| { October 16, 2003 }
Making Your PC Nearly Tolerable
I really am beginning to believe that the creators of Windows are off somewhere laughing at how absurd it is that they have made a fortune from an operating system that tries to do everything it can to work against the user. Have you ever tried to do anything with fonts other than the ones that came with your PC? Don’t. Unless you like getting mad. I wish I could change things for the better (Macs!) in my office, but it’s not in the cards right now. I am comforted by the fact that I have a Mac on my desk as well, but so much of our network is run under the pretense that everyone is on a PC that it gets little regular use outside of font conversion and mp3 playing.
Today I downloaded two applications that make having to use a PC at work a not-quite-so-shitty experience. Hell has indeed frozen over because Apple has just released iTunes for Windows. This is obviously an effort to bump the sales of iPods and the use of their online Music Store. Whatever the case, I can finally stop opening the painful Real Player forever and ever and ever.
Also, if you hate Internet Explorer on Windows as much as I do (which I assure you, is a considerable amount), you will find solace in the new Firebird from open-source mavens, Mozilla. Firebird is a lightweight, speedy browser with great support for Web Standards and CSS. There is a Mac version as well, but I am still swept away with Safari.
Apple and Mozilla have granted my PC at least one more day’s grace from getting thrown off the roof. 
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