I started writing something about my thoughts for this year but it got to be really stupid. So I'm just going to post the most insightful part:

"...I think if I moved out on my own, I would do pretty well for three months. After that I'd probably go native by taking three or four wives, rasing a flock of sheep and hiring a shaman. Wouldn't it be awesome to have your own shaman? Or maybe a parrot named Shaman. And an eyepatch. Argh!"

That's all. Have a happy new year everyone. Yes, you too Sri.

Last week, an e-mail requesting my urgent response slipped through GMail's filters. Normally, I would have responded to such a desparate cry for assistance except this one confused me. It starts out with, "Dear Sir/Mama:" WTF? Sir/Mama? Am I this gentleman's mama? To my knowledge, I have never been pregnant. Actually, I feel very strongly about this issue. I intend to never become pregnant because I find it somewhat unnatural for me to bear an offspring inside of me. Now, I'm not saying that I find pregnancy unnatural, just that my own pregnancy would be somewhat unnatural. Right. Anyway, since the e-mail requested confidentiality, I won't go into specifics, but a certain man named X, who is the son of Y, former Minister of Z of the Q government has fled to country W because his father was wrongfully accused of V. With Mr. X in W is his mother. Wait a minute, his mama? Didn't his salutation suggest that I am his mama? (Now can you see what confused me so much?) So here is a man who is hiding from the Q army with a woman who is pretending to be his mother while he knows that I am his mother. Who is this woman and what does she want with this honest, innocent gentleman? Concerned, I did what any mama/419 scam victim would do in this situation: Google the name of this vile motherly temptress. It turns out, another one of her "sons" had requested assistance because his father, former Minister of Z for country Q was wrongfully accused of V and needed help laundering (I mean, securely transfering) his vast wealth out of country K. Ah ha! So this "mother" has gotten to two of the Minister of Z's sons. (But for some reason, the name of this father is different in the two e-mails. Hmm, the plot sickens.) Obviously I need to rescue my child from the clutches of this evil witch, but I need to do it without her knowing. What should I do???

Serenity comes out on DVD Tuesday and lo and behold, Netflix says it'll ship it out to me on Tuesday. Which means I can finally watch it on Wednesday! Badass!

Speaking of badass, all heros need to have some sort of ass-kicking music. This is music that's played in the background while said hero is kicking ass. I'd have to say that Madlax has the best ass-kicking music out there. I might even go so far as to say it has the most kick-ass ass-kicking music. With someone chanting "Yanmani! Yanmani!" in the background, it's no wonder she can kick so much ass. Kira Yamato, you really should ditch that Meteor junk and get some chanting going. You wouldn't want to get pwn3d by Shinn in Gundam Seed Destiny II: A Rehash of a Rehash now, would you? What would Lacus think?

A couple days ago, I said I was feeling sick. Well, I'm not anymore. In fact, I wasn't feeling sick when I woke up yesterday also. This leads me to wonder if I was ever actually sick, why I'm not feeling sick anymore, and where that sickness went. It's like the illness put on a dark cloak, said, "At last we will reveal ourselves to the people. At last we will have revenge," and then got chopped in half and fell down a hole. But not before creeping around with some of those hovering probe droids.

It's too bad. I was all psyched that I could take a sick day. Darn. However, I am not one to give up. Every evening presents a new opportunity to get sick and I am not one to pass up a good opportunity for something bad to happen. Definitive proof that I don't shy away from bad things lies in the fact that I get out of bed every morning.

My company is doing that Salvation Army Giving Tree thing where you take a tag off of a tree (or a wall, in our case) and buy a gift of the type that is specified on the tag. I took one that reqeuested an educational toy for a six-year-old boy. (If Sri were reading this, he'd say, "That rhymes, it is not crap," but Sri doesn't read this blah blah blah this is getting old blah blah blah.) So I went toy shopping for an educational toy this week. It's strange -- I have trouble considering anything that doesn't run on batteries an educational toy. I mean, how do you learn anything from something that doesn't use batteries (or plug into a wall)? What sort of educational toy these days doesn't use batteries? Books don't count (and I'm talking about books that don't use batteries) because they're not really toys. You don't play with books unless you have a lot of them and you want to build a fort. Someone said that Legos are educational toys but really, what does a set of interlocking plastic blocks teach a kid about the vast reality we call our world? OK, maybe a globe can be considered educational. I can't think of how it can be considered a toy though. Well, I can, but then it wouldn't be very educational if you use a globe in the way that I'm thinking about. They have sea monkeys in the educational toy section. I'm not sure how those are educational either unless they create their own civilization like that South Park episode. But you'd have to study those critters and that's boring.

I ended up getting a dinosaur excavation kit. It doesn't use batteries. I'm not sure how educational it is, but if I was six years old, I'd think it was pretty cool. Heck, I'm 25 and I think it's pretty cool. Comes with a pair of protective goggles too. Sweet.

An update? Why yes indeed.

This morning, two people in my group said they were out sick (actually, one guy was taking care of a sick kid). Another one left later in the morning and the last guy usually works at home or comes in late (he came in late today). So for a while, I was the only one in my group at work. Awesome. Yeah, awesome. Except that I'm beginning to feel sickly now. And our supply cabinet is out of tissues. What a perfect turn of events. Frigging disease- carrying co-workers.

I went to a wedding on Sunday. The groom was my mom's friend's son. I didn't know the people, but it turns out that the groom and a lot of his friends went to the same high school as me. He's like three years older. I think three years is beyond the high school threshold of knowing. He was probably a senior when I was a trash can accessory (ie. freshman). It seems like in high school, I knew a bunch of people my year and plus or minus a year, a few people plus or minus two years (plus two because of yearbook, minus two uh, also because of yearbook) and beyond that, no one really. I wonder if that's the result of my extreme anti-social nature or if that applies more universally.

That's all. I need to get back to being sickly.

The fine folks over at Mozilla released Firefox 1.5 not too long ago. And not too long ago (today) I decided to try it out. There's...nothing special about it. As usual, the default keybindings don't let you delete a line using CTRL-U. It pops up the source instead. How friggin' useful is that? Anyway, it appears that the location where this is set has changed, probably in an earlier release but I was still using 1.0.4 up until now. Instead of platformHTMLBindings.xml being in res/builtin/, it's now conveniently tucked away in a .jar file. Specifically, it's hidden in plain sight within chrome/toolkit.jar. I'm sure there's a correct way to do this, but I'm not one for being correct so here's what I did:

1. Copy toolkit.jar to a temporary directory
2. Unzip toolkit.jar (I used unzip to do it) It'll create a content/ directory with stuff in it.
3. Go to content/global and edit platformHTMLBindings.xml
4. Put <handler event="keypress" key="u" modifiers="control" command="cmd_deleteToBeginningOfLine" /> in the inputFields section
5. Zip up the content/ directory and everything in it into another toolkit.jar file
6. Replace the old toolkit.jar file with the new one
7. Restart furfox

It doesn't need to be this hard. What happened to the days where one could simply sic a text editor on an unsuspecting XML file and be home in time for dinner? Sigh.

Oh, and Flashblock doesn't work with 1.5. What The Flash is up with that? Hmm, maybe I should upgrade Flashblock. That would be smart.