The Foster Farms chicken commercials are funny (it's a local company I think). Two chickens from the Midwest travel to California and try to become Foster Farms chickens. Nobody believes them because "Foster Farms chickens are fresh and you have freezer burns". Good grief! They're alive! How can you get fresher than that?!? But the chickens are quite funny...

Once again I switched browsers. Now I'm using the latest Mozilla, version 0.94. Much better than 0.93, it completed all my browser tests except for the Java test (which it doesn't support I think, mostly because it doesn't support plug-ins yet) and logging into my 401K account, which apparently checks for the correct browser version (and Mozilla 5.0 is not one of them). Shame on you Fidelity! E-Trade works fine with Mozilla.

Now, you may remember that I was all hot and bothered for Opera, which is quite cool. But I switched back to Internet Explorer because Opera crashed constantly. Not freezing so much, which at least I can work with, but just unexpectedly, which is really annoying. We'll see how the current Mozilla stands up to daily use. It's still another year away from an official release...

I used to have all my links to web sites as "http://www.xxx.com" without the ending slash. After I read an Apache book I realized that it's inefficient because Apache will just tell you to retry with a URL with an ending slash. And your browser will do that automatically, though now you have that extra query overhead that you probably never noticed before. NetPresenz does the same thing but I thought it's just because it's not a great program...

Nikon just introduced their 5000 model digital camera, which will replace the 995 in a few months. Looks pretty cool. It's a 5 MegaPixel camera with a new body (it doesn't have the whole body swiveling just the LCD screen). Shutter speed increases to 1/4000th seconds, though the max ISO 800 is the same. The movie capture now does sound too, which I wanted for some reason. Other than that it's got pretty much the same features as the 995 at a price thats $100 greater ($1100). I probably shouldn't buy it...

Goddess, I love BBEdit Lite. I just moved my Year 2 journal entries to a subfolder (the Finder doesn't do well when a folder has thousands of files). That of course means that I have to change any internal links to point to the new folder. That's where BBEdit Lite's multi-file search and replace comes in handy. Coupled with grep and you have a nice batch solution, though I didn't have that many changes so I just used the multi-file search (no replace)...

I'm reading Star Trek 1 (not a novelization of the movie). It's adaptations of tv series episodes by James Blish (now dead). Much like the Star Trek Logs (by Alan Dean Foster) which are adaptations of the cartoon series. Except the Star Trek ones are much shorter, half a dozen episodes for each book instead of three episodes per book. I'm almost done with this first one, and it's interesting. Blish writes from the view point of Captain Kirk, so you don't have scenes where the bad guys are plotting. The stories also don't follow the scripts that closely. Sort of a retelling of the TOS episodes...

David Letterman Monday night had his first show since the World Trade Center attack. He was quite moved -- heck, he practically broke down in tears. Very touching, though I still don't like him as a talk show host. It's strange how tragedies and disasters cause people to help each other, even though in a normal day they'd be bickering and fighting. It's one of the great aspects of humanity. Some people would disagree. We fight so much, and yet we can be so kind and generous, why can't we be that way all the time.

That's not realistic. You need conflict and friction and nature favors the cleverly greedy and self-centered (not the totally greedy and self-centered, since they'll alienate everyone and die off -- you have to be selfish, but you can't seem that way to others). So I think that the petty things and the striving against each other is a natural and necessary part of us. What's really cool is that when faced with big disasters, we band together to get through it. That's a good mark of species survival.