Brettia

Note: this was written yesterday evening.

A new concept: weblog print editions. That’s kind of what I’m doing now by writing this entry on notebook paper first. (I’d blog, but I’m supposed to be asleep.) This is the first time I’ve handwritten anything since school ended May 23rd. There has been the occaisional note or phone number of course, but nothing this long. I have a feeling this entry will span several pages.

I had a double sleepover (no, I’m no to old for them) last night with Tyler and one of my other friends, Coleman. We had a lot of fun in the AIM chatrooms by lying about our age and appearance to get girls to talk to us. (No, we’re not that desperate, this was just for entertainment.) We ended up getting to know this one chick named Miranda in the “Christina Aguilera” chatroom (don’t ask), and she seemed to like (and believe) us. Then again, she might’ve been laughing the whole time at Coleman’s sad attempts to call her “babe” and “hun” which seemed really lame to me.

The next morning, I kicked ass in MLB SlugFest 2003, beating my younger brother (who has played it for ten hours straight before) twice. We sat around awhile and then went outside and played hide-and-go-seek. Childish, yes, but fun all the same. This ended in a short waterfight involving a hose and a waterbottle.

Once everyone had gone home I had dinner and went to Tyler’s house for a meeting about my upcoming trip to London, Paris, and Barcelona. I’ll try to blog from there, but my Internet access will be limited at best. I might be able to post some digital pictures, though.

I have decided to make Mozilla.org my site of the day. For those that are still feeding themselves alive to the Beast of Redmond (that’s Microsoft, if you hadn’t already caught on), Mozilla is a free, open source web browser, source editor, and email client build by thousands of the best developers around the world. The latest version, Mozilla 1.4, is available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and FreeBSD.
After downloading it, you might notice that it looks a lot like Netscape 6/7 (when using the “Modern” theme). Surprise! When AOL purchased Netscape in 1998, they decided to make the browser open source and free to allow everyone to work on it and make it better. So, Mozilla and Netscape are one and the same, with a few minor changes. Still, the latest Mozilla build is always more advanced than the latest Netscape version because each new edition of Netscape has to go through extra checks and marketing and all that corporate stuff before it becomes available to the public. Though the latest version of Mozilla is 1.4, Netscape 7.1 is probably built from Mozilla 1.2/3.

Mozilla has a lot of features Internet Distorter (a nickname for IE because its rendering engine doesn’t follow World Wide Web Consortium standards as well as other browsers’.) does not include, such as a popup blocker, built in Google, DMOZ, or in-page search, mail client, source editor, and smarter AutoComplete/password saving capabilities. It’s definitely worth a try.

The compressed, barebones version of Mozilla, MozillaFirebird, which lacks Composer and the mail client (also available by itself as MozillaThunderbird), will soon be the core browser since it is stabler, sleeker, and has an interface based on XUL, making it extremely customizable. You might download this if you are an advanced user.

I picked their site not only because of their products, but because it has been newly redesigned, too. Design can be a major factor in how much a user wants to use a site, and I include that factor in my reviews.

I will begin to record the 11-page Wal-Mart tale today, so be ready for some wacky, pointless tales of the Bentonville Behemoth.