What Firefox Extensions Are You Using?

I finally got around to upgrading my Firefox setup to version 1.5. Why did I do this? Because I tried just doing the quick-and-dirty upgrade to the 1.0 version of the Web Developer Extension and it totally hosed my 1.0.7 install (I need to read directions, I know).

But I figured this was a good a chance as any to just bulldoze my profile and start from scratch with 1.5 (which is the recommended course according to many forum threads I’ve seen over here, versus trying to upgrade on top of the old version).

It was also a chance for me to download and install all new versions of all my extensions, and thought I’d post what I’ve installed here for everybody else to peruse (and so I don’t have to look them all up again), and I encourage folks to comment here and let me know what they’re running so I can see if there’s any other cool little extensions I might be missing (and for anybody who cares, I use the Smoke theme, after using the Noia Lite theme in 1.0.7).

Also of note, I probably will install Greasemonkey at some point as there are a pile of great scripts for it, but I’m going to hold off for now.

So what is everybody else using?

January 8, 2006

Lost Photos

This is an interesting (if almost eerie) site with a bunch of photos found on old cameras. He’s been buying old cameras from junk shops and processing the pictures with some interesting results.

In this digital age, I wonder what people have found on old hard drives and memory cards. I usually just format any old ports I’m given, but maybe I should start digging through them.

Link via b3ta.

Update with correct link.

January 8, 2006

The Geeked Out Bible

It’s small keychain that hides a USB key that contains all 66 books of the Bible.

January 8, 2006

You Know You Live In Central Oregon When…

Snarky has an audience participation post for all you locals. One of Snarky’s: You know you live in Central Oregon when your neighbor is selling his house for $150,000 more than he bought it for the year before. Fun stuff — and the more locals that join in the more entertaining it will be.

January 5, 2006

Bend Broadband Offering Phone Service, But Is It Worth It?

As I mentioned before Bend Broadband does sponsor this blog. They have an ad right up there on the top right of this page (which is now linked to the service I’m going to talk about). Part of my agreement with putting up their ads was that I reserve the right to post commentary about their services and products, and this is going to be one of those times.

BendBroadband has introduced a new home phone service. Starting at $40/month (assuming you already have cable TV and high-speed internet with them, otherwise the price goes up), you get unlimited local and long distance phone calls in the lower 48 states, caller ID, voice mail, and a whole slew of additional features.

But $40? Yes, it’s a pile of great features, and since it’s the cable company they can probably give traffic priority to your voice calls and there’s always the convenience of having it everything on one bill (which is Qwest’s big pitch). But it just doesn’t seem worth it to me unless you make a lot of long-distance calls (which I don’t) and even then you can get services like Vonage that are quite a bit cheaper and provide just as many features. Talking to the folks at BendBroadband, they’re considering a “lite” option for folks who don’t need long distance access, but it’ll still probably be too expensive for me. I spend a grand total (including all stupid fees) of $25/month on my phone service from Qwest. I don’t need any of that fancy additional services crap — I just want a phone that will work all the time at a cheap rate. Heck, even if you wanted all those features that BendBroadband provides, there are other local phone companies like BendTel that provide all those services over your regular phone line — no special equipment required — at a very decent price.

So for now, this will be a service of theirs I’m going to avoid, mostly because of the cost, but if anybody else has any input or has tried it (they’re currently rolling out in the Redmond/Terrebone area with Bend coming next month), let me know! I told them I’d be a beta tester if they wanted a review, but haven’t heard back on that one yet (not holding my breath).

January 5, 2006

Experimenting With Yahoo Publisher Ads

A long while ago I was invited to the beta of Yahoo!’s publisher network. I’ve just now gotten around to signing up for the beta, playing around with things. I haven’t implemented their ads on the main part of this site yet, but I have implemented them in my RSS/Atom feeds. I think that’s only fair, considering that my RSS feeds include my entire entries (and always will) and they’re fairly small ads (as of right now, they’re not even showing up in the feed, so they might not even be delivering ads anyway).

I’m mostly just testing it out to see how it works. If they suck, then I won’t leave them in there. If you even notice them, and have opinions, feel free to share them here.

January 5, 2006

There’s Just Something Very Wrong About This

Woman marries dolphin after 15-year courtship. I guess if you don’t want any crap from a husband, marrying outside your species is one way to do it.

Thanks Cheryl for the link.

January 5, 2006

Stuck In Utter Chaos Mode

Warning: this will be one of those entries that will totally fit the “Utterly Boring” title of this site. I apologize in advance.

This day has been utter chaos. Minus the few minutes of peace and quiet when I grabbed a bite to eat with Simone earlier today, this day has been a mess.

We’re doing a bunch of year-end closing stuff with all our accounting stuff, and we had some problems with running the year end reports and the payroll that is supposed to be run this week for the first pay period of the year. It was giving our accountant upstairs some really ugly errors. So I hit the company’s knowledge base, the solution is to rebuild the appropriate payroll database tables. So I do that on the payroll tables, thinking it’s a payroll problem. Try it again, still giving the same error. Go back, and just rebuild everything. Notice I’m getting an error in one of the general ledger tables. So I open up the raw table, don’t notice anything weird, but for the life of me can not get in and run payroll, getting the same error.

I spend a good chunk of the day trying to rebuild these things so we wouldn’t have to reinput the last couple days worth of transactions. So I finally bucked up and called the company, paying for the privilege to talk to them, and got the answer that I didn’t want to hear: “You need to recover from backup.” And of course, the last two days worth of backups had the same corrupt table, so I had to recover from the last known good, which was done on Monday night. I told him that I didn’t want to pay for the call as he couldn’t help me, he said that was far and didn’t count it towards our support agreement and he said that was fair

So reimported the whole mess, reclosed off the year so we could run payroll, and finally got things working again. What a frickin’ mess — it’s just totally consumed my whole day and kept me from writing the proposal to my boss to redo this site (more on that some other time).

Anywho, normal blogging to resume when I catch my breath after that mess. It was my daughter’s sixth birthday yesterday, that’s my excuse for not getting online yesterday (I played hooky, and stayed home, took her out to lunch, and had a grand old time).

January 4, 2006

Free Airfare If You Drink A Lot Of Soda

If you want to get some free airfare so you can fly around the country, all you have to do is either drink a ton of soda at Wendy’s or do some dumpster diving. Quoting Al’s Morning Meeting:

People are dumpster diving and there is now even a black market for Wendy’s soft drink cups stamped with coupons good for free air travel. The fast food chain and Florida-based discount airline AirTran are offering free frequent-flyer rewards on the sides of 84 million 20- and 32-ounce cups.

A collection of 64 coupons can be redeemed for a round-trip flight anywhere AirTran flies. (See route map.)

Sadly, though, the airline doesn’t fly out of Portland, but it does fly out of San Francisco so you could drive down there (or fly cheap down there) for some free flying around the country.

Apparently folks on Craigslist have been buying/selling the cups, and there have been a few on eBay as well.

The Christian Science Monitor has a story, as well.

Obviously not too many Oregonians can take advantage of this unless they pay to fly somewhere first, but has anybody outside of the area used these? I don’t even go to Wendy’s, so I didn’t know a thing about this promotion.

January 2, 2006

Responsible Spam

I would love it if my spam read like this:

From: Maybelline Kane

Subject: What time is it?

Hey, you, I’m blond, gorgeous, and I just turned 18! I set up a webcam in my bedroom so people could watch me 24/7! However, the more I thought about it, the more the whole thing seemed kind of creepy and demeaning. So I scrapped that idea.

January 2, 2006