The Good Life... a weblog about life, technology, and the Opera Web browser

I see a difference between ring shopping and ring browsing. Ring shopping is when you're in the market for the ring; you're actually out there trying to find one to buy. Ring browsing is just seeing what's on the market. I want to pick out the ring for my fiancée without her being there. That's the ring shopping. But I need to have a good idea what she wants. That's the ring browsing. That said....

The week before I left for Oslo, Rebekah and I went ring browsing. We went to the mall and walked from jewelry store to jewelry store to see what's actually out there. I don't know a thing about diamonds, but that's what they seem most interested in selling. It's not about the setting or the band, it's about the diamond. Well, we were really more interested in the setting and the band. And no one wanted to tell us about those. They just wanted to show us diamonds. I understand that diamonds are really the focal point and the main cost of a ring, but still, sell us what we're there to buy. If we're more interested in the setting, sell us a setting.

So, Rebekah looked around and she put rings on her finger to try to get an idea what she liked. And I think she did. The sales persons asked me if I liked the diamond and I did my best to remain out of the way and let Rebekah do the deciding. After all, she's going to be wearing the ring, not me. I'm getting a picture of the ring that I'd like to get her, when that time comes. But more ring browsing will be required when I get back in the country.

I don't want people to get the wrong impression here. We're not getting engaged tomorrow. We're not getting engaged next month. We're not getting engaged the month after that. It is something we're talking and thinking about.

It seems so strange to be at this point in my life. I don't know how I got here. I mean, I do, but it still surprises me. Last January, if you had told me I'd be engaged--especially if you told me I'd be engaged to Rebekah--, I would have needed a huge amount of convincing. But here I am. And I'm ecstatic about it. I smile just thinking about it. And I know she's thrilled too. It's a wonderful, unexpected blessing and is helping me to look to the future for setting goals. I like how the future looks.

I sat down with one of the Mac Quality Assurance guys last week to see how Opera 7 for Mac is shaping up. And it is. There's a lot of work to do still, but it looks like it's really coming together. I'm not a Mac user, so I don't know the OS conventions. But it looks like it belongs there. And I know that's what our users want. Our developers have been working hard on trying to get that part right and I think they're doing a great job.

For instance, the reason I visited the Mac team was to talk about ways to improve the preferences across the desktop platforms. Mac applications seem to have the preference page selector at the top (released versions of Opera 7 for Windows and Linux have it on the right) with a minimal amount of options available on each page. Because Opera is so customizable, it's a challenge to find a good balance. IE has a preferences dialog similar to Opera, but (I think) Safari has the more typical Mac preference dialog. In any case, that's the kind of thing that Mac developers are thinking about. They don't want users to get just the Opera experience. They want users to get the Opera experience on a Mac. I hope we still have enough Opera enthusiasts left on the Mac to give it a chance when the time comes.