• Joseph Kahn, director of Britney Spears’ mile-high Toxic video, reveals that Britney was indeed very naked during the diamonds sequence, and practically cums in his pants describing her “brilliance” and “incredible sense of humor.” Or maybe he did, and the interviewer didn’t notice.
  

Ok, I’ve listened to the whole Kiss and Tell album now. Maybe I’m just giddy at finally hearing something good this week (how apt that I’m listening to it on Sunday night), but this album is … man. It’s almost the best album I’ve heard this year, if not for the Libertines releasing their second album on the 31st (officially anyway … it’s been floating around the P2P for a while now) and A.C. Newman releasing his first two months ago.

Standout tracks include “Stay/Stay Away” (best song I’ve heard all month), “Keep Calling My Baby”, “Who Do You Dance For?” and “Hot Night Crash.” Heck, nearly all of the songs are fantastic actually, with the only clunker being “Nerves” (but that may just be me).

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a short blurb about this group’s debut album over at Highfiber, completely unaware that their new album had also just been released. And from the six songs I’ve heard so far (the first half only, alas) it seems like a really, really strong effort. I think the biggest difference is that they’ve steered clear of the distortion-laced sound that the Jennie Bomb album was so keen on, and are coming up with stuff that kicks the ass of practically every garage-punk band out there right now (and I don’t just mean The Donnas* either). What I find amazing is how they’ve so confidently shrugged off the sound that made them famous (well, relatively famous) and come up with something really fresh this time around. I don’t think this will alienate their fanbase in any way (hell, it’s not as if it’s No Code or something), but it is a definite departure.

* Incidentally, the Donnas are releasing their new album on October 26th, according to their website. If I were them, I’d be squeezing every last bit of energy I could to make sure each of those new songs shine, coz Sahara Hotnights is leaving everybody else in the dust.

I fell asleep for a few minutes this morning, and dreamt of a small winged puppy in a shoebox. He was asleep when I found him, and when I pulled him out he blinked and kinda yelped softly. He couldn’t fly away because I was holding his wings together, so he just kinda looked at me solemnly, and waited for me to put him down so he could go back to sleep.

Rummaging through Emusic’s “six-months-ago-and-older” stuff has produced more great finds, most notably this lovely album from Tahiti 80. I’m gonna try my hand at comparing these guys to other established artists again, which I hear is what Serious Music Reviewers like doing, so here goes:

Belle & Sebastian meets Stereolab (although the Stereolab gene is buried pretty deeply within all that indie pop) meets Brian Wilson (ok I know that’s a lazy-ass comparison, but the Beach Boys are the guiding light of so much of indie pop that you can’t really go wrong with him).

It’s a pretty short, 8-song affair but it’s a testament to how good these guys are that I can’t decide which track I like best (and that includes the purely instrumental “Antonelli”). This is without a doubt, the best album I’ve pulled off Emusic’s shelves (the previous best was AC Newman’s The Slow Wonder, which I haven’t devoted a review unfortunately) and I’m seriously considering purchasing the rest of their discography as well.

I’m not sure what to make of Stepford Wives, to be honest. Throughout most of its 120 minutes, it’s a kitschy caricature of surreal old-fashioned-ness and equally surreal production design. The unhappy couple (played by Matthew Broderick & Nicole Kidman) have just moved in to Stepford, where everybody is polite and welcoming in a way that any sane person would find absolutely creepy. As they get to know the residents, things get increasingly weirder, but always in that kitschy comic, Frank-Oz way. There’s not an ounce of menace in the whole movie, which is probably why I had such a hard time “getting” it.

People probably already know the truth behind the Stepford Wives, so I’ll just gloss over the details here:

Basically, what they do is take your loved one’s brain and place it in a practically invulnerable robotic chassis, while suppressing all of that person’s bad traits through a bunch of “name” implants. Towards the end of the film, this process is explained to the audience via a retro cartoon presentation. My beef with the whole concept is this: in order to get the partner of your dreams, you have to kill them first (sorta, because the only bit of them that’s left is their nano-enhanced brain), and it doesn’t seem to fit in with the whole cute and wholesome feel.

