Mozparty Vancouver

With the upcoming 1.0 release of Firefox and Thunderbird, a lot of people are getting into the party mood.

Here in Vancouver, there will be a gathering at Stamp's Landing on November 20th starting around 6PM. Read more about it here.

Opportunity Calling

Maybe because of all of the windshield washers, junk mail (both snail and e-mail), promises of 'free' things and telephone solicitation, but I generally eye anything promotional very suspiciously.

I would have hung up on this phone call.

Getting back to blogging

The Plumber's Leaky faucet
In the last 2 weeks, I have had no less than 5 people complain that I don't update my blog anymore, which is curious, as I believed that no one actually read it.

I have been so busy coding, upgrading and converting blogs for other people that I didn't really have the energy for mine when I was done. After many hours of templates, layouts, css and why-the-heck-isn't-that-working, I was kinda burned out.

Maybe I'll tear this one down (again) and build it a little leaner this time. Who knows, maybe I'll even remember to include the Archives in the template.

Before that though, on to some sharing:

Packing Heat - Browser and Email on your Keychain
I have written here about my love of Firefox, and have tried to advocate its use amongst my co-workers, friends and students. The browser is highly customizable, standards-compliant and has a lot of momentum behind it.

In fact, my browser at work is so enormously tweaked that I have a list of extensions longer than my address book. Duplicating it at home isn't easy, because there is no simple way to export the customizations and take them home with me. Or to a conference terminal, or an instructor's station, or an internet cafe. You have to start from scratch at each location with a vanilla browser, if you even have the rights to install it.

Because of this, I would frequently just use the default browser on whatever machine I was working on (likely Internet Explorer), and in no time flat, there would be a feature I was missing.

Then, while reading Mozillazine, I discovered a thread on the forums titled: Running Firefox from USB Drive.

Shut Up! You're kidding!

As a USB Drive owner for a couple of years, I have carried a mix of files from images to MP3s to drivers for my digital camera, but I didn't have a reason to carry it with me everywhere until I discovered that I could carry my beloved Firefox with me.

The drawback: the set up isn't easy, and extensions are tricky. So, when I found John Haller's excellent Portable Firefox, I was excited, but even more so when I saw: Portable Thunderbird!

I have been using the Thunderbird e-mail client since my discovery of Firefox, and though there have been some ups and downs, it has settled into a solid code base. The idea that I can now carry my e-mail around with me is extremely cool.

So, if you have a USB Drive and you'd like your customized browser and e-mail environments in your pocket wherever you travel, give John Haller's installs a try.

Blogger Spellcheck
I think it's somewhat ironic that Blogger's spellcheck finds the following words as incorrect:

• blog
• blogs
• blogger
• blogging

Also, if you spell a word wrong at the beginning of a sentance, the word will be corrected, but it will be converted to lower case.

Needs work.