EdKopp4

It's been a fairly long time coming, but the latest major version of the popular Firefox browser is now available for download at Mozilla's website. I've been using it since late this afternoon, and so far I'm fairly happy with it. As often happens with new releases of Firefox, many of my favorite extensions were broken by the release. I could enable them using Nightly Tester Tools, but I have a fear that doing so might turn on an add-on that really shouldn't be turned on right now, leading to unpredictable behavior and a crashing browser. I don't think I'll have to wait long for my add-ons though. In the past, add-on creators, especially those responsible for more popular add-ons, have been very good about quickly updating their works not long after a new update is released. In terms of performance, I've been pretty impressed with the speed of this latest Firefox version. It seems to work much better on JavaScript-full sites compared to before, with Hotmail working noticeably better and Gmail and reddit seeming to be a tiny bit faster. I still want to say that Chrome makes pages load and work a bit faster than 3.5, but it's really hard to say. I have a feeling that some sites will work a tiny bit better in one while others work better in the other. Regarding the rest of the application, the menus seem to be a bit more clunky than before with their opening being a bit delayed. This could very easily be caused by one or more of my extensions, though. I have been pretty surprised by the awesome bar. I don't know if it has to do with me no longer needing the Hide Unvisited extension, but the awesome bar seems to load URLs as I type significantly faster than it was able to in the last version, in which I often observed a noticeable lag. Between its better JavaScript performance, Private Browsing mode, and other new or improved features, I think Firefox 3.5 should turn out to be a pretty good browser choice for most people, especially once the add-ons catch up.

After a fairly long but expected wait, USA Network's awesome series Burn Notice will be returning with new episodes starting this Thursday, 6/4/2009, at 9 PM EST. You may remember that it used to be on at a different time, but they've stuck it at 9 PM so it can be used as a lead-in for USA's new series Royal Pains. Royal Pains doesn't have me very excited, but Burn Notice certainly does. It's delivered consistently over the past two seasons with great action, characters, and stories, and I expect this will continue. The end of last season was particularly good, thanks in part to the addition of Stargate SG-1's Daniel Jackson (What? That's not his name? Oh, that's right.). When last we left Michael Westen, he was finally free of the people who burned him and will no longer be forced to do their every (usually illegal) desired operation. However, he's still considered burned, meaning that he still has no spy job and no public employment history. Except for his friends and family, he's on his own, and neither the US government nor the people that burned him will protect him. This means that he's now at risk from anyone he may have crossed while he was a spy. This should be quite a season, and the slightly new premise leaves him open to a much wider variety of confrontations. In all, I'm very excited and hopeful about this season. If you've missed the last two seasons and want to catch up, you should check out USA Network on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, during which they'll be showing Burn Notice marathons, including all the episodes from the first two seasons.

In addition to beholding the power of cheese, I'm also fond of beholding the power of awesome websites. To that end, I tend to be rather prolific when it comes to signing up for and trying out neat websites. In this Web 2.0 age, you can find a website that does nearly anything you want or gives you any bit of information you may be looking for. One of my favorite websites definitely has to be Yelp. It's not an incredibly flashy site, but it's an excellent resource if you're trying to learn about local businesses. In particular, I find its reviews and photos for local restaurants to be a tremendously useful resource when I'm trying to learn about a restaurant or find a new one. I learned of many a great dining location in Boston and Tampa thanks to this site. You have to be careful when you're looking at reviews and ratings and remember that everyone has a bias or may have had an unusually good or bad experience. Of course, this is true of any work of writing, reviews in particular. If you look with a discerning eye at the reviews of places near you, I'm quite sure you'll be impressed by Yelp's ability to point you to excellent restaurants.

