WARNING: What follows is a rant. If you don’t feel like listening to me complain about my problems with Windows Vista, you should probably just skip this one.

I’ve been using Windows Vista for…oohhh…I dunno, about a year now or so, something like that. The experience has been…uuummm…OK. There are some things about it that I like, and definitely some things about it that I don’t like. One thing that I will say for certain though, is that there is one thing that I don’t like about it SO much, that it may just end up being the deciding factor of whether or not I continue using Vista or not.

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Computers are so unreliable. You’d think that with as long as I’ve been working with computers that I would’ve learned my lesson by now and gotten some sort of reliable backup and recovery plan in place at home. Unfortunately, if you did think that, you’d be wrong.

I’ve said for a long time that I was going to get some sort of plan in place. As a matter of fact, I’ve been working on writing my own application for backing up data off and on for quite a while now (I’ve run into a few snags that I’ve not been able to figure out how to get working, which is why its not done yet, but that’s another story for another time). Anyway, the system disk on my server at home crashed last week, which is why Yexley.Net was down for a while.

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Today I was trying to figure out a way to apply some functionality to a given set of anchor tags on a web page. Basically, I wanted to be able to add a function to all of the anchor tags on a page that link to an image file. The first thing that came to mind for how to handle this, was jQuery. It was made for this sort of thing. I knew I could do it with jQuery, it just took me a little bit to figure out the right syntax for doing it. So, I had to figure out a way to write a jQuery selector that said “give me all of the anchor tags on the page where the href attribute contains an image file extension”. So I did a little bit of searching, and stumbled across this article on how to use predicate selectors in jQuery. The syntax I ended up with was:

   1: $("a[@href *= '.jpg']")

BRILLIANT! (yes, I know, I still need to figure out how to OR the other image type extensions (.gif, .png, etc) together into the “contains” predicate, but that’s the easy part really). I couldn’t put it any more clearly than, or agree with this statement any more (pardon the language):

The more I read up on jQuery, the more I realize how sweet-a** it is. jQuery is the “Easy” button of the user interface world.

That says it all for me right there. Before I was introduced to jQuery, I hated doing JavaScript of any kind in my web apps. Now, having jQuery, I go out of my way to look for ways to use it…its THAT cool.

I thought this was fascinating. Visuals of relational information derived from the Bible. Very cool stuff. The image below is a visual arc representing cross references from the Bible. Awesome.

For what its worth to anyone that might read this, my recent experience with the purchase of my new MacBook Pro through MacMall has been fantastic. The process of ordering the computer was quick and easy. The people I’ve talked to (yes, I was actually connected directly to a human when I called, after a single level of voicemail system where I told it what I was calling for - to place an order) have been friendly and helpful. The experience has been great. I think the thing that I noticed most, that prompted me to write this at all, was the fact that I just received a phone call from the account rep that I placed my order with, in which she reminded me to not forget to fill out the mail-in-rebate forms so that I could claim the rebates that I was offered with my purchase. The thing that stands out to me about that is the fact that, in my experience in the past, the whole point of mail-in-rebates is the hope that at least a percentage of people will either be too lazy or will not remember to fill them out. For a company to make a point to call a customer to remind them to fill out and send in the rebate forms to me is remarkable enough that its worth telling people about.

So, if you’re ever in the market for any Apple products, be it a computer, an iPod or iPhone, whatever…I can personally, highly recommend MacMall.com.