Indeed, there is much to discuss.

Firstly, I would like to announce the release of Mozilla Firefox v1.0. Nineteen months of development, more than a dozen pre-release test builds, and millions of testers worldwide have culminated in the best web browser that’s available on the Inetrnet today. It has built-in popup blocking, it doesn’t fall prey to spyware, it doesn’t put your computer at a security risk, it has tabbed browsing, and best of all, it’s small, fast, and free. Weighing in at under 5 MB for the Window sversion, it will only take you 15 or 20 minutes to download in the background. There are dozens of extensions and themes to change the look of your browser and add additional functionality, too. Best of all, it will automatically import your Favorites, History, even your Cookies from Internet Explorer so that you won’t be starting over and forced to move a lot of data over.

So really, what do you have to lose by trying it? In the seven days since its formal release, close to four million people have already downloaded it. For the first time since the browser wars were won six years ago, Internet Explorer’s market share has dropped. Not just one tick, but month after month, literally millions of people are switching from IE to Firefox. I’ve been using it since close to the very beginning, and I wouldn’t use anything else to browse the web. I’ve found that I can’t live without tabbed browsing, the Find bar that doesn’t block any text on the page you’re searching, and the built-in search box that allows you to search Google, Amazon.com, Dictionary.com, IMDB, and hundreds of other websites, whatever you want to add. I can’t stress enough how much I like this web browser, and while it won’t change your life, it’ll change the way you browse the web. It’s faster, it’s smaller, it’s safer, and more importantly, it has way more features than Internet Explorer. I highly recommend you check it out.

Take a look at the product information at the Mozilla Foundation website. You can download it from the same page, too. You won’t regret it, I promise.

So, what else? I’ve been reading about this marine in Iraq who shot and killed the unarmed, injured insurgent in a Fallujah mosque, and the only problem that people seem to have with it is that it was captured on tape and thus recorded for everyone to see. Now, I’m not exactly naive when it comes to the horrors of war, and though I’ve never seen them myself I’ve read enough accounts of previous wars to know some of the kinds of things that go on. The key is to never underestimate the depravity of humans. Regardless, I’m a little frightened and sickened to see all the “Rah rah! Go get ‘em boys!” floating around the Internet. Because we’re involved in hostilities against an enemy who has chosen to use unorthodox tactics, it’s OK for soldiers to summarily execute injured and unarmed combatants? A guy reaches for his wallet in New York and police shot him dozens of times and there violent demonstrations and riots for days. What would it have been if he were already injured and lying on the ground and the police did the same thing? I think that the LA riots would have been put to shame if that had happened.

Regardless, I’d like to formally express my disgust at the soldier who took that action. I’ll never be able to be in his place and feel what he did to take that action, but above all I know that our forces are supposed to follow a code of conduct when fighting.

Mostly, I know what the reaction would be in this country if the tables were turned and a network caught the summary execution of a wounded, unarmed Marine by an Iraqi. Our collective blood would be boiling, and I don’t understand how so few people can see the hypocrisy of the situation. It’s OK for a Marine to do it to an Iraqi, but not OK for an Iraqi to do it to a Marine? I call bullshit on that.

This is a different kind of war, yes. It’s entirely guerilla warfare, and soldiers don’t know who the enemy is until they’re getting shot at. I can’t possibly understand what the life of a Marine in Fallujah is like, but there are reasons we have rules of engagement. They exist for us as much as the enemy. Am I critical of the military on the whole for this? Of course not. But I am willing to single out this one Marine, point my finger at him, and say “War criminal.” From now on, the Iraqi insurgents and terrorists-in-training around the world know that American forces will kill unarmed, injured people. Way to go, asshat.

Yeah, so that’s been bugging me for the last day or so since I first read about it, and I needed to vent.

