I have been using Firefox by Mozilla for a week now, and really love it. It’s fast on my pokey 266mhz Windows98 laptop, and amazing on my 2.4ghz XPpro machine. It has most of the features of Opera, such as popup blocking and tabbed layout, but it seems more lightweight and streamlined. I don’t need Opera’s chat feature or mail client, and if I can save some vertical space by not dealing with the ads, that is a bonus too. (especially on my 800×600 laptop)

I am also now using Thunderbird by Mozilla for my email client. My server is configured as IMAP4, so I can pretty much use any client I want and get the same experience. (Except perhaps Opera, which seems to have a couple issues with IMAP at the moment) Like it’s counterpart, Firefox, Thunderbird is a stripped-down app, and runs fast and doesn’t have all the bells and whistles. Just simple, clean design, and great performance. I used to use Mozilla 1.7 for email, which is very similar, but figured I’d get rid of the Mozilla “suite” and do Firefox/Thunderbird instead. Mozilla has a chat feature, I think, and html composer which I will never use, so why install it?

Bay and I have been enjoying Teen Titans on Cartoon Network a bunch lately. It’s really fun. The animation is cool, the characters are neat, and the theme song is by Puffy. 🙂 I bought Bay a couple Teen Titans toys for his birthday. I hope he likes them! His favorite Titan is Beast Boy.

The headline at CNN.com:

BREAKING NEWS

Federal Reserve boosts key short-term interest rate by one-quarter percentage point, its first rate increase in four years. Details soon.

It may just be me, but I think the red, in-your-face banner should be reserved for events like 6.7-scale earthquakes or planes flying into landmarks.

Finished “The Mysterious Affair at Styles” last night at about 1:30am. What a great book. Next is the Ackroyd book…

It’s 9am, and someone just cooked something in the kitchen here at work, and it smells sooooo good. I hate when they do that! Now I’m starving, and my cup of coffee is barely sufficing.

At least win one of these games up in SF! It’s bad enough that you lost first place to the Giants, but a four-game sweep? Please don’t let it happen…

I am a huge fan of eBooks. I own a Dell Axim X5 PocketPC, and my favorite use for it is for reading eBooks. For those that aren’t familiar with them, eBooks are digital versions of a normal books. You can buy eBooks from lots of online retailers, such as eBooks.com or Amazon. Not only are novels digitized, but you can find magazines, ezines, and reference books in digital format. There are still many books that are not available digitally, but the number is growing.

Before I tried it, I was a bit skeptical about reading an eBook on a PocketPC. I had looked at a couple eBooks on CRT monitors, and I couldn’t see myself looking at a monitor screen to read a book. It just didn’t seem right. I guess it felt like overkill to have a computer and monitor running, using up all that power, when you could just open a paperback, not use any power, and not feel like you are ruining your eyes by being so close to a “tv screen”.

So, I finished “Murder on the Orient Express” the other night. It turns out that I was really really near the end of the ebook (probably about half a normap paper page) when I put it down for the night. The next day I was at the bookstore and perusing the book, trying to skim quickly and find out how far I really was. I then realized I was close to the end, but not exactly sure how close. Later that night, I opened the ebook, read about three “pages” and was done. 🙂 With the desktop version of MS Reader, you can see the page number and total pages. With the PocketPC version, you don’t see the total pages, which is why I didn’t know.

At any rate, I thought it was a terrific book, and have now started on the first Poirot mystery, “The Mysterious Affair at Styles”. I am going to try to read the books in the order that Agatha Christie wrote them. Unfortunately, some of them are not available in digital format, so I may skip a couple. Next on the list will be “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd”, which I am eager to read because of a few recommendations from friends.

… but they sure seem to love me. A couple days ago we found these little ant-like bugs in Bay’s bathroom. For some reason they were going into Bay’s plastic backpack that was hanging on the wall. It’s a mystery, because there wasn’t anything in there that they would be interested in, just toy cars. Anyways, later that night I sprayed some bug poison around the window and along the seams of the walls and cabinets. The next morning, they had disappeared. Or so it seemed…

My workmate sent a few audio clips around. Here’s my favorite one, from the movie “Office Space”.

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