I have been using Portable Firefox lately while I am at school. It allows me to keep all of my settings (Bookmarks, themes, extensions, etc.) and runs completely from my 128 MB flash drive.

I have also been trying out Portable Thunderbird for my IMAP accounts. So far I have been pleased.

If you have a USB drive definitely check these out.

I watched The Simpsons yesterday because they were going to announce a character coming out of the closet, which, is a big deal if you’re a Simpsons nerd like me. Well, the episode was a huge disapppointment. Besides the few witty remarks about different subjects the episode was like a lot of others this season, bland and somewhat boring.

Patty, Marge’s sister, was the character to come out of the closet, which if you watch the show is not much of a surprise.

Back on topic, I have felt that the Simpsons has gone down hill ever since Conan O’Brien left the show as a writer. In my opinion he is a lot of the reason the Simpsons was so successful. I have noticed that since he left Homer’s character does not have the “funny spark” that he used to. He lacks the sarcasm that made him great in seasons 5,6, and 7.

I just feel that the writers could do a lot better job of creating content for the show. The way things are going now I can imagine the show being taken off the air on Sundays after this season or next. And maybe that’s what Matt Groening wants so that he can pursue the full length motion picture about the Simpsons.

WordPress 1.5 was officially released today and I am tempted to download it and play with the database and see if there have been any major improvements in the quality of the datatypes.

The one feature that sounds very cool is the “Manage More than Your Blog” one. It allows you manage an entire site through the WordPress administration panel. Very neat.

I have an archives section now up. It is not formatted very well or grouped specifically but I am trying to port some of the dates (which are keeping it from working right) to a standard format that will allow me to group everything together correctly.

I have finally updated my class schedule. There is one class missing which is my internship class because it has no time slot, I do it in my free time.

According to a story on Wired scientists at UCLA have altered HIV to hunt down cancer cells and kill them. The tests have so far been successful in mice but they are going to refine the method more before any tests on humans are done.

I am not sure how I feel about this. The idea of a cure for cancer is amazing but to inject someone with HIV is a little worrisome. Would you feel comfortable having a virus that has killed an estimated 3.1 million people in 2004? I really don’t know how’d I react.

I acquired a new puppy named Jackson from a woman who wanted to get rid of him. He’s a mutt according to the vet but he’s very playful and likes to sit around in your lap.

He’s a little shy but the vet thinks it’s because he was either abused or neglected but said he should completely come out of it.

Sarah and I with Jackson

He’s camera shy…

Worn out from all the attention.

Jackson and I.

With North Korea dropping out of talks and saying that it has nuclear weapons and will continue to produce them how does the world and the U.S. proceed?

From a logistical point of view we can conclude that North Korea has the ability to launch nuclear weapons at the United States from the mere fact that they have launched things into space. Would they attack the United States? More than likely not. There are still skirmishes along the 38th Parallel and because of this I think that North Korea would first go after South Korea for the simple fact that it wants the land. The populations of both countries are growing extremely fast and the territory that is covered is only the size of Pennsylvania and New York.

Should we take an aggressive stand against North Korea or do we sit back and let another Cold War unfold or even worse do we let North Korea use its weight to take over South Korea? Are we still preserving democracy over communism there or has it simply become a symbol of peace? Technically the United States is still at war with North Korea and the scary thought is that they could use that as an excuse to attack the U.S. or the troops stationed in South Korea.

I think the best plan for President Bush is to stand back and look at the situation for a while and let things unfold a little more over there. See if the Japanese or the Russians can get the North Koreans back to the discussion table and talk some sense into them. If we jump into this too quickly we may run into more problems than we expected.

I am not saying go to war with North Korea, by no means. We are right now overdrawn on troops in Iraq and we cannot afford to pull troops from Iraq and put them in South Korea, nor does this country need a draft. I think we just need to take it slow and explore our options.

If you are a user of MapQuest you may want to take a look at the new Google Maps. It is still in beta but works beautifully.

The page holds an iframe with the map inside of it. That iframe is constantly being updated and redrawn. The real beauty is the fact that you can drag the map around and follow a road. The directions functionality leaves something to be desired (much like MapQuest). I entered my address in Houston and tried to get directions to Lubbock and it gave me a route through DFW which is about 3 hrs. out of the way. I am guessing that it tries to stick to the major highways when giving directions but I really wish there was an option to get quicker directions.

The last thing I noticed was the fact that the maps are a little outdated. There are some streets and landmarks in Lubbock that are missing or are no longer here. Once they get that done then they will have an unstoppable service…. Can you say “Goodbye MapQuest”?

A flaw has been announced by Secunia. The flaw affects Mozilla 1.7.x, Firefox 0.x, and Firefox 1.x.

The flaw is really in the IDN implementation. It allows a URL to be spoofed, as well as the SSL certificate and status bar. How do we remedy this problem? For right now you need to type in or copy and paste URLs from sites that you do not “trust”. I have not found anything from the folks at Mozilla about when a fix will be released.