I’m posting this in case Dick forgot about the new weekend tradition here at DDoE. This is where you can post anything you like.
This was a good week for posts. Lots of interesting stuff. One of these days I’ll actually read all of the VB.NET stuff XL-Dennis posted.
Does anyone need to get a new battery from Dell to replace their flammable one?
Both my D810 batteries are not affected – hooray!
I didn’t forget, I’m just running late. I had two off-topics today. First, I decided to start using a travel agent today. I spent at least two hours searching for airline tickets this week, and to be honest, I’m sick of it. Self service seemed like such a boon for the travel industry – well the consumer end of the travel industry. Why would I pay someone to find flights when I can simply log on to the Internet and book them directly with the carrier? For the same reason I don’t cut my own grass. I don’t like it, so I pay someone else to do it. Today I paid someone $35 to find me the shortest-travel-time flight from Omaha to LAX. It was such an enjoyable experience, I don’t think I’ll ever book my own travel again. My new agent is Trans Global Travel in Omaha and tell Marilyn I sent you. She’s a peach.
I heard It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry, a happy little Dylan tune, earlier this week. Later that same day, I heard Rock and Roll Part II, which got me thinking about songs whose title never appears in the lyrics. Outside of instrumentals and songs, like the aforementioned Glitter tune, that barely have lyrics at all, I wonder if there are a lot. I couldn’t think of any at the time, then my head started hurting. I figured I’d poll the group and see what you can come up with.
I guess I do have one more issue: What do you Firefox users use for a spell checker? I haven’t upgraded FF in a while because I haven’t found a decent spellchecker plug in, but I haven’t looked in a while either.
I agree about the travel sites. We recently booked a trip to Hawaii using Encarta. It’s a royal PITA. You’re constantly being bombarded with come-ons for cars, hotels, attractions, etc. And the last three flights I booked, I was told at the end that etickets were not available, so I had to pay an extra ~$30 for overnight delivery of paper tickets — even thought he flight is three months away. Scam.
Spell checkre for Firefxo? Why woudl you need taht?
Hi
I have an add-in downloaded from internet. I want to rename it so that when it appears on the menubar alongwith other toolbars like “file,edit, view, isert, data, format,tools, window etc.” it appears with the new name I give to it. Any ideas !
Thanks and Regards
Amar
Well, I finally succumbed to the hoopola about Firefox and downloaded it and am trying it out. Please someone, tell what it is I am gaining? So far I am totally unimpressed.
@dick: There’s a firefox spellcheck add-on at https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1022/.
@doco: I don’t know if I’m gaining anything. Maybe it’s just the hoopla about ff being more secure than IE, however true that is. I have run into some sites that just don’t play well with ff, though. One of my favorite ff features is the tabbed browsing. I understand that the next version of IE is going to have it (maybe in beta now?).
And as for my weekend…the kids at at nana’s for a sleepover (starting last night) and coming home tomorrow. So sleep and relaxation are what is scheduled (exciting, huh?)
Hi Mike,
You got it ! It is there in the Beta.
Hmmm…
Not aware of any issues my firewall/virus software doesn’t already deal with. As far as tabbed browsing in IE, I already have that. It’s called the taskbar. ;-)
Last night, I saw the Bob Dylan documentary “No Direction Home”. Being a child of the eighties, I had no clue how volatile Dylan’s move from acoustic to electric was. I particularly enjoyed his attitude toward the press. At one point in the movie, a photographer asked him to “Suck on his sunglasses” while he took a picture (you know…put a tip of the ear piece in his mouth). Dylan’s reaction is priceless.
Another thing that that movie confirmed for me is that Alan Ginsberg is way overrated. Also Joan Baez looks pretty good for an old liberal. She hinted that she still does “Sit-Ins”. What the hell? Who does “Sit-ins” anymore? Let go Joan….just let go.
Sorry to drag the conversation back to FireFox, but I could never conceive of returning to IE after making the break. Firefox is faster and slicker and definitely has a groovier name and I certainly couldn’t imagine doing without tabbed browsing now. I have tried the IE7 Beta and I found it to be slow (possibly because it is still only a Beta) and so didn’t bother using it again. Having said all this though, I do hear that Opera 9 is rather good, so maybe I’ll swap loyalties again!
