Every day I use Firefox, I find something else about it that just kicks ass. It’s mostly little stuff, but quickly improves the way I’ve been doing things for years.

Some people have switched for “religious” (Micro$oft sux!) reasons. Other people have made their lists of why to switch. I’ve just found it to be a better hammer, so I guess this is my list of why you should switch:

– Favorite icons (the little icons for websites) show up everywhere. It’s mostly eye candy, but it makes it easy to identify bookmarks.

– The Live HTTP headers extension makes debugging http easy. I used to use a program called naviscope, but it slowed down browsing because it tuns as a proxy server. It also crashed a lot.

– View source is syntax highlighed and has good searching abilities. IE uses notepad.

– The javascript console allows you to jump directly to the line an error occurs on. That’s a huge timesaver.

– Tabbrowser extensions makes tabbed browsing nearly perfect. You can save a group of tabs so when you start up your browser all the pages you’ve loaded come back.

– I haven’t been able to make it crash yet.

Overall I’ve been very impressed with this browser that isn’t even a 1.0 yet.

Last weekend I was literally wading around in poison oak. In shorts. There were huge walls of it in Sierra Azul. Once it started getting scary, I liberally applied TechNu and then again later in the day. Once I got home I took a good shower.

Tuesday (poison oak day) came and went and I’ve only had a few itches and no visible rashes. Either this stuff really works or my body has just given up reacting to poison oak.

More good news is that I’ve finally figured out how to identify the nasty stuff. Hopefully I’ll never go through this again.

Lately, I’ve been writing a lot of blog entries (mostly on my Treo) and I’ve got ideas for a bunch more, but I haven’t had time to edit and post them.

I think that plague that’s been circulating around work has finally caught up with me, so I’m vegging out at home and let’s see if I can’t get some of those up there…

Man, I love Amazon. It’s not that the site is easy to use, loads quickly, has great wishlist functionality, and ships virtually everything for free. It’s that you can save a heck of a lot of money if you do it right.

Last week, I decided that I no longer wanted to be the last kid on my cube block to have an iPod. I managed to control myself though and not buy one immediately. I looked around a bit for the best price (from someplace legitimate) and found that Amazon would be cheapest, at least for me.

Checking out dealmac, Amazon regularly has sales on the 40GB iPod for $463 or $36 off. I figured if I waited long enough, they would have another one. Sure enough, today they did and I snatched one up.

But I didn’t pay $463. I paid $362 after cashing in gift certificate from my last quarter’s referral credit and a certificate from my Amazon.com visa. Of course, this purchase will count towards credit for those same rebates, so I’ll get a $30 referral credit (to myself!) and another $12 back eventually for using their credit card.

Net cost: $362.69 or 27% off with no shipping and no tax. Not bad at all. And while I chose the free super saver shipping, they appear to be preparing it to ship right now. Sometimes I’ve even seen packages arrive from them before I got the shipping notice, literally overnight. Can you tell I’m excited? 🙂

40GB is a lot of music. Now I just need to figure out where to get cheap iPod accessories…

—

UPDATE: I miscalculated the referral credit and my actual cost was $362! Woo hoo! It arrived today and iTunes is almost done copying 6,000 songs onto it. Yum.

In 1997, Bill Gates made a visit to Barnes and Noble. He wasn’t buying books, he was visiting with the guys who ran BarnesAndNoble.com. After that meeting, they switched from their Solaris-based platform to Microsoft servers.

I was working at Firefly in 1997 and Barnes and Noble was our current big customer. To keep our big customer happy, we had to port our software to Windows NT to make it work for BarnesAndNoble. To get that done, I needed to get a PC and soon one showed up on my desk at work, previously only inhabited by a Mac and a terminal window.

So I guess I can claim that Bill Gates directly caused my switch to a PC for my primary work machine. I resisted it at first, but after a while I started to see that some of the apps were better, notably Internet Explorer. It was faster and crashed less than Netscape. Later when I went to work at Microsoft, it was a no-brainer – everything was Microsoft software. I swore I would never use another crappy Netscape product again.

