Tabbed Out

There are some things in technology that tend to spoil us. Video games let us live vicariously in another person's life, controlling their every action. Automobiles get us all over the place at high speeds not possible only a century ago. Computers allow us to create, explore, and communicate with others near impossible in any other medium.

A recent addition to the canon of life on computers has been these little things called tabs. FireFox was an early purveyor of them. Opera uses them. Then Internet Explorer 7.0 came out and added tabs to its lineup as well. At work, I used tabs to organize my desktop and keep everything neat and tidy. Then it all came to an end.

An email rolled down from the powers that be who determined that IE7 caused "back end" problems with some of their software environments, and pointed out to the plethora of users who have this app installed that IE6 is the officially supported application, and mandated that all users immediately downgrade to IE6 to comply with their supported app standards and alleviate these "back end" problems they seem to be having.

For me, this is a blow to how I do things. Our ticket application is a window sucking fiend. You open one window to log in. Click on queue, and another window opens. Want a ticket, another window. God forbid you want to keep a ticket open cause that's a window that you won't be closing. With IE7, I had all of these windows wrapped up in tabs. I'd have 5 or 6 tabs open at once, but all in one window. Now... I've got 5 or 6 windows open just for this one app. Nevermind, our main application that I had kept three tabs for in another window. It'll change the way I work.

In other news, The Socialite has officially decided to claim Rock Girl's old skate shoes. Of course, she has swiped them now and again, but to my knowledge, never wore them out in public. Yesterday, she did...and to my arm she clung as she slipped and slid all over the place with those wheels down. Rock Girl skated circles around us as usual in her heeleys, while Socialite struggled to stay on her feet. She had fun, though, which is the real point.

Dancing With The Stars started last night, and well, that's an event in my house, anyway. Everyone (except me) gathers around to watch the competition and they really get into it. Me, I'm not much into awards shows and such. I prefer to catch the summary at the end when the scores are meted out. While they were watching the show, I was running in and out of my room ripping DVDs onto my iPod. What can I say? I've had Halloween (Rob Zombie, 07 version) for months, and I still haven't watched it. Yes, I've seen the 78 version.

To cap off last night, The Queen and I played two player Guitar Hero 3, and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. I probably shouldn't have stayed up so late given that I'd been up since 9:00pm Sunday evening (I worked at the world's largest retailer on Sunday night). I love playing that game, and playing with someone makes it all that much more fun. I have been going back and forth between hard and expert, but I stuck with hard last night. I'm getting rather good at it.

As a matter of fact, I beat Slash on hard, and it was a battle royale too. We went through most of the song before I finally took him down. I've never lasted that long on any of those battle songs, so I was pretty proud of myself.

The Queen is getting really good as well. This is the first GH game she's played, but last night, we managed a five star song. It's only the second one I've garnered on the hard level, and her first on easy, so we were rather proud of ourselves. Round about 1:00, though, we were also really tired.

Usually, the Queen wants a story as we go to sleep, but last night, I didn't get very far before the next thing I knew, the alarm was going off to get up and go again this morning.