Many people sign up for Yelp with the intention of writing reviews on the site. While I do hope to write some restaurant reviews at some point in the future, I expect that I'll likely keep those reviews here on this blog instead of on Yelp. Instead, I use Yelp as a way of keeping track of many of my favorite restaurants. By looking at my list of bookmarked places on Yelp, you can see in one easy list many of my favorite food destinations in Boston and Tampa plus some others as well. Thanks to this list, you get easy access to the address, phone number, ratings, reviews, and other Yelp information bits for all these places. One really handy feature of this page is the map in the right hand column that shows markers for all these locations. By zooming in on different parts of the map, you can see the physical locations of my favorite places relative to one another and the layout of the city. While this is the main thing I use Yelp for, I also occasionally upload photos of my favorite restaurants and markets when I see that the place is missing a photo or if I think mine adds something to the quality of place's photo album. At the moment I have 34 photos uploaded, and I'll upload more in the future if I see a need. In all, Yelp is a really useful, easy-to-use website that makes expanding one's culinary horizons and learning about the area around you about as simple as can be. You can check out my "local photos" by going here, and you can visit my Yelp profile page by going here.

As TechCrunch and other sites have recently mentioned, Microsoft will be shutting down its long-running digital encyclopedia Encarta at the end of October. I admit that I practically never use this service anymore with the accuracy and ease of Wikipedia waiting just a few clicks away, but I am a bit sad to see this service go away. We've already seen numerous restaurants, stores, newspapers, and other businesses close in recent months, and it seems that web services aren't safe either, with their owners facing increasing financial pressure to have their web services yield a decent profit or face having to shut them down completely. While I won't miss Encarta in my daily life, I will look back on it with fond memories whenever I think of computers and the internet in the pre-Wikipedia era.

Especially in the late 1990's, Encarta provided me with a wealth of information and images. Finding content was incredibly easy thanks to its search feature, and it tended to provide much more up-to-date and detailed information than a traditional set of hardcover encyclopedias. In my dial-up internet days, and even in my early broadband days, such a wealth of easy-to-access information was a rarity, and Encarta provided me with much-needed information when I was pressed with the occasional information-requiring paper to write or a curiosity to be satisfied. The web we have now is very different from the one that existed then, and it seems that Encarta has been rendered irrelevant by the likes of Wikipedia. I hope that as it closes Encarta, Microsoft has the generosity to donate some if not all of its encyclopedia entries and images to the public domain. Wikipedia is generally accurate and thorough, but it could still benefit from the wealth of well-written entries and images compiled over the years by Encarta. Such a move would be a very nice gesture and would certainly benefit current and future people who rely on the internet for their information. Goodbye, Encarta. You served your purpose well and will be remembered fondly.

As some people who have been following my Twitter feed might know, I was recently at JFK airport in New York City for a short while on my layover going from Tampa to Chicago and on the one from Chicago to Tampa. My experience was generally a good one, but I was very disappointed to find that JetBlue's fancy new Terminal 5 was completely devoid of an authentic (or even semi-authentic) New York-style pizza place. I had really hoped that I would be able to use this rare opportunity to further expand my food horizons and enjoy a New York-style slice in the general vicinity of its origin, but it just wasn't meant to be. I would have even made do with a semi-authentic variation of the New York-style, like Pizzeria Uno does with its airport offerings, where you get the general gist of a Chicago-style pizza without the usual Chicago-style thickness or size. All I could find instead were overpriced bar and grill restaurants, really overpriced bar and grill restaurants, a sushi bar, and an overpriced food court.

In the end, I appeased my hunger with two Sicilian-style pepperoni pizza slices and one regular pepperoni slice from the pizza place in the food court that tries to be like a Roman pizza place. After having been to Rome recently and having tried good Sicilian-style pizza at Galleria Umberto in Boston, I can say with a great deal of confidence that the Roman pizza wasn't what you would get in Rome, with the crust being reasonably similar but nowhere near the same quality and the toppings being inferior, and the Sicilian-style slices were like what you would get at Galleria Umberto but with inferior ingredients, not as hot and fresh, and not as much cheese. In all, I'd say it was a decent, rather expensive meal that was heading in the general direction of the intended pizza styles but fell far short. I won't complain too much, though, because that's just what I would expect with airport food.