House women want internet in every corner of home. Purchased wireless router. Will nuke every corner of recently painted beautiful home with microwave frequencies from mid day tomorrow. Bye.
My Dell wasn’t on the list. Pfew.
I can’t get aspell to work. I keep getting “TypeError: Components.classes[‘@mozilla.org/windows-registry-key;1’] has no properties” I followed the directions on the link, but not dice.
amar: You can’t. The menu caption is coded in the add-in. Contact the add-in’s author and see if you can get access to the code.
What I like about Firefox: First, I like to keep my taskbar clean so tabbed browsing is a definite advantage of multiple instance. I hear FF renders closer to standard, which means nothing to me, but why wouldn’t I use the best. There’s an active developer community making good add-ins, except for easy to install spellcheckers apparently. My favorite feature of FF is find-as-you-type. I start typing “Leave a Reply” and it takes me to the part of of the page that has that text. For mouse-a-phobe like me, it’s the bee’s knees.
The downside is any site that uses ActiveX won’t work in FF. There’s only two sites, MS and Quickbooks SDK, that I need to open IE.
Good luck, Harald. I installed a wireless router when we moved into this house, two years ago. It works great, but all the paint is chipping off the walls due to the microwave frequencies. Maybe I’ve been using too much Wifi Speed Spray?
Subjectively, IE seems faster to me, but Firefox has it beat in every other area that’s important to me. The ability to wheel-click a link and open it in a tab is addictive. And there are some exensions that I can’t live without. Firefox is also buggy as hell – it crashes a lot. But, all things considered, it’s still no contest compared to IE. There is only one site that I use that requires IE: The Arizona government site where I pay my monthly “privilege” tax.
I’m using FF 1.07 and it absolutely never crashes. Maybe I should stick with this lower version for the spellbound addin and because it’s more stable. You can (I did) uninstall the latest version and re-install and older one from their ftp site, like here
http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/1.0.7/win32/en-US/
According to What’s New, I’m not missing much. Better popup blocking would be nice – I still get 1 or 2 per month.
John — you sure it’s FireFox that is buggy, and not one of your installed extensions?
FireFox used to crash on me a lot. I finally determined it was because I was using an extension that put my tabs into the sidebar. After removing it, I rarely crash anymore. I do use the Tab Mix Plus extension, which places my tabs across the top. I prefer them in the sidebar, but just couldn’t handle all of the crashes in the middle of something I was working on.
Dick: I do notice with FF that repeat myself thing I emailed you about does not exist. With IE several of the comments in this thread repeat the last four or five words into the next line. But with FF it does not.
But the look and feel of FF is clunky and sterile. I use the Google toolbar alot and FF has reduced it to an address bar – can’t live with that.. Whether it is faster or not? I haven’t noticed. Maybe it will grow on me :-D
I’m in the FF camp. I don’t have any problem with it crashing – love the tabbing and the Find.
Doco, it sounds like maybe you don’t have the actual Google toolbar installed, just the default Google box that comes with FF. I installed the Google bar from Google’s web site and it’s very similar to what I remember in IE. Until about a year ago there was no official Google bar for FF – just an extension created by somebody else to mimic the IE version.
Doug: You’re quite correct. I had as dick explained, uninstalled the latest FF and downloaded an earlier version. Then installed the googlebar extension – it’s good!
Also, I have been like a kid in a candy store with this thing all day and have made some discoveries that may have won me over: Page Setup & View Page Source to name a few. And (tongue in cheek), I have become quite enamored with tabs; knowing that I may have my three favorite favorites upon opening is pretty kewl. Think I’ll keep it. ;-)
As an Excel user, I find the Table2Clipboard extension for Firefox really useful for copying tables in web pages into Excel.
I switched to Firefox last winter because good old MS had created a fix for the latest
internet virus but had decided not to make it available for a couple of weeks. Then a
couple of days later they decided to issue it.
That was enough for me. I changed that day. The only time I use IE now is at work.
At one point, I did run Firefox extension-free for a few days. It didn’t help with the crashes.
I see that FF 2.0 will have spellchecking built in.
Dick –
I use the Google Toolbar in Firefox for Spell-check. Does it well and quick.
…Michael
I agree with Michael I use the Google Toolbar also