The Blog at the End of the Internet

Ahhh, Machu Picchu!

How many wanderlusts lust for you!

For devotees like us, who can only aspire to visit this indescribable beauty of a place at some point in our lifetimes, a kind soul has created a 222 megapixel zoomable/browsable picture , using a mosaic of 35 high-res photos. This is the closest many people would possibly get to seeing this ancient Incan city high in the Andes. This is probably the closest i would get, though I sincerely hope I would be able to make the pilgrimage some day.

So I recently came to know of this wonderful browser called Flock that's based off of firefox, but has a lot of cool web 2.0 features like blogging editor that lets you post directly, drap-dropping photos into Flickr and an in-built RSS reader, to name a few. Think of it as firefox with a lot of those wonderful extensions built-in. They have a dev version to try out, and apparently they are getting ready for a big Alpha release soon. It is available for Windows/Linux/OS X. I am running 0.7 on linux.

It looks amazing, light, and fast. and the pleasant surprise for me was that it auto installed Flash plugin directly on my AMD64 machine! I think it is a 32-bit version of Flock and that's why flash was set up in a, umm, flash, but I have been proved wrong too many times in the past to have any faith in my assertions myself.

But however it works, it works - i now have a web browser with Flash on my 64-bit linux machine, and that's all i care about! I can now watch youtube, read www.nba.com without impairing my eyesight and am now posting this using the blog tool in Flock.

Way cool.

Matt Brochu is a columnist at the Daily Collegian, our (UMass Amherst's) college newspaper. Whenever I pick up a copy of the Collegian and see his weekly opinion piece, I read it without fail - his writing is sharp, insightful and humorous. I recently came to know (old news) that an article by him had become a kind of internet meme, and was so popular that it was mentioned in the Washington Post, apart from being circulated among countless dorm rooms and universities all over the western hemisphere. Unfortunately the article had to be taken down from the Collegian's online archives, but I found many places (blogs) where his article was saved in its entirety. Being a fan myself I decided to give this wonderful article a home of its own, and here's where you can read it.

And the truth shall set you free.