shinyPlasticBag

So, I’ve installed Firefox 0.9. I’d been running the RC for about a week, so this wasn’t a big jump for me. However, there is one latent issue: you have to manually remove your profile folder

or else it will crash immediately after you start it, without any good reason. And the problem will appear to be a faulty version of msvcrt.dll, although it isn’t. They really need to work on this: upgrading should be completely painless. How hard can this be?

As far as the browser itself goes, I’m very happy. The new theme is nice, and the theme & extension managers are long overdue. However, they’ve changed the shortcut key to open up the download manager from Ctrl-E to Ctrl-Y. I’ll be the first to admit that Ctrl-E didn’t make much sense, but Ctrl-Y is even worse — at least the letter E occurs somewhere in the phrase “Download Manager”. There’s no Y there. It seems like change for changes sake — Ctrl-E doesn’t do anything now. The most annoying thing about this is that while Ctrl-E was a one-handed shortcut key, Ctrl-Y requires two hands (or some serious stretching). What a piss off. I’d also like to see the theme and extension managers have shortcut keys. I suggest Ctrl-Q for downloads, Ctrl-W for themes, and Ctrl-E for extensions — that way, they’re all together and one-handed once again. That would mean getting rid of the shortcut key for Close Window (Ctrl-W), which isn’t really needed anyway.

On to slightly more interesting material: first of all, Simon is back in Australia, and he broke his foot at a nightclub in Berlin. This is all the news from him I have, though, except for his new desire to move to the United Kingdom for a year or two. Can you say wanderlust? I think so. Anyway, the news I’m really-really-really excited about is the fact that we’re upgrading to an Eastlink Bundle. We currently get our cable TV and Internet connection from Eastlink, but our phone from Aliant. This bundle will give us all three, and it will cost about $17 a month, which is fairly decent. The real bonus here is that we’ll get twice as many TV channels and caller ID. Nice nice.

This all started with an Eastlink tech guy coming over to check our cable connections and hook us up to the mysterious “new system” (which is needed to get telephone service through cable). He looked kind of shocked when he hooked up his little meter and checked our cable, and then he said that he was completely baffled as to how we got a cable signal, let alone a good cable signal, considering the amount of interference. You see, our house is weird — we don’t have cable jacks at all. Two cables go into our house: one directly to the cable modem, and the other into a splitter in the corner of the living room. The TV in the basement has a home-made cable splice that involved copious amounts of electrical tape. This guy fixed it all, and now the TV is a lot cleared — I hadn’t actually noticed until he fixed it. Maybe the Internet will be speedier.

And that’s all. I’m off to go see Chronicles of Riddick with my dad and then to pull a hardcore prank on Russell. Wicked.

PS: There is a great quote at the bottom of IMDB today: “Religion goes out of favor in 2037 when science discovers the gene that regulates fear.”