Today Firefox gave me a major scare when, instead of logging me to my website so I could write a post, it took me to http://meta.wikipedia.org!!! WTF??? I then fired up IE and tried it with success! I fugured something was up with Firefox but decided to do some more detective work. I successfully logged to my web host’s control panel and checked the internet stats for the last few days… Boy, was I shocked when I saw this:

[Australian outback background music plays] [Announcer] How to speak Australian… [Husband and wife are seen doing their laundry… doing their food shopping… cleaning / dusting their house… cooking and feeding their kid… all shown in fast motion] [pause] [Announcer] Day off! It occured to me while replying to a friend’s post that we New Jersey(ians)/Yorker(ers) seem to live by a different drum beat! Lately I’ve been hearing stories of people doing a lot of fun stuff and/or taking the time to read… or just nap… or just watch their toes nail grow!

… goes to 18-year-old Scott Harper of Armonk, N.Y., who “plunged from the upper deck at Yankee Stadium onto the screen behind home plate during Tuesday night’s game between New York and the Chicago White Sox, then was taken to a hospital for observation.” (ESPN) Apparently, this “super gifted” individual wanted to see if the net would hold his weight.

Straight from Microsoft’s Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability: Improving XML Performance: Design Considerations Check Description * Choose the appropriate XML class for the job. * Consider validating large documents. * Process large documents in chunks, if possible. * Use streaming interfaces. * Consider hard-coded transformations. * Consider element and attribute name lengths. * Consider sharing the XmlNameTable. Parsing XML Check Description * Use XmlTextReader to parse large XML documents.

Nice to see my close friend Toadman back to the blogosphere! And what a comeback it has been! Apparently he’s been busy jotting down all of the dirty secrets he’d been keeping from me all these days! Welcome back dude!

From the Gentoo documentation page: “The Gentoo Installer project aims to create an widely extensible install engine that allows for a diverse set of attended and un-attended install options. All functionality will exist in the backend, exposed through a stable API. Planned front ends include text, gtk2, fully automated, and web-based interfaces.” I’m a somewhat “seasoned” Gentoo Linux user and have performed the installation (and post installation maintenance, etc) process several times on a few different plataforms.

Source: http://www.chinfo.navy.mil/navpalib/images/historical/hiroshima.jpg I can’t believe I forgot to blog about one of the biggest act of cowardice in human history: This past Saturday, August 6th 2005 marked 60 years since the US dropped an atomic bomb (codenamed Little Boy) over Hiroshima! In a matter of seconds, complete generations were literally wiped off the face of the Earth and the Empire of Japan brought down to their knees had no other choice but surrender during WWII.