A1

Part of the reason I've been scarce around these parts lately is my preparation for my big road trip around the Rocky Mountains. I've made a few changes to where I'm going to allow me to cut a couple days off the trip, and reduce the number of miles so that I can afford the gas :-)

However, I am also looking at some options that might allow me to climb as many as four of the Colorado "Fourteeners", two of which I've never been on before. I will try to make sure to post an updated itinerary on here sometime before I go.

I am also gearing up for photos and video so that I can finally get "Ewan's Outdoors" kicked off. Already have shot a good bit of video around San Antonio that I'm thinking of releasing as a DVD of relaxing drives in the country for folks who like to go on Sunday drives, but hate to pay for the gas. Figure if a DVD of a fire in a fireplace goes over well...

Anyway, I'm pretty excited, and look forward to sharing with y'all along the trip. Am hoping to even do a short (!) post from the top of Longs Peak.

I'm not totally sure that you can call something a "fanimation" if it's actually created by the original author, but it certainly fits the "style" of what I've been doing. Note, there is a voice over, and there is the use of one word near the end that you might not want overheard by the boss or your SO without context...

It seems like lately I'm the guy who can't find a software package he doesn't hate. And I know this post won't win me any friends, but let me start this off by saying that IE 6 and 7 are STILL worse than Firefox. Just not by nearly as much as used to be the case.

I'd been reading all over the net about how much better FF3 was, but I've learned not to be bleeding edge in the past, and so have waited until I heard that the latest release - FF3 RC2 (Firefox 3 Release Candidate 2 for those of you less acronym inclined) was probably going to be the same as the final release.

I install FF3 Portable on my USB stick, and things start quickly going VERY badly. It seems that the new features of FF3 include a background download of a file that is a blacklist of sites that are associated with various malware or phishing type attacks. No big deal on a fast connection on a local hard drive. Very big deal on a USB stick. The longer I worked with it, the more I was having to tune my portable version to make it not hang on even the simplest tasks. The breaking point was when I did my normal morning Webcomics read (opens about 25 tabs at once so I can read them all), and half an hour later it was still going.

OK, so I put it on my local HD, and things seem snappier. However I glance at Task Manager and it shows me that FF3 is using over 100 megs of RAM. My 3D animation program doesn't use 100 megs of RAM. I understand that the new memory model for FF3 is designed to stop fragmentation and guarantee that when you close the program all the memory is released, but oh my word!

Unfortunately, being the kind of "jump in with both feet" kind of guy I am, I no longer have a copy of FF2 and associated profile. So going back is difficult at best, and probably not worth the effort since over time it will just get me further and further out of the mainstream. Given that is the reason I run Vista, however, I'm very disappointed to see that what used to be one of the best examples of a successful Open Source project seems to now be taking lessons from Microsoft. I shudder to think what this may imply for Open Office.

Just my .02 worth.