That’s the way it remained for quite a few years – until very recently. Outlook, then Outlook Express wasn’t cutting it for my email needs, so I went looking and found Mozilla (nee Netscape) Thunderbird, which is a pretty good email client. That’s been working out pretty well for the last few months.

Even more recently, the Mozilla Foundation released Firefox 0.8, the latest rename and version of their open-source next-generation browser. I gave it a try and quickly found it very well done. I began to use it more and more until I decided to make the switch – I made it my default browser.

There’s a few issues with some websites (mostly ones I wrote!), but for the most part, it’s become my preferred PC browser at home and at work. Tabbed browsing is great, it’s fast, and compatible. Search integration is cool. Type-ahead find is amazing.

The intial versions of Mozilla (and Netscape 6 and 7) were horrible, slow, bloated apps that crashed often. Firefox and Thunderbird seem to be a great step in a new direction and I think they’re finally ready for primetime.

Video on the net is always iffy. When I’m in interactive mode, stopping to sit and watch a tiny video is hardly worth it. Lately I’ve found a few which are worth the effort:

Sacramento TV News Report on Geocaching
If you still don’t get Geocaching (or know someone else who doesn’t), this video is a good intro.

Snow Tow
You know what’s going to to happen, it’s just a matter of when.

Hey Ya!, Charlie Brown
This is better than both the real Hey Ya! video and the classic Peanuts special. Unfortunately it’s been taken down for copyright reasons, but it’s widely available on Kazaa or other file-sharing networks. For Macs, Acquisition rocks.

I love working at Yahoo!, but it seems lately that Yahoo! is creating more and more reasons not to do work while I’m here.

There’s the free, very nice gym for one. Personally I’ve never stepped foot in it, but lots of people do use it. They offer classes in yoga, aerobics, volleyball tournaments, and whatever. There’s the bocce courts, sand volleyball, and the bay trail for other recreation. I’m glad they want to keep us in shape. I bet it keeps the health care costs down.

Of course we have a subsidized cafeteria. Soda and gourmet coffee are free, so there’s no reason to get in your car and drive down the street to a local sandwich shop or Starbucks. On the way in, stop by and use the no-fee ATM, or pick up a birthday card in the Yahoo Mini-Mart.

Don’t bother going home to wait for the UPS guy. Have your packages shipped here and they’ll magically show up at your desk. Need to ship a package? You can do that here too.

You can go to school here. You can take classes in everything from Flash programming to managing your priorites to buying and selling a house.

Twice a month, a Winnebago with a full-service hair salon shows up and you can get your haircut right here at work. There’s also a dental winnebago that visits every so often. I’ve heard horror stories about that one. Yesterday “The Bike Doctor” showed up and provided bike-fixing services. On most Fridays, you can drop your car off to be washed while you work.

Notary? Check. Travel Agent for personal trips? Check. Foosball, Golf, Hockey, Rock Climbing, Running, Scrapbooking, Softball, Ultimate Frisbee, Volleyball or Mountaineering Clubs? Check. Discounts at HP, Apple, Sprint PCS, Ford, Office Depot? Check. Dry cleaning service? Check.

I guess the rationale here is that by giving us fewer excuses to leave campus, we’ll spent time more time doing work. Theoretically you could live here. You have food, shelter, showers, recreation, and a fat internet connection. You could even clothe yourself in Yahoo! from the Yahoo! Store. A couple of years ago, the employee Christmas gift was a nice sleeping bag so you could sleep (more comfortably) under your desk.

But I can’t help think that some people might spend more time doing this other stuff rather than working.

“That project plan I owe you? No sorry, I won’t have it today. I’ve got a financial knowledge class at 10, yoga at 11, lunch at 12, then I need to drop off my dry cleaning, get the car washed, rent some DVDs and do some shopping. How does next week sound?”

It’s something like this phenomenon I noticed in college which I refer to as procrastination by proxy. Hey, Steve and John are out playing frisbee and not stidying, so I can too. Julie’s chatting in the hall and she aces every test. I’ll go chat too. Of course you could do this all day long because at any one time, someone is always not going to be working/studying.