In fact, even after the implants have been destroyed, your partner’s brain is still trapped in their robot body, a fact which the filmmakers seem to have neglected to tackle. Maybe I’m just overthinking all of this, but a little bit more explanation wouldn’t have hurt.

What do you say about a movie that was made solely to appease the fans? How do you even review something like that? This was one of the dilemmas I came across while trying to write a review about AVP.

Eventually I decided that the fairest way would be simply to review it for what it is — a two-hour commercial for the resulting line of merchandise.

“Aliens” and “Predator” represent two of the most popular sci-fi franchises around, surpassed only by Star Wars & Star Trek (although Star Wars is actually more of fantasy than sci-fi); and fans have literally been waiting decades to see the two titans duke it out Freddy and Jason style. So was it good? Well I already said I wouldn’t review it as cinema per se, because it’s obviously not meant to be anything like that, so I won’t talk about the utter lack of pacing or characterization.

However, I will point out certain aspects of the movie that I found genuinely insulting (as a sci-fi fan and/or as a movie enthusiast), just for the hell of it:

1. What day is it today, baby?
   
   During the first third of the movie, our heroes come upon an ancient monolith which the “scientist” deduces was made by the master civilization from which the Egyptian, Aztec and Cambodian races all originated from. (Don’t ask how they figured that one out — I don’t think any of the writers knew either.)
   
   Upon finding the secret entrance to the ‘pyramid’, our heroes are confronted with a calendar-lock, a lock which will open when you dial in the current date, i.e., 10-10-04. The lock is meant to be opened once every hundred years, so the last time it was unlocked was in 1904, then 1804, then 1704, etc. Uh, retard alert, kids. Why is the ancient, pre-historic lock using a Gregorian calendar system?
   
   (I saw this same stupidity in End of Days, wherein Satan was supposed to be reborn at the dawn of the new millenium, a date they had pegged as Dec 31, 1999. Uhm, that prophesy was written in Aramaic, my friend. They didn’t have 12-month years back then. They didn’t even know about time zones, yet their prophesy has Satan being born in NEW YORK at a minute after midnight, on a
   
   continent that they didn’t know existed. Granted, AVP’s foolishness was not quite as repugnant as End of Days’, but I felt obliged to point it out anyway.)

2. Thanks for the history lesson, Bubba.
   
   As our heroes explore the labyrinth, they find bits and pieces of this unknown civilization’s story, which culminates in a CG-laden flashback about two-thirds of the way into the movie. Pay attention while the flashback is running, because it’s one of the most ridiculous sci-fi sequences ever rendered.
   
   The “scientist” explains the story as he reads the inscriptions: he says that at one point, the Predators were overwhelmed by the Aliens, and set off a mini-nuke, which wiped out the entire civilization. Uhm, if the civilization was completely eradicated, who chiseled that slab you’re reading, Sherlock? And more importantly, the flashback shows the Predators setting off their bomb at the apex of the “pyramid” yet we see that the structure (as of several thousand years later) is in absolutely pristine condition, as good as the day it was built, with just a thin layer of dust on everything. Also, notice that the flashback shows a tropical environment, and not a chilly arctic one? That’s because it happened so long ago that the climate was totally different … you know, like in the Pre-Cambrian era, when there were no fucking humans yet.

3. Stop changing the rules dammit!
   
   One of the movie’s little gimmicks is the fact that this ancient structure is so high-tech that it reconfigures its internal passages every 10 minutes, kinda like a maze that you can never escape from. In its underbelly, an Alien queen lies chained, laying eggs at a furious rate. (Two seconds out of deep-freeze and away she goes!) These eggs are then transported via conveyor belt up to a chamber where human hosts wait to be face-hugged. The alien spawn burst out of their chests, and these become the prey that the Predators hunt through the maze. In the movie, this entire process takes place in a matter of minutes. Bam! Alien queen lays egg. Bam! The egg immediately opens and face-hugs the closest host. Bam! The alien bursts out of the host’s chest. Bam! Instant full-grown Alien soldier drone.
   
   This is the part that stung the most, because it showed such a blatant disregard for rules that the Alien movies had already set. I mean, it’s one thing to break the rules of reality (which implies simply that the screenwriter was retarded), but to break the rules of the movies that you based all your concepts on is another thing altogether (he’s not just retarded, he’s an ungrateful asshole as well). In a movie that was made specifically for fans, it’s like flipping the bird at the audiences that made these characters so popular and is unconscionable bad form.