This past weekend was a lot of fun, though I won’t bore you with the details. I believe I can sum it all up by saying that there was a lot of rich food involved, starting with the slice of mocha-fudge cheesecake I had on Friday night at Rimsky-Korsakoffee House and ending with the wedge of brie with roasted garlic I polished off with a glass of port Sunday night. I felt so upper-crust eating that. There I was, eating my brie with fresh roasted garlic on rosemary crackers, drinking a glass of port, and watching “Married With Children.” OK, so that last part wasn’t so upper-crust. I guess I could have switched to “Frasier” and been able to pull it off, perhaps.

So that about brings me full cricle and up to today, where I sit at work almost complete with phase I of this big project. Since I’m the only tester on this software, you’d think it would be slow going (which it really is, but only due to the speed of my computer), but as it turns out after listening in on a conference call on Friday, we’re way ahead of the competition doing the other half of the project. They have a bunch of programmers and a couple of testers working on the Palm sync side of the project, and we’ve got one programmer (not fully dedicated to the project) and myself doing the PocketPC side of things. As I sat and listened to the call, I kept hearing them listing off their bugs knowing that our side of that worked perfectly the first time. I guess that affords me a little latitude in the length of time I spend testing, but I get to fritter that away every time I have to wait five minutes for my computer to respond after opening the software, or waiting another three for the sync to start.

I’m told I’m getting a new computer here at work this week. Huzzah!

I had a fantastic idea for my website a couple of weeks ago, and I’m solidly in the middle of planning out something so drastic, so mindblowing that not only would it make my site into something truely unique in the world of personal blogs, but it would increase my traffic dramatically. I need the help of at least two other people to do it, though, and once I have a better idea of planning, maybe even cost, I’m going to spring it on them. You don’t know who you are yet, but trust me, you will soon enough.

Tonight I’m headed over to my Dad’s for dinner, though I can only marvel at the irony of the package I’ve been waiting to arrive for nearly three weeks being delivered today of all days. I haven’t been to his house for dinner since I made pizza awhile back, and we pick tonight out of the air, and of course, my package is waiting for me in the office that closes long before I’ll get home. Contained within the carboard shell will be the power cable and sync cable for the ultraportable laptop-esque device I wrote about recently that I brought home from work. I’ve been waiting since the end of October for it, and it arrives TODAY, of all days. I mean, of course I’m still going to dinner, but I’ve been wanting to play around with that thing since, oh, May. Blast! Oh yeah, and I was going to do a load of laundry, and I forgot to bring that, too. I only had a single load, but laundry is laundry, I suppose.

I think that about brings us up to speed for the most part. Back to work.

The Republic of Darter
“Live free, or don’t.

UN Category: Scandinavian Liberal Paradise
Civil Rights: Excellent
Economy: Reasonable
Political Freedoms: Average

The Republic of Darter is a small, socially progressive nation, renowned for its barren, inhospitable landscape. Its compassionate population of 16 million enjoy extensive civil rights and enjoy a level social equality free of the usual accompanying government corruption.

The large government is mainly concerned with Social Welfare, although Education and Healthcare are secondary priorities. The average income tax rate is 30%, but much higher for the wealthy. A robust private sector is led by the Information Technology, Retail, and Furniture Restoration industries.

Scientists regularly clone human beings for research purposes, meat-eating is frowned upon, same-sex marriages are increasingly common, and the tenet of free speech is held dear. Crime is relatively low. Darter’s national animal is the muskrat, which is also the nation’s favorite main course, and its currency is the dollar.

Darter is ranked 3224th in the region and 51,210th in the world for Largest Basket Weaving Sector.

—

See? I always knew I’d be a good leader. Just look at what I’ve managed to do for my own country. The description is generated by the game as are the products that drive my industry, but the description is based on the decisions I’ve made since creation of the country.

If you want a NationState of your own, just head over to http://www.nationstates.net and create your own government. It’s a two-step process that will take about five minutes, and you only have to check on your country once a week if you so desire, though I have mine set to give me two issues a day.

