waffle

Dun… dun… dun……….. dun dun……

Black.

It is insanely hard to make a legible web site in black.

Black is really the ideal background color for online reading. When you’re reading this, you’re probably staring into an incredibly advanced lightbulb right now. Black means less light, and less strain on your eyes.

But black’s also best unanimously. When you flip between white pages, you don’t notice it. When you flip from a white page to a black page, you don’t notice it as much, but when you flip from a black page to a white page, you’re probably a bit blinded. That’s why I’ve avoided black for so long - because it’s insanely hard to make a legible web site in black.

Coming soon: a switcher that lets you flip between black and a rejiggered version of the previous white/blue theme. Coming now: live search, right on top of this page, semi-sensible navigation and a host of halfway decent tag lines, brought to you one by one, randomly. And muted white text on top of a black background, for the first time in Waffle history.

What do you think?

• Photo scrolling is wicked, wicked, fast. Load in a few thousand photos into it, go to the photo library, wait a second or two for the caches to build up, push the Center/Action button and scroll that click wheel as fast as you can. iPhoto seems like a Sinclair in comparison. It’s awesome. (And yes, I know it’s small, pre-optimized photos. Still awesome.)

• I’ve changed my mind about the black front. Dirt and fingerprints are, barring dipping the thing in flour, not easier to detect, and the biggest problem on that end remains the chrome back. The small border around the screen is also less obvious this way.

• You can barely make out the engraving.

• The Universal Dock box is larger than the actual iPod box.

• Like, apparently, every new iPod starting with the shuffle, the headphones cord has a sizer for where it splits into left and right cords. Handy.

• Speaking of the iPod box, the number of pack-ins are drastically lower. I remember being pissed when my 15GB 3G didn’t come with a Dock. This one, in comparison, also lacked a remote (and a remote port as well, though) and a charger.

• The carrying case bag that comes bundled is way better than the flimsy black string bag I got with mine two years ago, even if I agree that there’s a “bad summer camp project” feel to it.

• I love high pixel pitch displays. The text isn’t as crisp as you’d like (everything looks ‘bold’, but Myriad’s fairly bold by default) but it’s certainly more legible.

• I love insanely bright displays.

• This display would hold a 10-band graphical EQ and user-saved presets just fine. What’s the holdup, Apple?

In just over a month, what a large part of the world calls ‘Christmas’ will happen, but what I celebrate is not Christmas. The word Christmas is, if you look at it, very Christianity-centered - Christmas. (Quite a lot of people have begun to abbreviate this word as X-mas, perhaps to get away from the religious meaning of the word.) Jul, traditionally, is the scandinavian (pan norwegian/swedish/danish) word for either of Christmas and Yule, and Yule is a religious celebration of the winter solstice by some pagans. Neither of these is what I celebrate either. I’m not christian, nor am I a pagan; both imply believing in that one or more gods exist, that one created us and that we should worship them and model our lives around them and their ideas because of that.

No, what I celebrate is what I call Jul.

Jul in my meaning is very simple. Around the 21st and 22nd of December is for the Northern hemisphere the darkest time of the year. If you’re anywhere near the polar circle, it’s probably fucking cold, too. All things considered you would probably feel fairly miserable sleeping outside at this time. If we go back a few thousand years, all we did was sleep outside at this time. There wasn’t any light and heat unless you managed to get a bonfire running, all there was was cold and lesser cold.

Jul is simply the natural optimistic thing to do. Celebrate that we’ve come this far, the progression of us as a species and that we can choose when we want to get cold and when not to. Get together with your family and your friends. Eat and drink. Have a good time. Appreciate the company, support and friendship of other people. And relax in the notion that while the next three months will contain quite a lot of freezing your ass off, you have it quite better than those guys a few thousand years ago, and that there’s only five months until the warmest season of the year begins.

I believe this to be enough on its own to be worthy of participation. I don’t think that you need to be religious or think up other reasons to celebrate this holiday. And I hope that you will join me in celebrating the essence of Jul in about a month’s time.