electric relaxation

I was Googling to find the exact lyrics for my favorite part of The Roots‘ Ain’t Sayin’ Nothin’ New and I stumbled upon the Wikipedia entry for Ted DiBiase. It makes for great reading.

I really hate the weird purple color that Windows Vista uses by default for menubar backgrounds. Most Vistatized apps, like IE7, WMP11 or Explorer, don’t actually show the menubar until you activate it with e.g. a keyboard combination, so the ugliness is not as noticeable. But plenty of applications do show the menubar, and that purple is just plain nasty:

It’s even worse when using Firefox, since Firefox uses this color not just for the menubar, but also for any and all toolbars:

I tried out a few of the Firefox 2.0 themes that are floating around (there aren’t very many), but none of them actually tweak the background color. I also found some open bugs in Mozilla’s Bugzilla related to beautification of Firefox on Vista, but there hasn’t been much action on that front.

Fortunately, I found an outlet for my impatience. This simple addition to userChrome.css was good enough to get rid of the ugliness:

menubar, toolbox, toolbar {
   background-color: #eeeeee !important;
}


I don’t think #eeeeee is actually the perfect color, and if I were more motivated I would track down the exact value used on e.g. XP hosts or something, but at any rate it sure as heck beats the default:

YouTube has a Top Gear piece on the 300ZX. It’s from an earlier version of the show (Philip tells me they’ve been through several incarnations), and it’s mostly focused on the aftermarket enthusiasts rather than the car itself, but it’s still pretty fun to watch -for me, anyway.

Philip has been recommending this show for at least as long as we’ve shared an office, and, as I am wont to do when confronted with “words” from “people”, I’ve been ignoring him. Unfortunately, I’ve recently realized that I’ve committed a tactical blunder of epic proportions. The show excels in every way that its hypothetical American equivalent could not; it’s wildly impolitic, witty and surreal. Oh, and they drove a Pantera GTS!

Update:
Watching an old episode where they discuss the upcoming Nissan 350Z. Jeremy Clarkson apparently hates the 300ZX (not sure why, and he’s infuriatingly tight-lipped about it). But more amusingly, he rails on about how the entire initial run of 350Zs are committed to “The Septics”: his personal nickname for America.