I think that in its efforts to look trendy and appeal to wealthy travelers, the folks at JFK who were responsible for designing this new terminal really missed the mark in some respects. Yes, there is a decent amount of seating, although I much prefer cushioned seats like those in Tampa. Yes, there are charging stations where you can easily charge your mobile device with a plethora of power outlets. Yes, you have numerous rows of touchscreen-based delivered-to-your-seat dining stations. However, when I go to an airport, especially an airport in a famous, old, diverse, culture-rich city like New York City, I don't want to go to expensive stores, overpriced generic restaurants, or knockoffs of good foreign food. Instead, I want to get at least a taste of what the city and the surrounding area is really like, and the best way I can think of accomplishing that would be to provide a decent number of restaurants and food court stalls that offer local cuisine, in particular New York-style pizza. Even if it is a bit overpriced (this is an airport, after all), I and I'm sure many other curious or cash-limited travelers would quickly seize the opportunity to grab a real slice of New York cuisine. I don't want to feel like I'm in one of many overpriced malls when I'm in your airport. I want to feel like I'm in the gateway to "the greatest city in the world" (as they would say in the opening sequence to The Late Show). I hope that the people in power at John F. Kennedy International Airport come to their senses soon, but as long as customers appear to be reasonably happy and the vendors continue making enough profit, things will stay the same, and it really is a shame. What could have been a welcoming taste of what New York City has to offer is instead a cultureless, albeit pretty and comfortable, expensive shopping mall that doubles as an airline terminal.

If you like sci-fi shows or fun-filled detective shows, then tonight is the night for you. With its fifth season coming to a close, Stargate Atlantis' series finale will be shown tonight at 9 PM (EST) on SciFi. It's been a pretty good run, albeit shorter than that of its predecessor, Stargate SG-1, which lasted for an impressive ten seasons. Tonight's episode promises conflict, action, and hopefully some story resolution to give at least a little closure to the character and story arcs formed over these five seasons. Also on tonight is the season premiere of the final season of Monk. This has been a great show and a favorite of mine, so it's sad to think that it will be leaving soon, but at least we have one last season to enjoy. That episode will also be shown at 9 PM (EST) on USA Network, but if you want to watch both episodes like I do, then you should be able to catch the reshowing of the same episodes later tonight. USA will be reshowing the new Monk episode at midnight, and SciFi will be reshowing Atlantis at 11 PM. This is what my Verizon FiOS TV guide tells me, anyway. Happy viewing.

I hope everyone has a wonderful Christmas. Whether you're having a white Christmas with lots of snow on the ground or a warm Christmas like I am (with the temperature supposed to get up to almost 80 degrees today), I hope you have a festive, fun day filled with presents, family, friends, good food, and lots of cheer. I'll leave you with a picture of my family's Christmas tree. Enjoy, and have a safe, merry Christmas.

I finally got the New Xbox Experience on my Xbox 360 this past Friday after signing up for the NXE Preview through Microsoft Connect towards the end of October. I was lucky enough to sign up during the short window before all of the slots filled up, but I wasn't lucky enough to get accepted into the preview in the first or second waves. Finally, in the third wave of granting people access to the NXE, I was chosen, and as a result my console updated this past Friday, November 14th. The very first thing you do after updating your console and seeing the welcome video is to set up an avatar, and I must admit that it was a lot more fun than I expected. There weren't enough clothing options, but there were far more possibilities for facial features and such than I had expected. I really hope that Microsoft keeps adding more options, and I trust that many of these additional options are kept free of charge. I could see myself coming back to my avatar and customizing it now and then to change up its appearance a bit as long as there are numerous free options. As it stands, my avatar looks a great deal like me (well, as much as a cartoonish avatar with limited customization options can).

Thanks to the update Microsoft made to Xbox.com last night, you can now see my avatar, as well as that of any other Xbox Live member who has one, right on their Xbox.com profile. Everyone not in the Preview will have to wait until tomorrow to download the NXE and customize their avatar, but that's not too long. The wait is almost over. In the mean time, you can enjoy a look at my avatar below.