For those of you who have switched to Firefox from another web browser (most likely Internet Explorer), the Boston Globe is gathering opinions from recent converts for a forthcoming article to coincide with the upcoming v1.0 release next week. If you want to drop them a line and tell them your experiences with Firefox, you can go to http://www.boston.com/business/globe/globe_article/ and drop them a line. Don’t worry, I’ll be pushing my readers to download the official v1.0 release of Firefox soon enough, but if you’ve switched already you can give them your opinion, positive or negative. I’ve been using it for the last two years, since back when it was only v0.4 and called Phoenix instead of Firefox, and I’ve never had any serious complaints about it, at least none that haven’t gotten fixed fairly quickly.

Another week, rolling to a close. I met with my boss today about the candidates that came in this week for interviews, and it looks like we’re going to hire not one, but two new people. One of them has the organizational skills that he needs for long-term planning and the other has the nuts and bolts skills, but neither is pefect for what we need. That, of course, may change, but it was his initital impression. Each of them is about 85% of what he needs, so he figures he might as well hire them both on. He also laid out the plans for the next six months or so, and he has some pretty ambitious things planned. One of them is so super-secret that he told me I couldn’t even tell my coworkers what the whole deal was, so I probably shouldn’t say anything here, either. I don’t see the harm, but still…

That super-secret one, though, may delay our move to a new office by a month or two if it goes down the way it’s looking like now. The customer’s original plan was to have the project done by next May 1, but my boss thinks that to do it that quickly, he’ll have to charge about four or five times our regular rate, which for them would be a drop in the bucket but we’d really be pushing the limits as far as work goes. It’s somewhat of a daunting project to me, and it would require outside assitance to write special code, and in the amount of time required that wouldn’t come cheap. My boss is meeting with the client soon, though, and he’s going to offer a year instead of six months, which would cut his bid by almost a third. He figures that the higher-ups will realize that the project is a bit more complicated than the manager had originally thought, too.

The ambitious project (that’s not secret, but I won’t go into details about here) is for a tool that doesn’t exist in the industry, and the people he’s talked about it with so far have said “Now why didn’t someone think of that sooner?” Probably even going to be one of our main selling points for the next few years, and he’s seeking outside programmers for this one, too. It’s pretty simple, though, and he anticipates that it might be as little as a month from project inception to project completion, testing included. And we’re eight days in already.

In short, even with two new people coming on I’m going to have my hands full for awhile. Good to know.

My Friday is looking like I’ll head home at 4 PM, go jogging at 5 PM, eat dinner and watch some TV, and sweet, sweet slumber until tomorrow morning. Sounds like a great plan to me.

My weekend went just about as expected, and I ended up being fairly inactive through most of the time. Then again, that *had* been my prediction.

Friday found me feeling sick after eating a whole loaf of bread by myself, though in all honesty the loaf wasn’t that big. I’ve picked up a few loaves of this particular type on more than one occasions in the recent past, and each time I’ve enjoyed it immensely. This was the first time, however, that I felt sick afterwards. Too much grain in one sitting, methinks.

Saturday took me to the gas station with fears of having to push my car the last distance since my gas light had been on for far too long. I seem to run it all the way down to the wire before I fill it up, which is a bad habit to get into, but what can I say? I like to see how far I can go on a tank of gas. With regular driving, it seems to be about 250 miles. All highway (like on a roadtrip that I won’t take any time soon) will probably run a bit higher. I was a bit confused, however, when I only filled up for eight and a half gallons, but according to various sites I’ve been to, my 2001 Ford Escort ZX2 has a twelve gallon tank. Why had the gas light been on for the last day, then? An odd question for another day, perhaps, but I’m not willing to run the tank dry just for a test. Not without some sort of contraption like they used in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off to run back the odometer, but the risk of catastrophic failure and my car crashing out into the backyard increases dramatically in that situation. Oh yeah, I also returned a couple of bags of cans and bottles, bought myself a sandwich, and had a nice afternoon watching TV. I tried playing some City of Heroes, but I just couldn’t find a group to play with, and ended up largely avoiding the whole situation and only playing for short amounts of time.

