Newsies
I upgraded to Firefox 3 Beta 2. The biggest things that I notice are the new location bar, the new tab bar, and improved performance.
The new location bar is pretty sweet. I like how I can type in the title of a page and still get results from recent history without having to remember the URL. I also like the new structure for individual result items. The layout of information is better, and I like the highlighting of the matched string.
The new tab bar provides some minimal niceties. The main thing is that the tabs now slide around when you shift to a tab that’s been pushed offscreen, rather than just being pushed back. Visual improvements are always nice.
Improved performance is only noticeable if you’re really looking for that kind of thing. I’m somewhat of a tab whore, and always have tons of tabs open at any one time. And I always have Firefox set to remember my tab session when I close and restore it when I open again. On Firefox 2, if I had a lot of tabs open, Firefox would hang for a couple of seconds while all the tabs were fetched, and then would hang for a good while longer while every page was rendered. I wouldn’t actually be able to browse until at least all the tabs currently visible on the tab bar had finished loading. No such difficulties on Firefox 3, as far as I can tell at least.
I also went along and customized my chrome a little. I have the navigation buttons set to disappear when they’re inactive, and have consolidated all of the menu and navigation widgets into one toolbar. I’ve never really been a fan of the bookmarks toolbar, so I don’t have that showing. I’ve been somewhat considering starting to use it, and bookmarks in general, more, but haven’t really gotten around to working it in to my life. As I said, I tend to just leave tabs open, so my most visited sites are just tabs that I never close.
I was talking with Adam the other day and he was rather amazed at how many tabs I keep open at one time. I, in turn, was amazed that he ever had wont to use two separate windows. I feel like the whole purpose of having tabs is so that you don’t need to have more than one window dedicated to any one application. If I want to group pages together by function or topic, as Adam was doing with his separate windows, I just move the tabs together on the tab bar. Then I can look through the list and find the page I want, and all the pages related to it are right there next to it.
So Adam flew to China. It’s 17 hours to Beijing. That’s a long ass time. I do hope he’s having fun. Beijing is an awesome place. He said he’s going to Hong Kong and some other random Guangdong provinces too. I told him to not be shy of trying strange foods.
Jon’s home, too, now. Had dinner with him, Jeff, and Pat the other day. Had some nice higher-order conversation. I always enjoy that. We played Betrayal and GH3. All in all a good time.
Jon’s apparently staying in Rhode Island over the summer to do some geo-chem research. We all may cobble together some money for an air-trip over to visit.
I’m still all conflicted on what I want to do about EAP. On the one hand, I do really want to go and think it would be a great experience for me and a lot of fun at the same time. On the other hand, I really want to use junior year to take more of my upper division classes so I can get more experience in the field and be ready to start a senior thesis come senior year. Of course, there’s also all the networking I’d miss by taking the year out and not taking any linguistics courses at all. I’ve almost set myself on not going, but I’m still a little unsure.
Grades are in. Finally. Got A’s across the board. I missed 4 points in Logic. 3 of those were on the second invalidity problem, which was the one that I totally guessed on, and the last 1 was on a symbolization that I probably botched a little with some binding or whatever. Ah well, at least I’m done with that class forever. Maybe I could be a tutor for it next year. I’ll have to ask Carey about that.
I rewired the house’s wireless network so now I can finally connect all my devices. Apparently, Dad had set up some MAC address filtering on the old router but had subsequently lost the password to the router’s control panel, so we couldn’t add any new addresses to the allow list. Dad wanted to upgrade to 802.11g anyway, so we just got a new router and reconnected everything.
It was actually a lot more complicated than it should have been because Dad had also forgotten the password for the DSL connection, so we couldn’t configure the router to dial in properly. I spent probably a good half hour on the line with a tech support operator at SBC resetting the password. When that free municipal wireless comes through, I’m going to be so happy.
Bought a dock for the Zune. Now I do my syncing wirelessly and charge with the dock. It’s very convenient and strangely satisfying.
Ordered a book on C#/.NET 3.5 and a book on ASP.NET from Amazon. I’m waiting for the books on WPF to come out so I can order those too.
Getting really into .NET. I’m really interested in Silverlight, because I feel like it offers the same benefits as Flash, but builds on a more generalized toolset (WPF). JavaFX also looks interesting, but I don’t really want to learn a new programming paradigm. Silverlight lets you extend skills you already have in making Avalon applications to making web applications, or vice versa. I just wish it would work on Linux.
Also been buying a lot of music on Zune Marketplace and on Amazon. Still not convinced that subscription music is worth it. Don’t think I ever will be.
