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Comments

You know, I really appreciate comments on any thing I write about here. But what I don't really care for or care about is when 'someone' leaves a comment telling me how great they think my blog is but then going off on their own little tangent and saying something completely unrelated to the entry. The idea behind comments is that people comment on what's been said. Not tell me about something that has nothing to do with what I was talking about. These comments will be deleted. If it keeps up, I'll just have to make comments for registered users only. So please stop with the spam.

Firefox 1.5 beta 1

Mozilla Firefox is now testing it's 1.5 release. Beta 1 can be downloaded from the Firefox Nightly Builds section of their site, or you can just Click here. This version feels very much like the older versions, and if you ever downloaded the Deer Park Alpha's, you won't see much different here, but there are quite a few things under the hood to make this release more stable and easier to use.

You will definitely notice a new settings page. It's cleaned up and very well organized. In the new settings page, you will also find a much better way to use plugins in firefox, gone are the days where you have very little control over what plugin is used for what, you can now tell it what plugin to use for every file extension and change the plugin instead of just turning it off.

Another very small thing I noticed that I really like is that when you open up another browser (I use the address bar on the windows XP toolbar a lot) and you tell firefox to open a new window when external programs request it, no longer does it pop up your existing window when the new one opens. This was an annoying thing about the old firefox. For whatever reason, if you had a browser window minimized and tried to launch another browser, it would pop up that minimized one. Again, this is really small and very insignificant but I really liked it.

There is also a better update system that I have yet to use, but I've heard great things. They added a new 'update' to search for. Now it not only searches for updated extensions, themes and versions of firefox. It will look for new search engines.

The point, folks, is to download the new beta and help crush all the bugs! There ain't many, but it'll take a little time to find them all.

Poker for Relief!

Want to help the Katrina victims and have fun (and make money) at the same time? You definitely want to head over to UltimateBet.com and play! They are holding Katrina Relief tournaments for the next three days (8th, 9th, and 10th) and donating 100% of the house fees for those tournaments to the Red Cross. On top of that, UltimateBet.com and their software company (Excapsa Software) will each be matching $25,000 and donating it as well. ON TOP OF THAT! Phil Hellmuth and Russ Hamilton (Poker Pros) will each be donating $10,000 of their own money. If your already an UltimateBet player, just log on and register for the Katrina Relief tournaments to help. If you aren't a player already, Download the software and register. If you want, you can use my name (dnite) as a referral and you and I both get Bonus Dollars when you deposit money.

What I thought was really amusing, is that about a week ago, I heard The Lakers had scrounged together (as a whole) $100,000 to donate to Katrina. It's kind of funny (and very humiliating to The Lakers) that 2 poker pro's are collectively contributing 1/5th of the money The Laker's are donating. I just found that entertaining. Greedy people piss me off.

What are you still doing here?! GO NOW! See you at the tables!

Help!

Have a blog or website? How would you like to add those nifty 'dog ears' you see on the top right corner to your site? Just add the code below to your template or anywhere between the <body> and </body> tags of your site.

<script type="text/javascript">

</script>

Hydrogen Conversion?

All this talk about Hydrogen cars is in the air, but frankly, hydrogen powered vehicles are still years away. Gas prices will sore high above the $3 a gallon it's at now by that time and I'm sure it will be a welcome addition to our newest automobiles. This company (kinda) has it right. A very good read about hydrogen powering vehicles. They are testing and will offer a hydrogen conversion kit for your car in roughly a year. This will include a solar/wind powered hydrogen generator that will produce the gas you need to fill your tank for almost no cost. Pretty sharp.

The only problem is the slight hypocrisy I found. The entire article talks about cost being a major factor. The say their system is great because when production hydrogen cars come out, they are going to be expensive. And they just go on about other methods of hydrogen powering vehicles is still expensive, but then you get to the products page and see that the conversion kits will set you back $10,000. I believe this is a base system too, so you'll have to add more tanks or whatever else your needs might be. But for some reason, I don't see adding half the purchase price of my car on top and considering it cheap. Ah well, it's still a good read. Check it out.

Donate a buck to the Red Cross for free!

I know we all have lot's dollars to give the the Red Cross, but when it's this easy, you can't help buy donate another one. Click Here and take 15 seconds to donate another dollar to the Red Cross, coursesy of Clorox.

Why Google Talk isn't so great.

A great article has surfaced about the current state of IM and it's possible future. It goes on about how Google has the power to change the way IM is now and get rid of the 4 huge closed IM protocols to adopt 1 open protocol everyone can communicate on. The article is a little lengthy but very worth the time to read it.

I'll try and summarize it here for you. Basically, when email first started taking off, there were a half a dozen email protocols, each requiring you to be on their network to use it. So you could only send email to other people on your same network. Then came SMTP, which was an open protocol that let you send an email to any network. How this works is, the SMTP server you are on, finds the SMTP server you are sending your mail to and sends the message there. That server then serves you the message. Quite simple, and it got rid of all the annoyances that were involved with sending email to users that weren't in your network. Now, if you look, we have the same problem with IM today. For almost 10 years, very little has changed with IM. We have ICQ, AIM, MSN, and Yahoo!. All of these are closed networks. You need an account on each network to talk to others on that network. ICQ and AIM are now (kind of) on the same closed network, but that doesn't help very much.

Google just released their IM program called Google Talk which includes a very open IM protocol called Jabber. Jabber has been around for a while but hasn't gotten the huge support it deserves. The great thing about Jabber, is it's not centralized. There is no 1 big server you reside on. Just like your email account, your Jabber ID includes a name w/ a @somewhere.com. This way, when you send a message, Jabber knows where that message should be going and looks for the Jabber server somewhere.com. Meaning, just like email today, if everyone was using Jabber, we would all be able to talk to anyone with one client on 1 network. It's great that Google has adopted the Jabber protocol, but they left that part of Jabber out. Google Talk still only talks to those on the Google Talk Jabber server.

The point I'm trying to make now, is read that article and send Google an email telling them to change their ways. Google is big enough to change the way we communicate w/ IM. Make sure Google lives up to the 'Open Communication' they talk about all the time. It's still early enough to make a difference here!

Do you watch The Family Guy? Of course you do. One of the most recent episodes was called Petarded. Peter ends up winning a game of Trivial pursuit after Lois rigs the game and then takes an IQ test to find out he's actually below the 'retarded' line. You can put your name or anyone you knows name on the chart that was displayed in this episode Right Here! The picture is very small but you should still be able to read it. Have fun!

Trailer Crashers

Wanna be part of the movie, The Wedding Crashers?? Here's your chance. Go here to 'crash the trailer' and put yourself (and an optional friend) in the movie. Pretty funny and actually pretty cool.

My girlfriend and I starred in a trailer!