Tonight I changed a preference

Tonight I changed a preference that I haven’t touched since 1999. I made Mozilla my default web browser and bumped Internet Explorer. I still like IE, but the news surrounding the 5.2 update for Mac OS X was pretty lukewarm. I don’t want it to set my homepage to MSN — I like a blank home page. I don’t want to have quit my running apps to install a browser — Mozilla was drag and drop. IE continues to clutter up my screen with popunders and popups — Mozilla can turn that off for me. Plus, Mozilla does tabbed browsing, which I’m really getting into (clean interface) and it will save groups of bookmarks to open together in a tab set. IE can’t do that. My only complaints about Mozilla:
1) The interface is not quite Aqua
2) It’s a bit slower than IE for casual browsing (but I hear that it’s faster for rendering large pages)
3) The icon is ugly (but this is easily fixed with a trip to Xicons.

Plus, it kind of feels good to be using a piece of open source software. Not that I have ethical issues with commercial, closed-source stuff (heck, I hope to one day be rich because of it). But Mozilla is a solid browser that’s stable and consistent across platforms. IE can’t make that claim.

But who knows? Maybe I’ll switch back in another three years.

Microsoft accidentally distributes the Nimda

Microsoft accidentally distributes the Nimda worm to Korea. According to the article: Microsoft accidentally sent the virulent Nimda worm to South Korean developers when it distributed Korean-language versions of Visual Studio .Net that carried the virus, the company acknowledged Friday.

I’m getting more and more into REALbasic. What an awesome program! After struggling several times to learn how to write even the most rudimentary programs, I’m starting to make sense of object orientation. And it’s really cool.

Just heard that a girl in Etown strangled her one year old baby and left it in a dumpster. I just don’t have the restraint not to point out the unfairness that my son is dead because of a pre-natal virus and this girl murders her own child.

As of yesterday (June 16,

As of yesterday (June 16, 2002), I am an elder of Westwood Community Church. Big responsibility, lousy pay (that’s a joke).

In all seriousness, it’s an honor to be chosen for something like this. It makes me think a lot more about the church and our direction.

I’m beta testing a product called ideaSpiral. It’s pretty cool. When it’s released, I’ll post a link here.

It’s weird having a three

It’s weird having a three year old child. She says the funniest things. The other night as supper she looks at me and says, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” I don’t know where she comes up with stuff. Actually, I realized later that that particular phrase is often repeated on PB&J Otter, but still.

The dog, on the other hand, never says anything intelligible. Just barks. Although there are times when I would give cash money to find out what’s going through his brain. He looks at me sometimes like he passionately wants to speak but can’t. Then he usually pees or does something equally endearing.

My good friend Bill and his wife visited last weekend. Bill was the best man in my wedding. His brother and his wife just lost a baby, about as far along as Jen and I were. My heart is broken for them, but I hope that I can somehow help. It’s been over a year and a half for us, and the sting is still there. It’s mostly not so bad, but there are times when it’s worse. This week, for example, I was asked on two occasions about my second child and had to tell people that he was stillborn. Invariably, people feel embarrassed and awkward at having asked, and they fall all over themselves to apologize, and they genuinely try to be helpful.

But it still stings. And I guess it always will.

I’ve heard it said many

I’ve heard it said many times that potty training is an almost instant thing when the child decides that it’s time. I’ve actually been reminding my wife of that for several months. Friday evening, Grace’s potty training switch flipped. She’s a big girl now.

The teachers are now officially gone at Etown. Now the summer begins and our work becomes absolutely insane. I get so annoyed at people who assume I have the summer off just because I work at a school. I guess they think the computer fairies are rebuilding servers, re-imaging labs, upgrading classroom computers, and installing new network hardware.

My dog must think I’m

My dog must think I’m an idiot. I went downstairs after a thunderstorm last night to see if we had taken in any water (we didn’t). In the basement is our house mascot, a stuffed and mounted fox.

Now, I’m not a hunter. I have no ethical or moral issues with hunting, I just don’t have the heart for it. My dad got the fox many years ago. He was going to get rid of it in 1994 at a garage sale, but I took it home because it seemed kind of campy. From being stored in his basement and several of my basements through the years, he has earned the name Dusty.

So Dusty now dwells in my basement, which drives my dog Jack crazy. My basement is split into two halves, a partially finished section and a completely unfinished section. Dusty stays in the unfinished half, which is where I check for water (since there’s no seal or anything over there). Whenever we go into the basement, Jack goes nuts and scratches at the door that divides the two halves of the basement, just dying to get at Dusty.

Sometimes I have a little fun and pretend to make Dusty growl at Jack, which flips him out completely. Usually, I just try to calm him down and take him back upstairs.

This is why he thinks I’m an idiot. I can only imagine what’s going through the dog’s head. “Don’t you get it? Don’t you know there’s a freaking fox living in the basement!? Why won’t you let me get him? I can take him! Why are you holding me back? It’s a fox, don’t you understand??”

My allergies are killing me.

My allergies are killing me. I haven’t regularly taken allergy medicine since about two weeks after I went on the Atkins Diet (in May, 2000). But this week I’m just getting hammered and taking my Actifed knock-off four times a day. If I don’t, my head fills up and I can’t even think straight.

Today was the last day for students at my school. Monday will see the last of the teachers leave for the summer, and then we can really get busy. We’re migrating to Windows2000 servers over the summer, so we have our work cut out for us.

I just looked over at my Far Side desk calendar (my Mom gets me one every Christmas) and noticed that I haven’t flipped it since May 9. Odd. I would think that I would have noticed before now.

REALbasic 4.5 is out of alpha and now in beta. I’ve been lurking on the developer releases mailing list and it’s shaping up to be a pretty cool release. To all those who say REALbasic is for sissies: shut up.