I’ve been in Alaska all July. The trip was a pseudo-high-school-graduation present from my family in lieu of allowing me to go on a trip over spring break. (I wouldn’t have actually gone anywhere because I don’t care about that sort of thing whatsoever, but I’m not complaining over a free trip.)

While I was gone I managed to keep up a very, very, very slight amount with what I normally follow in life. Just as a random, spur-of-the-moment post, I’m going to list some of the stuff that’s happened and stuff I’ve missed. Some will be news from websites, and some will be real news. Some will be interesting, and some will be esoteric (probably more of the latter than the former, but I’m the one writing). This could be long, so in the immortal words of a character from Jurassic Park, “Hold onto your butts.” (That line’s so goofy I can’t resist using it.)

2100+ email messages

How so? Interestingly enough, virtually 0% is spam because my email address is new and I’m guarding it ferociously. My main contributors are messages on various bugs in some free software I enjoy using and messages from a competitive Scrabble mailing list. The number is so massive my email client’s freezing on me, and while I’ve successfully downloaded the message headers, I can’t seem to download the messages themselves, which is rather problematic. I’m still working on it…

Lance Armstrong wins a record 6th Tour de France

I did keep up on this throughout the trip via the Anchorage Daily News, tho I was disappointed the coverage was so minimal. He’d get a blip on the front page of Sports and nothing more, not even after the end of the race. That’s America, tho – the mixed-up sports priorities in the US can be extremely annoying.

Interesting discussions on controversial issues

A comment on prayer and a rant on abortion generate loads of dialogue (which I haven’t read so much as skimmed simply because of the sheer volume of it). I generally agree with Gerv and his viewpoints as I’m a Christian too, although I believe I disagree over abortions always being wrong. If in a hypothetical situation an abortion could save the life of the mother, then an abortion might be viable. In this hypothetical situation, either one or the other will die, so I’m uncertain how either choice can be absolutely wrong. In this situation I believe there is no murder, because both action and inaction will result in a death. It’s roughly analogous to the situation with cojoined twins: does one separate and risk a death or leave together and leave partially disabled? The problem is, however, that these hypothetical situations tend to be expanded way too far if abortions are legal (and indeed, I’m not sure if such a situation can even exist because it’s been expanded so much in America). If the choice of whether to have a baby or not must be made, it should have been made before conception (rape being the unfortunate exception as the child is the rapist’s choice). If the choice to save the mother or save the child must be made, I can’t rationalize one choice over the other. However, I’m open to arguments. However, if there is no choice over whether to save the mother or save the child, then abortion is always murder, even in cases of rape. (Now, if this was anywhere near as coherent as I’d like, consider yourself lucky. I’m still suffering jet lag.)

Cookies are no longer delicious delicacies

If you’ve used the web browser Firefox before, you’ll know what I mean. It’s sad, really. I really liked that text.

Favicons work right in Firefox

Per this post by Asa Dotzler. Awesome. I’ve missed way too much development in this month off.

Firefox 0.9.2

Completely unexpected.

Firefox Help changes

I don’t know what, but I’ve seen a few suspicious checkins. I’ve got a ton of work to do today and tomorrow on this, because I’ve got one last mini-vacation for the next week and I’d like to finish the biggies before PR1.0 (or whatever it’s called now that RC1 is out).

I have a couple other posts gestating right now, so maybe I’ll have something else reasonably soon. The current topics include my experiences with Linux distros (Fedora Core 2 in particular, my current poison of choice) and an informed review of Winstripe as a followup from my original less-informed post. (I will get to that one because of a comment reply I received to the original post. I’m still not sure whether I’ll keep the old commentary I’d written because it’s so out-of-date, but I’m looking forward to posting that one in particular.)