badmojo74

I haven't jumped on the Chrome bandwagon yet, so I still think Firefox is slicker than two eels humpin' in a bucket of snot. 

Even though my favorite part of Firefox is the add ons, I've come to realize that I'm taking the precious little thing for granted.  I just think of them as part of Firefox, use them, and throw them away like a kleenex or a hooker with a glass eye.  OK, maybe not that last bit, but when you really think about it there's something very cool about having so many useful free apps to add to your browser.

It wasn't that long ago that you could have any functionality you want with Internet Explorer...as long as Microsoft bothered to include it in the program in the first place.  No skins, no add ons, just plain old IE and its "special" way of rendering HTML.

So, here's a shout out to some of my favorite Firefox add ons.  Does it sound stupid when I say "shout out"?

1) Twitterfox  - I use it to update Twitter.  It tells me when new tweets come in and it's reasonably unobtrusive.  That's the "less than 140 characters" description.

2) Foxytunes - I like to listen to music while I'm doing stuff online and with a reasonably large iTunes library I tend to forget what the hell I've got in my collection.  Foxytunes lets me see the artist and song title at the bottom of my browser as well as letting me pause, stop and skip tracks (among other things).  I can also click on the song title and get some information on the artist, song and album.  That last function has been hit or miss for me, but I still love this one and use it almost daily.  It supports a suprising number of audio players, from Foobar 2000 to Windows Media Player (and nearly everything else in between).

3) Flagfox - This one is kind of silly but fun.  It displays a little flag in the address bar that shows me the location of the server on the site I'm visiting.  Useless but still fun and easily ignored if you lose interest.

4) Scribefire - A blog editor I've just started using.  I'm still figuring out what it can and can't do, but it seems like a fairly simple way for me to maintain both Livejournal and Blogger.  I'm not sure why I'm keeping up two blogs that nobody reads, but at least this makes it easier.

5) Download Helper - Lets me yoink Flash (and other video) as well as some streaming audio from websites.  I don't use it often but sometimes there's a flash video that I really want to save for posterity.

So, what are some of your favorites?

I finished Paul S. Kemp's book, "Shadowrealm", a few days ago and posted a review on Amazon.com. I'd imagine the review will be posted up there in a day or two. I'll post a copy here as well in case anyone is interested.

I'm too tired right now to say anything particularly eloquent, but this was a book that managed to choke me up a little bit in a few parts. This was one of the few books I've read lately where the ending went exactly where I felt it should logically, yet was still incredibly satisfying.

For those of you keeping track (I don't think I'm even keeping track) the first book I'm reading for 2009 is Simon Scarrow's "Under the Eagle". It's historical/military fiction set in Germany around 42 AD. The book has some problems with "point of view" but I can tell it's going to be a light, fun read. It reminds me a bit of a book about Pullo and Vorenus from the HBO TV series "Rome"; come to thnk of it, that's probably what motivated me to pick it.

Edit: Still cross-posting from Blogger. Unfortunately, I'm still doing it manually.

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Listening to: Ennio Morricone - L'Arena
http://foxytunes.com/artist/ennio+morricone/track/larena