I know it’s been some time since you were my primary browser.

I know that you probably hate me for cheating on you with Chrome, too (but damn, she’s fast!).

Here’s the deal. I came back to you, as you’ve reached version 12 and it seems like you’re doing quite well for yourself. It was all coming together so nicely, but then I tried to give you a negative margin, and you would have NONE of it.

Firefox? What the fuck.

You used to love negative margins! We would make content regions overlap, and touch up positioning with them all the time. They were something we bonded on… and I thought it was… forever…

Well get your shit in order, Firefox. I’m not going to resort to relative positioning just to get your content in line. I’ve had it with you. But if (and hopefully when) you go back to supporting basic CSS2 attributes, I’ll take you under my wing and we can conquer all the negative margins once more.

Best,

Paul

This brings me back to the quoted simile. I reject the comparison of free software programmers to autoworkers trying to unionize the company. A better comparison would be that someone writing free software is like a hippie who grows his own coffee beans and sells them at the side of the road by his farm. You can’t buy them at Tim Horton’s or Dunkin Doughnuts because the hippie doesn’t like what the big chains do with the coffee.

So you go to the hippie or you don’t drink the coffee he grows. The problem is that you bought yourself a shiny espresso machine that only takes pods distributed by the manufacturer. So even if you buy the hippie’s beans, you can’t make yourself any coffee with them because the machine won’t take them unless they’ve been shipped to the manufacturer and packaged into little special pellets.

How is this the hippie’s fault for not liking big coffee chains or espresso machines? You can drink plenty of coffee, and you can buy a plot of land and grow your own coffee to be distributed by the espresso machine maker. You can buy a different kind of espresso maker that takes ground beans directly.

The hippie is free and you are free. The hippie hasn’t shut down the big chains, but that isn’t his goal. His goal is to sleep at night, comfortable that he has made choices compatible with his personal beliefs and that he has given other people the freedom to make choice compatible with their personal beliefs.

I can think of no greater definition of freedom.

You can read the whole post from raganwald’s posterous, and though it’s about software more than coffee, he touched on a really great point. His statement, “I can think of no greater definition of freedom” really sends home the message that at the end of the day, we should all be able to make our own choices in life based on our personal beliefs. That is awesome. Let’s do that.

Hoping for time spent in a place like this.

A quick read by Aldous Huxley, though the language is pretty tough in some places. I thought this book was really inspiring, and gave a good look into the minds of people, moreso than most may be comfortable with. Good stuff, really deep, food for thought. Maybe not a must read, but if you’re looking to get really out there, definitely give it a shot.

A bunch of friends all got together at a gorgeous estate (thank you Owen!) and played tennis, threw some disc, drank flippy floppies and great beer, and chilled hard.  The weather was beautiful, sunny in the low 80s, and without the road noise of the city, all I could hear was the wind through the trees. It’s relaxation heaven up there.

A visit to Vermont was just what I needed, and inspired me to do more outdoors and keep the feeling alive. Next weekend? Hiking trip in New Hampshire. Word.

Image Credit: http://thewanderingsofadreamer.blogspot.com/

I’ve started reading again, and after finishing one book just to move on to the next one, I’ve been asking myself this question a lot:
Why not read?

If you have any books that really moved you or (and possibly more importantly) made you think, comment on this. I’ll use the comments as a sort of reading list, and as I finish them, I’ll get back to you.

Reading is good. Knowledge is power. duh.

Over Thanksgiving break, I made it down to RI to visit the extended family and celebrate with strategy games, guitar, and good food.  Lucky for me, my aunt and uncle have a sort of mini-farm, and we had a feast of pork, along with other farm fresh produce grown only a few months earlier.

Uncle Chris and Aunt Martha run the ‘Faella Farm‘ where they grow tons of flowers and vegetables.  Recently they’ve added pigs and chickens, so now there’s a full fledged farm running over there!  It’s fun to work for them and let my brain reset from all the computers and screens at work and at home in my day to day life.  To see them work on the farm, eat what they grow, and enjoy it makes me jealous of the simplicity of the process, and the rewards of their labor.

Simplicity doesn’t mean it’s any easier though.  A day’s work clearing brush and junk (and working with a Bobcat!) only opened up half of what’s to be the new pigpen.  It’s a lot of manual labor.

Although the work is tough, it felt good to get my hands dirty (literally) and step away from the technology driven mad-house of web development that was taking over my life.  A nice Thanksgiving reset if you will.

Well, it’s back to the grind now, but with a renewed sense of direction to keep things simple and rewarding.  Snow is coming too, and it looks like my foreseeable weekends will be filled with Stratton, Okemo, and Sunapee. I’m looking forward to stepping away from the screens and getting back to nature.  Thanks farm!