Sunday found me more focused on the game and catching up on some TV sitting in my TiVo buffer. I played off and on all day long, but found myself stuck in a mission that I couldn’t drop out of in the evening. For Halloween, the game developers had introduced some new Halloween-themed villains (including a giant pumpkin-headed creature that caused many a death in Paragon City) and the ability to trick or treat. Trick or treating was easy, and once every minute you could click on any door in the game you you would either be rewarded with a treat or a trick. Treats took the form of bonuses called inspirations that you pick up in battle anyway or a rock. I didn’t understand the reference to the rock at first, but my childhood reminded me that Charlie Brown always complained he got rocks when trick or treating. If you got a trick, the door opened and monsters came out. Not a bad deal, really.

But I ended up starting a task force in the game, and conveniently forgetting how long a task force takes, close to five hours later we were done. I would have quit sooner, but if you quit a task force, you have to completely restart it and can’t rejoin. I wasn’t about to give up the hours and hours of gameplay, frankly, so I ended up playing until about 7 PM before I got dinner.

I had read about a promotion that the Mexican restaurant Chipoltle was doing, where if you buy a burrito on Halloween you get a free burrito on election day if you take in your receipt. So I bought my burrito on Halloween, and I’ll get a free dinner tonight. Actually, since I have a filled frequent purchase card for Big Town Hero, I’ll get a free lunch, too. For my quick Mexican food, I normally stick to Baja Fresh, but the Chipoltle place opened up down the street a couple of months ago and I’ve avoided it thus far. I have a few objections to my eating there, but it’s mostly for personal reasons. There are restaurants I tend to avoid for various reasons–mostly dietary–but I have no such qualms about Chipoltle. I just don’t want to eat there. Free food is hard to pass up, no matter my personal objections.

We only got one knock on the door Sunday night, which meant I was snacking on candy for most of the evening I easily could have done without. I placed the rest of the bowl of candy bars and Tootsie rolls next to my sister’s purse in the hopes that she would get the message and take the rest of the bowl to work with her for everyone to enjoy, but alas, she decided to leave them at home to torture me. That’s the LAST thing I need at the moment: candy. I’ve been largely watching what I eat, trying to avoid fried foods and alcoholic beverages, but without regular exercise it’s sort of a losing battle. What can I say, though? When the end of the day comes, I’m too tired to do anything else. Sitting in a chair all day is tiring work. I went jogging yesterday after work and it felt great, then I had a nice healthy dinner and didn’t have a single piece of candy. Why can’t I eat like that all the time? Because it’s boring. So for lunch today I think I’m going to go get a roast beef au jus sandwich at Big Town Hero, and tonight a chicken fajita burrito at Chipoltle.

We’re finally hiring someone new here at work to fill a vacant position, and so interestingly enough, I’m helping to conduct the interviews. I’ve never really done that before, and while I’m not directly interviewing people I’m administering some of the tests that we give for the position that we’re hiring for. In other words, I don’t have to make any direct judgements, but it’s a new situation nonetheless.

As if anyone could possibly forget, today is Election Day. I voted last week since Oregon is entirely absentee, so I hope that for those of you who actually have to go to a polling station you find the time to cast your vote. Personally, I’m just glad that this is all coming to a rest. Election years give me the heebie jeebies, and I’m tired of the focus on utterly insignificant and irrelevent issues. No matter who wins the election tonight (or a month from now, if it goes back to the courts again, though I’m hoping that the courts have better sense than they did four years ago), I’ll be happy to see all this at an end and whoever is elected can actually do some work instead of constantly campaigning. I offer no 11th hour predictions here on my website, but those of you who have spoken to me in the last few months know that I made a prediction in June that I stand by. I’m a realist, if nothing else. Should be an interesting evening, though I don’t plan on watching election results. I can just as easily get them online, and that way I don’t get erroneous news reports, mindless and inane commentary, and filler material.

I shaved my goatee off. Again. I don’t really know why, I just had the idea and did it. Looks interesting, and I figure I’ll hold on to this look for awhile.

That’s about all I can think of. Happy Election Day, and I’m glad this is all coming to an end.