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Too Cool for IE
March 27th, 2006From Angry Young Man to Piano Man
March 17th, 2006
30min before Joel hit the stage. By the time he did, not a single empty seat could be found.
I just got back from the Verizon Center where Billy Joel just played an awesome concert. As you can probably tell from the above picture, I had great seats! My mother and I were literally 20ft. or so from the stage. The tickets (bought through eBay) were a real pain to get since Paypal ended up charging twice for them causing my bank to charge me $50 bucks in overdraft fees. Luckily I managed to get the second charge refunded and somehow even managed to have my bank return the $50. While incredibly inconvenient, the hassle was totally worth it to get seats as close as they were.
Joel playing Don’t Ask Me Why.
The show itself was great. Even at 56, Joel still knows how to please an audience. Playing a setlist that included some of his lesser known songs as well as the bigger hits.
- Prelude/Angry Young Man
- My Life
- Everybody Loves You Now
- The Entertainer
- New York State Of Mind
- The Downeaster ‘Alexa’
- Zanzibar
- Allentown
- Don’t Ask Me Why
- Pressure
- Goodnight Saigon
- Movin’ Out
- An Innocent Man
- She’s Always A Woman
- Captain Jack
- Keeping The Faith
- I Go To Extremes
- The River Of Dreams
- Highway To Hell
- We Didn’t Start The Fire
- Big Shot
- It’s Still Rock And Roll To Me
- You May Be Right
- Only The Good Die Young
- Scenes From An Italian Restaurant
- Piano Man
Introducing Pressure prior to running to another keyboard on the right side of the stage.
One thing that really surprised me about this concert was the massive number of younger faces in the crowd. Of course the middle-aged to older group you’d expect to be there were, but the younger folks seemed to have more of a presence at this concert. It really shows that in times of crappy music, people will go off looking for alternatives. It also speaks for how timeless Joel’s music is considering his first hit came out in ‘71.
I really had a great time and given a chance, would buy another ticket or two to another of his upcoming shows.
Winter’s Back… With a Vengance
February 18th, 2006This winter has been fairly moderate in terms of weather with little snow and temperatures hitting 50°F on Monday. That was until we got hit by a blizzard on Thursday which brought with it 15in of snow and plunging temperatures. This is what I was greeted with this morning:
I think I’ll be staying inside until spring….
ChuckBot Module Now Available
January 30th, 2006Chuck Norris Can
January 30th, 2006After my floor took on a Chuck Norris theme* (second and third went with Sean Connery and Katherine Hepburn respectively) I decided that Moznet could stand a little Chuckifying, so I wrote up a module for Mozbot and set it loose in a few channels. Of course you can only have so much greatness on one network, so he’s now restricted to #chuckbot (/msg ChuckNorris help for commands). Even through his time outside of his new sandbox was short, it was long enough to start a Chuck buzz. If you’re brave enough to submit a bug on it, chuck.diff awaits. 
*pictures soon!
Save the Plush!
January 4th, 2006The Firefox plush doll is in danger of becoming an extinct item at the Mozilla Store – save the plush!
Vote now!
A New Standard
December 24th, 2005Firefox has changed the web again, this time it comes in the form of a new standard.
A few weeks ago, Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer 7 will use Firefox’s feed icon to indicate the presence of feeds. Followed by this announcement, the Outlook 12 team announced they’d be doing the same and now there’s a movement to make the icon the standard for describing and making feeds more visible in web pages and applications.
Hopefully changes like these will become common place as Firefox development continues. It’s been a long five years since IE6 was released and in the meantime the web has grown old and tired. Changes like these show the influence Firefox has had thus far on reaching ‘Web 2.0‘ and this sure won’t be the last – the web’s on fire whether you like it or not
Almost There…
December 19th, 2005In 48 hours I’ll be getting up and preparing for my 6am flight back to D.C. 
It’s been a long time since I’ve been home and I’m really looking forward to it. All I’ve got left is an easy little 2-page paper and an mildly difficult exam. I’ve spent the weekend studying and preparing some Christmas gifts to bring with me. Unfortunately with all the running around I’ve done this weekend, I’ve somehow managed to lose my student ID (which also serves as our debit card) so I’ve had to suspend that until I either find it or go and get a new one. Buying food from the dining halls has really sucked since I now have to use cash and cash customers get their food prices marked up by 60% 
*sigh*
Just 48 more hours…
XULRunner Rocks
December 9th, 2005For the past few weeks I’ve been using XULRunner to create an easy (no need to constantly reinstall) environment to develop extensions under. But I haven’t really used it to run anything useful up until now, tonight I just packaged ChatZilla and I must say I’m really liking the abiltiy to run my favorite extensions without a browser open. ChatZilla also seems to be quite a bit more stable under XULRunner (under Firefox, CPU usage would skyrocket).
Once XULRunner is officially released, I think it’ll become a great platform for creating various applications (XUL and XPCOM can be used greatly reducing development time). For the time being, if you want to run a great IRC client without having to run Firefox or Mozilla in the background, give XULRunner+ChatZilla a try.
Frozen
December 9th, 2005Lake Mendota froze last night. It’s not really a surprise considering it’s been about -2 for a week. On top of being really cold this week, we just got another 4 inches of snow. In some places it’s almost 2ft. deep due to previous snowfall and the high winds we’ve been having.
I can’t wait until I’m back home in the relatively warm weather.