stream of consciousness

This is a repost from July 2009. Originally posted as a note on Facebook.

You’re walking next to a stream, not quite following the stream exactly as much as in the general direction. The weather is fine, a soft breeze gently ruffles some nearby trees allowing some leaves to fall and interrupting the nap of a few birds. All in all, it’s a satisfying trip, and you feel like you’re enjoying it for once.

The thought of yesterday crosses your mind, and you become thankful that all the trouble you went through is finally paying off. To think that you almost gave up. What a bad move it would have been. But in the end, you succeeded.

That is to say, you’re about to succeed.

Or is it… hmm…

Where am I? you wonder, and you notice that you’ve been walking for a whole day now, in the general direction of the river, but the sad realization that you have no idea if you’re heading correctly or not hits you.

You sit on a nearby rock to catch your breath, and you take a sip of water.

Now what?

Googling around shows that a lot of people are having this problem where Safari on Mac will flash white while transitioning from page to page. This problem is most noticeable when the pages in question have a dark background.

Most of the replies you will find online are from people who are trying to guess what is happening.

Using the Audits developer tool, we can track down what is causing the issue:

Running the audit on the page in question shows this particular hint:

Digging in the source code shows that mixing the order of loading CSS, JS, and inline stuff is what is causing the problem.

So to solve it, you should first load all your external CSS, then load all the external JS, only after that include any inline <style> and <script> tags.

There was a guy who had one black rock and one white rock. He placed them next to each other, and then showed them to people. They didn’t think it was interesting.

He got two other black rocks and a white one, and he arranged them next to the previous two. People still didn’t like them.

He changed the order of the rocks. That also had little effect on people.

He then went around and collected all the black rocks and all the white rocks he can find, and spent his life creating patterns of a long string of black and white rocks.

Of these patterns, there are some which, if you convert the black rocks into zeros and the white rocks into ones, and you feed the whole thing into a computer, you get very interesting applications that people actually pay money for.

My job is to spend my days rearranging patterns of zeros and ones, and people pay me to do it.

So yesterday I decided to go early to the apple shop in the hopes of getting an iphone.

The shop opens at 10am, and I was there at 8:30, there were 27 person in front of me in the queue, so I wait. And I wait. And finally, at 10am, they come outside to announce that the delivery truck isn’t there yet, and they don’t know when it is coming.

I decided it’s not worth it, so I left. Heading in the bus, I check online and find an apple store in West Island, Montreal, and I’m in Laval, so I say what the hell. I get off at the metro station, take the metro to Montreal, get out at Sauvé station. I take the 121 bus to Cote Vertu, then I take the 470 express bus to Fairview Center. I reach the apple shop, only to be told that they also do not have any phones.

So I get back to Laval, 470 bus to Cote Vertu, 121 bus to Sauvé, Metro to Montmorency in Laval, Then I take the 50 bus to Le Carrefour Center, I check back at the apple store, they only got 30 phones, it’s 4pm, and the last two people on the queue are getting their phones.

I know that apple are shipping small quantities of phones to the shops to keep the hype up, but come on, this is ridiculous. 30 phones for the whole of Laval? And there were even people from Montreal who came here because the apple shop in Montreal had a queue that reached Mexico.

There’s also the attitude of the employees at the apple shop, they’re so happy that so many people are waiting, and they’re happy keeping people waiting without giving definite answers. One of them even took a picture of the queue when the shop opened.

It’s funny that I have to beg apple to take my money.

Went on a trip down memory lane tonight.
I came across my old self.
I said hi.
He said nothing.
He didn’t know who I was.
I told him.
Said I changed.
Asked me if things are going to be better.
I said he will have to find out.
When I came back, I found my future self waiting for me here.
I told him he changed.
I asked him if things are going to get better.
He said I will have to find out.

You get some kind of medication box, you open it, take out the instructions paper and unfold it to read. You can never fold it back exactly as it was, in order to put it back in the box.

You take an important relationship out of its box, you unfold it, and you read the instructions. The mistake you make is that you try to fold it back in the exact way it was. You can never succeed in doing that. It will never fold back exactly. The best you can hope for is to squeeze it back into a shape that vaguely resembles the original fold, and hope that no one will notice when they try to unfold it back again.

You may need to realise that there is an art to folding that does not come easily to everyone, and that what you needed to consider was this: If it really is that important to have it folded, you should have never unfolded it in the first place, otherwise, you should accept the fact that this paper, big as it is, will now lay flat and open, so make some room for it, and stop trying to fold it back.

Thoughts are lighter than air, they always travel upwards, and if we do not act upon them they will float all the way up and settle down next to the clouds, where all thoughts meet.