So do I recommend that anyone see this utter crap of a film? I dont know. Even with a review this bad, I’d have still watched it, if only to see for myself just how bad it was. I personally hated every minute of it, including the badly-shot fight scene between the Alien soldier and the last Predator, and the Jurassic-Park rip-off chase scene at the end. The director, Paul W.S. Anderson, is a hopeless hack and I feel genuinely robbed (of both a good movie and a faithful storyline). It’s not the worst film of the year (don’t worry, that’s still Catwoman), but I will most certainly not watch it again. Maybe ever.

I doubt there’s gonna be much of a story in this, but it’s 12:42, Aug 17, as I begin installing WinXP Service Pack 2. Mostly I’m writing this out of boredom - watching filenames flutter by over a flat blue progress bar was never my thing.

Like most of the geek community, I “splurged” on this Pack and downloaded the full 266mb version … you know, the one with the warning that goes “DO NOT DOWNLOAD THIS IF YOU ARE ONLY UPDATING ONE MACHINE, etc.” Not that anybody actually pays attention to those warnings. Hell, I’d been waiting for SP2 since they announced it last year and I sure as hell wasn’t going to wait for another week before they started serving it piecemeal over Windows Update.

So anyway, I got it several days ago (torrent-style, of course; it’s one of those pseudo-political statements) but had been holding off on actually installing it because … Well, I was scared. That Pack was 266mb for a reason (and most certainly not because it was jammed with free, legal MP3s) and the prospect of it fucking up my machine was positively pants-wetting.

But this evening I came to the point where I was too tired to work and too restless to play games, and found myself aimlessly backing up folders between my 2 hard drives. Maybe in the back of my head, I was already anticipating disaster. (Granted, I have had no previous bad experiences with Service Packs in XP or 2k, but M$ doesn’t exactly have a spotless record when it comes to stability, so it’s not as if my fears were altogether misplaced.)

Essentially I figured, what the hell, gotta face the music some time. So I did it. Clickety-click and away we go.

Which brings me back to writing this piece, this non-story of mine. It’s now 1am on the dot and my PC has just rebooted (no, this was a normal post-install reboot, not a crash or a BSOD or anything like that). The XP logo is coming up a bit slower than usual, but that’s normal behavior after a big update.

Oops wait. That little loading bar’s not moving.

Fuck.

Ok. I waited 5 minutes and nothing happened. I’m cold-booting as I write this line. Hopefully it’ll boot successfully this ti …

Fuck.

Ohkaaay then. Let’s try booting via our “Last Known Good Configuration.”

Hmm. Nope.

“Safe Mode” then?

Nu-uh.

Power off, do a little monkey-dance, then boot and pray …?

… Well now. I believe this constitutes a real problem.

More notable (sorta) new music:

Simply Waiting is a bit like how Jars of Clay would sound if they were emo, instead of commercial-alternative. (Ok, that was admittedly not my best attempt at a musical comparison but anyway …) Simply Waiting’s most distinct feature is their acoustic-guitar-driven melodies, which is especially obvious on tracks like “Went With The Count”, “Carefree” (my personal favorite, although i don’t really care for the brief voiceover toward the end) and “Strategy in Moving”. Incidentally they have 6 tracks available for free at PureVolume, which is where I came across them.

Jenoah is another emo band (although unlike Simply Waiting, these guys lean more toward that wonderfully ambiguous “post-hardcore” subgenre). Their free EP has been floating around online for quite a few weeks; I got mine at AudioLunchBox, but you can get copies here and here as well. I particularly like “Openly” and “Jamie” although your own mileage may vary.

And lastly, Seafood’s Surviving the Quiet album came out waaay back in 2001, but I only discovered it yesterday because well, I suck. In case there are still one or two of you around out there who haven’t heard these guys in the 3 years their album has been lauded, hyped and praised, this is a brilliant piece of indie pop that every fan of the genre should pick up. I haven’t quite made up my mind yet which tracks are standouts, but “Toggle” is fantastic straight out of the box, no second-listening required.