IKE and its after effects

Texas is the state that faced IKE head on. I live in Ohio, roughly 1,200 miles away from Texas. However remnants of IKE passed through Ohio yesterday (14th Sept) and I can only guess how the real thing would have been.

1. The winds reached roughly about 60mph. Many trees fell (some fallen trees blocked the entrance to the apartment complex I live) and a lot of people lost power. Given that most of the households depend on electricity to cook and heat water, people were left without lights, hot water and food! (Luckily we were left without power only for a few hours. Our apartment complex runs underground cables and that probably saved us from having a blackout for days)

2. Many things that were left outside showed how brutal the wind is. Roof tiles, the decorative wooden shades around the windows and plastic garden chairs are a few things that were scattered among the debris.

3. Transportation became a hazard! Not because the roads were damaged but because most of the signals are not working. Some of the signal lights were turned so that they don't face the right directions (the most notable being the one at the entrance of the school, which turned 180 degrees and is facing the opposite direction) so even when they are working it did not make sense. There are temporary stop signs erected at certain intersections but still its dangerous to drive on certain roads.

If a died down IKE could do this much, I can only imagine how devastating it would have been at its full power!

Google Chrome - First Impressions

Just tried Google Chrome. Looks cool and I definitely love the functionality of dragging tabs to create new windows. From the looks of it (taskmanager) it seems to spawn a new process only if the tab is made into a new window. 

1. I love the interface. Simple and elegant and a whole lot of area to view the pages without obstruction.

2. CSS confirmity seems to be good. In fact I doubt whether they used the mozilla components for CSS since it seems to work exactly the same as FF3.

3. Most visited tab is cool and pretty much useful when you start the day :)

There are some glitches though

1. No Linux version ! This means I'll be sticking to FF for 90% of the time. [ I understand the mindset of giving the first place to Windows users (there a whole lot of them) But why not even a simple alpha/pre-alpha on Linux and Mac ? ]

2. Its noticeably slow. FF3 is blazingly fast (perhaps I am used to it too much) but loading of javascript and certain flash plugins seems really slow compared to FF3. There are visible glithches in rendering plain html pages. This is somewhat conflicting because there are reports that say its javascript rendering is really fast! My connection is working fine and I have no clue why it seems surprisingly slow to me.

3. Single box for search and url is a double edged sword. It makes the interface simple but the usage somewhat tricky. For example I am used to type just google in the address bar (in FF) and hit enter to go to Google. In chrome it searches Google for 'google' and displays the results. 

I'm sure Google will soon fix these (except for the Linux release. I'm not sure whether Google will take the trouble to release a version for the handful of (?) Linux users out there. For example there is no equivalent to gmail notifier in Linux officially released by Google to date. There is a third party one but its another frustrated geek doing his own handy work). We know at least M$ is scared so let us see what others have to say ;)