Trimmings

I love long weekends. This one's drawing to a close, but I feel pretty good about it, 'cause I got a lot accomplished. I put a big dent in my Christmas shopping, for one. I slept a lot. I did part of my laundry. I spent some time on Monday with my mom. And I redyed my hair today, and I did a better job this time -- less chunky, more subtle.

It's December, and that means Advent Calendar on Neo, aka The Season of Free Stuff. Huzzah for free stuff. I'm using the occasion to sell off all of the stuff from last year -- those Onas look to be going for a decent amount, though sadly, the battle ducks still aren't, really.

I should make a new holiday mix CD, combine the best of the new BNL stuff with some of the stuff on my old mix CD. I wonder, though, is there a way to make an mp3 louder? I've noticed that on my old CD, some of the songs are really, really quiet -- it's just the way the files were originally created, I guess, but it's annoying 'cause I have to turn the volume up and down as I listen to the CD.

Work tomorrow, another four-day week. It's planning meeting day, so that oughta be cool. And hopefully I'll get clued in on everything I missed. I always miss a lot of stuff -- everything seems to happen on Tuesdays, for some reason, all of the hirings and firings and policy changes and whatnot.

I've got my autumn candle lit, finally. When I bought it, I was ahead of the season -- it was like September, I think, when I picked up this harvest-y candle. But it took forever for the last one to burn down. That's a good thing, though, really -- if I'm gonna pay a bajillion dollars for a candle, at least it's good to know that it'll last a while.

Reason No. 101 to love Firefox

ForecastFox. Damn, this is handy. The ForecastFox extension puts icons for the weather forecast into the status bar, so you know what the forecast is without having to click around through weather.com. Pretty damned handy. Extensions rock. I also have the BugMeNot extension, handy for those password-requiring newspaper sites and stuff like that. Amazingly enough, while many users seem to have tons of extensions, I only have those two. That's the beauty of Firefox -- keep it small or add on a ton of extensions, you only get the amount of browser you want with a minimum of memory-hogging clutter.

I tell ya, Firefox proves itself to be more handy every day. One of my favorite parts is the customizable search box, automatically sitting at the upper right -- just type in the search term, click to pull down the list of engines you have installed and pick the one you need (it uses Google by default) and hit enter. Faster than ever, there you are, search results without the tedious click-in-the-address-bar, type-google.com, hit-enter, click-in-the-search-box, type-search term-and-hit-enter. And you can quickly and easily add as many engines as you want. The only one I haven't yet found an add-on for is tv.yahoo.com, but that's not exactly a pressing need -- I can live until someone makes one. It comes by default loaded with Google, Amazon, Dictionary.com and eBay (plus Creative Commons, which I'd never heard of), and I added Merriam-Webster and Wikipedia.

Whipped up a new icon

Anyone wants it, go nuts. Probably not worth bothering with a credit -- I just rejiggered the design a bit from another similar icon.