Meta: November 2004 Archives

Now that the evil preceptor is out of the way, I hope to have a thesis draft done by the end of the week. Although there's much I'd like to write about now, expect blogging to be anywhere from "slow" to "non-existent" until the draft is completed.

A few months ago, I switched from Mozilla to Firefox as my primary browser. You might have seen some news coverage about its latest release, and could contemplate the switch. Aside from being secure and stable, there are several useful plugins to make browsing easier. Some of my favorites:

• Googlebar - Mimics Google's own equivalent
• Adblock - Removes image and flash advertisements from web pages - customizable based on URI
• Sage - A Firefox based RSS Reader
• Prefbar - Easy Access to preferences
• IE View - Handy tool to open up IE exclusive pages and links in an IE window.
• Spellbound - Works like IE Spell - checks spelling in web forms.

And there are loads more from which to chose. Now that I can do blog spell checking¹ from Firefox, I officially have no more use for Internet Explorer other than to handle MS's own websites.

Vive la revolucion revolution!

1. Yes, I do that occasionally.

Blogging may be a little slow for a while - certainly don't expect the longer postings to continue.

My mother came home from rehab on Sunday. Rehab will continue at home, but it's unclear how long it will take. Normally, rehab for hip surgery requires more support from the other hip/leg side. In my mother's case, the other side is still hampered by a broken kneecap. Therefore, she can't do the weight-bearing excersizes just yet so rehab may take longer than usual.

On the plus side, she is able to work at home - her boss installed a cable modem in the house. If you'd like to send wishes, you can e-mail Rabbiyuter at aol dot com. I'm sure she'd love to hear from random strangers.

I've gotten conned into regiving my shiurim at the Hillel here. The research is done, and I could use the hazara. Also, it gives me the opportunity to write out the shiurim instead of just putting up sources.

Finally, Izzy Kramer has been on fire in sending me loads of chords, and it's been hard to keep up posting them.¹ If I have any spare time, I'll be working on automating some things using PHP.² If there are any interested volunteers, please let me know.

1. Also transposing. Izzy uses a lot of barre chords - as well he should - but many players including myself have difficulty barre-ing acoustics.
2. At the risk of a flame war, I think PHP is cooler and faster than Perl - that and I forgot most of Perl and I've been wanting to learn PHP for a while. ASP.net isn't really an option since YUCS isn't running Mono - and there just isn't a need for it. From looking through the documentation and speaking to friends, PHP can best do what I need/want it to, even without MySQL