The latest reason to live at work is this DVD Station service, where you can rent DVDs from the Yahoo Kwik-E-Mart. The dumb part is that you have to browse and rent the movies from little kiosks next to mart, not browse from the comfort of your desk. I’ll keep my Netflix, thank you very much.

As long as they’re going to try to keep me here, I’m holding out for the opening of a Home Depot next to the parking lot. That would be really convenient for me and prevent me from running errands there at lunchtime. Then again, what could I possibly need at Home Depot if my “home” is Yahoo!?

Dear Fry’s Electronics,

I would like my $3.24 and 45 minutes back.

Yesterday I went to your store in Sunnyvale. All I wanted was a male-to-male DIN-9 null modem adapter so I can connect my GPS to my Treo. That’s all. Since you’re THE nerd haven, carrying everything from resistors to deodorant, I thought of nowhere else to go but to your store. I looked on the web for it, but it’s such a small thing that I’d get killed on shipping and I was drawn by the allure of having it RIGHT NOW.

I got there and wandered through the aisles, looking for such a device. First I found DIN-9 ends. No, I don’t really want to make my own cable. In a different section, I found DIN-9 ends with the wiring and cases. Close, but not what I want.

About 20 minutes later someone detected my aimless wander and asked if I needed help. I told him what I wanted and he directed me to some older guy who seemed to know what he was talking about. He immediately told me they he only had RS-232 null modem adapaters, even though he admitted that DIN-9 is what most people wanted.

I stared and stared at the wall of connectors and gender changers. Not wanting to go home empty handed, I got a DIN-9 gender changer, even though I was pretty sure that wouldn’t work.

On the way out, I remembered a needed a book for work, the Apache Cookbook, a fairly common and popular O’Reilly book. You didn’t have it. You did have a completely obsolete book on Object-Oriented Programming for the Macintosh that I bought over 10 years ago though. Great. Thanks for keeping that stocked.

I walked out the door with $3.24 less in my pocket and 45 minutes of my life lost. I’d like those back please.

I don’t want to go return the item as my time is more valuable than the 30 minutes I’d have to spend waiting in line to return something to your store. I accept Visa, Checks, PayPal, Yahoo Paydirect, cash, and baseball cards – basically anything but store credit.

As for the time, I’ll accept in in the form of productive work OR 45 minutes of extra sleep on a Monday morning. Your choice.

As for the gender changer, I’m going to keep it. I’ll throw it in one of my boxes of miscellaneous cables and electronics in the garage. It’ll sit with the 2400 baud modems, 100-ft serial cable, AppleTalk dongles, fat ethernet adapters, and other stuff that I’m sure I’ll need at some point. Who knows, maybe someday it will save me a trip to your store.

Sincerely,

Jeff Boulter

I’ve visited 52% of the U.S. States. I counted ones I’ve driven through, but not ones I’ve flown through.

create your own visited states map

I think that if I wasn’t married, I’d starve.

The other day I decided to have some fish sticks. Fish sticks. Just stick em in the oven for a few minutes and eat them. I put them in, then came back later to find them rock-hard. Overcooked. The french fries I made with them were undercooked. I ate them anyway.

This afternoon I had soup. Soup is ok. I can cook soup. You can’t undercook or overcook soup. It’s either cold or you have to let it cool. No problem.

Tonight I decided to finish off the fish sticks. Having learned my lesson, I cooked them alone, without the french fries. I read the directions and put them in the oven for a little less time than the box suggested. I even set a timer.

The timer went off and I noticed a funny smell. Smoke filled the kitchen. The fish sticks were completely charred. At this point I considered going to Wendy’s. No, I can cook something. Searching through the cabinet again, I found some Rice-A-Roni that Anne doesn’t want to eat. Yes, I can cook rice. ($191.00??)

Browned the rice OK, then went to add the “special beef seasoning” (i.e. miscellaneous animal parts ground into powder) and the bag exploded, most of it on the floor and on my clothes. It seemed to cook ok after that. It was at least edible. Lacking in flavor for obvious reasons, but edible.

Next time, it’s Wendy’s or soup. Or maybe I should just go pick up a sack of Bachelor Chow. I wonder if they make Wife-is-Out-of-Town chow?