I received The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures in the mail today from Q-Cow all the way over in the Philippines. This reminded me how lax I have been. I owe my copy of Beloved to Zoe1971 and The Lady and the Unicorn to Huakai. I am such a slacker. On Saturday! I promise! It shall be done. It is so cool to see your books going to or coming from foreign countries, I must say.

In other news, I have done everything I can about the identity theft. I have closed the account they broke into, filed a police report, filed a claim with the FTC, and notified the credit bureaus. Now I sit and wait for the proper authorities to do their work.

I’m still really happy with Firefox, and I’ve told everyone I know about it. My dad downloaded it. He felt the only downside to it was not having ActiveX. Actually, Firefox doesn’t recommend using ActiveX. My dad plays some games that rely on it. I figure just use IE to do that, but nothing else. ActiveX is most of IE’s problem: it allows hackers to hijack your computer. Also makes it easy for them to install spyware. I’m going to monitor the amount of spyware I get since using Firefox using my Ad-aware and Spybot Search and Destroy programs. I bet I’ll find less. Firefox has a built-in pop-up blocker that works better than the one in either Google Toolbar or Yahoo Toolbar (which is only supported in IE). Both of those programs always let some pop-ups through when I used them (although they do work pretty well and are better than nothing). I haven’t had one single pop-up using Firefox. Sometimes, I noticed that pages with pop-ups loaded slowly in IE as the toobars tried to block the pop-ups. Not the case with Firefox. I found this article interesting, as well. I have to agree with the author: “I have been using it [Firefox] for a week now and I’ve all but forgotten about Explorer.” Keep in mind that Slate is owned by Microsoft, if “MSN” in the URL and the butterly logo didn’t alert you to that fact already.

I like the large number of extensions available. I got the Dictionary Search extension, which allows you to highlight a word, right-click on your mouse, and look it up in the dictionary. I have configured mine so that I can look up words in Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary and Thesaurus and Wikipedia. There are other online dictionaries and references you can configure it to use, including foreign language dictionaries. I’ve already used this feature so much that I don’t know how I got along without it. I will convert all of you yet. Oh yes, or bore you to death trying.

Is Wikipedia the best thing since sliced bread or what? Seems like you can look up anything in there. You can spend a long time there, just jumping from link to link.

One more thing before I go. I have stopped using the target=”_blank” attribute in my links. I used to like it, because I would forget to right-click on links and open them in new windows. I like to be able to switch back and forth between pages, and I don’t like using the back button, because I lose my place. I guess that was my way of forcing everyone who followed my links to surf like I do. No one ever complained (thank you!), but I figure if you want to open a new window, you can do that by right-clicking. I have discovered that W3C no longer supports the target attribute. Also, I have read that a lot of users don’t like it, so now I am allowing you to control whether you want links to open in a new window or not. I myself have been taking advantage of using the multiple-tabs available in Firefox. I love that. Opera offers that, too. I is going to take some time to remove it from all the links on my blog. I don’t plan on going through my archives. That’s too much work. If you read something written pre-July 14, 2004, and click on a link, just know it will open in a new window unless you right-click on the link and force it not to.