Roger Waters

On Friday night, September 29th, 2006, I attended a Roger Waters concert at the First Midwest Bank Amphitheater in Tinley Park, IL. It was a great show albeit a little cold and windy. Look for some video and pictures from the show to be posted here soon.

Also, I have added a new addition to the journal: the "What I'm Reading Online..." section. Recently Google updated its Google Reader software and the changes are phenomenal. The new interface is intuitive and the sharing features are top-notch. The sharing feature is indeed how I was able to add the "What I'm Reading" box. Any new item that I mark to share will show up in the box as well as on my Shared Items page. The page should archive all of my shared items while the box located on this page will only list the five most recent.

I am currently running Release Candidate 1 of Mozilla Firefox 2.0. Anyone who somewhat knows me knows that I am an Opera fanboy so it is quite a leap that I have Firefox installed. Not only do I have it installed, I am using it as my primary browser. Blasphemy, you say? Not quite. I would be using Opera but a nasty bug/incompatibility with Windows Vista RC1 causes the Aero interface to deactivate any time a page using Adobe Flash is loaded. Since Flash is so ubiquitous these days, almost any page I go to causes this to happen. Interestingly, this bug does not affect Firefox or IE7. Of the two, I prefer Firefox so that brings me to today. I have to say that many of the new features are welcome additions, especially the inline spellchecker which is very helpful when typing blog posts. I do question the wisdom of making something like inline spell check a "standard" feature and relegating something as important (at least to me) as mouse gestures to "add-on" status. Mouse gestures are one of my favorite things in Opera and while it's nice that I can add them to Firefox, I don't see why it cannot be included by default - how many lines of code could it be? One other feature I miss is Opera's spatial navigation. This is where you can hold down the Shift key and use the arrow keys to navigate the links on the page. I am usually anti-mouse so any feature that keeps my fingers on the keyboard is a welcome addition. One final annoyance is the fact that Firefox 2.0 RC1 does not support Microsoft's new default program model used in Vista whereas Opera added this to the 9.02 release. Seems funny that Opera is quirkier in Vista than Firefox is yet I can make Opera the default browser in the OS but Windows gives me no option to do so with Firefox. I have filed a bug report with Opera so hopefully they will get all of the Vista-related issues solved and I will be able to go back to my favorite browser.