Today, November 11th, is a great day. Not only is it Veterans Day (formerly known as Armistice Day), and as a result a national holiday, but it's also my birthday. In less than two hours at 11:00 AM (EST), I will turn 23 years old. It is remarkable how quickly time passes. It seems like just yesterday I was turning 21, and not long before that I had my 16th birthday. As a side note, today, more specifically 11 AM today, will also mark the 90th anniversary of the end of World War I. So, mark that on your calendar. 11 AM today is my 23rd birthday and the 90th anniversary of the end of the Great War. So far I've been watching some World War II footage on the Military Channel to commemorate Veterans Day. Later, I'll be opening presents, spending time with family, and having some tasty Italian food from Castellano & Pizzo for dinner. In addition, I'll be having some ice cream cake from Publix for dessert, or possibly for an appetizer (or both). I hope everyone has a wonderful day today.

I've been toying around with Windows Live Photo Gallery for some time now, and even still I am impressed by it. At the most basic level, it's meant to make viewing, organizing, and uploading your photos a breeze, with some basic other features built in such as being able to crop a photo. It succeeds quite easily in all these areas, and for these features alone it would be a great piece of free software to have on your PC. However, Microsoft also managed to toss in some added features that make Photo Gallery really stand out. My favorite of these is the ability to create a panorama by having the software automatically stitch together select photos taken of the same place. Before I tried it for the first time, I couldn't imagine that it would work very well. I'd seen other software before that could create panoramas, but you had to tell it what parts of each photo are shared among the photos.

With Photo Gallery, Microsoft has managed to make it as easy as selecting a few photos and clicking the button, then out pops a perfect or near-perfect panorama photo, with each individual photo aligned in the new photo so that they blend together properly. It amazed me the first time I saw it, and it still amazes me each time I see it. It's especially impressive if the photos you're using are of a grand scene that's impressive in its own right. Whereas before all you could do was look at each piece of a vista on its own by looking at each individual photo, which at best captured one part of the overall picture, now you can blend them all together so you can truly appreciate the view just as you did when the pictures were taken. When used properly, you can feel like you're back at the place where you took the photos. I especially found this to be the case with the photos I took of certain places in Rome. To see my current gallery of stitches I've made using Windows Live Photo Gallery, you can go to the photos section of my Windows Live Space and click on the album titled "Windows Live Photo Gallery Stitches." Not all of them were blended together perfectly, but I think that in most if not all of the cases this was merely the result of trying to stitch together photos that weren't taken from the exact same location, which is critical for an accurate stitch. In all, though, I now have a collection of mostly-perfect panoramas from around the world, through which I can relive what it was like to be standing in each place the photos were originally taken. You may not be able to tell from the photos in my online gallery because they've been reduced in size for online viewing, but the stitches I have on my computer maintain all the original details and resolution of the photos used to make the stitch. If you were to open up one of them, you would be able to zoom in and see just as much detail as was in the individual photos. As a result, these panoramic photos are near-perfect blendings of smaller photos, giving one larger, more impressive photo of a place with all the original detail found in the photos that make it up.

If you want to make your own stitches, then you first need to get some photos that will work. You may already have some photos that qualify, or you may need to take some new ones just to make the stitch. Either way, for a photo to work with Windows Live Photo Gallery's stitching tool, each photo needs to be taken from the exact same place. This means that, as the photographer, you need to have the camera positioned at the same height and location for each shot. You can then move a little either to the right or left (or any direction really - up and down, diagonal, whatever you like) and continue taking photos. While you're doing this, be sure that part of each photo overlaps the one next to it (usually the one taken just prior to taking the photo). For best results, only move the camera a little for each photo so that each consecutive photo has a lot of overlap. This will give you a more perfect, smooth resulting stitch. Now, download and install Windows Live Photo Gallery from here. Once that's done, open Photo Gallery and select the photos you just acquired by selecting the proper folder on the left. Select each photo you'll be using for the stitch (which can be done by dragging the cursor to highlight the appropriate photos or by holding down the Ctrl key and selecting each photo individually). Next, click on "Make" in the top bar of the program and select "Create panoramic photo..." from the drop-down menu. Photo Gallery will then show you its progress and ask you where to save the file. Tell it the location and file name you want to use and you're all set. You should now have a beautiful panoramic photo blending together the photos you selected. You may just feel like you're right back where you took those photos.