I'd like to wish a Happy Birthday to my brother (how cute is that picture of my brother and I??) and to the United States!

My brother is pretty much one of my favourite people on earth and has been ever since I was a baby. I adored him from the time I laid eyes on him and looked up to him as only an adoring sister could. I followed him around everywhere and wanted to be just like him. Sure we had our stormy years (the teenage years are never the best for siblings) but as we have matured into adulthood I have really come to appreciate and love him that much more. We have a quiet but strong bond and have a great time whenever we get together. Sometimes just a glance in each others direction can set us off into a laughing fit. And there is nothing funnier to watch than my brother watching cartoons (especially the Simpsons). I'll just stare at him as he watches cartoons so I can watch the expressions on his face and hear the laughter that erupts with complete abandonment; it has been like this since he was a child.
Anyway, my family and I got together last night and had dinner in a nice restaurant up the street to celebrate his birthday. It was a fabulous time. *sigh* I love my brother.

In other news, I have been obsessively working on fine tuning the Firefox browser in the hopes of replacing my use of Internet Explorer. There are a lot of great features that I am loving about Firefox; (1) built in popup stopper. Genius!! And it works and has great settings so you can quickly add websites in which you want popups allowed. (2) Tabs instead of windows. That is to say, if you want to open a link in a separate window it will open a new tab within your browser instead of launching a separate browser window, taking up space in your bottom toolbar. So basically, you can have several webpages open within one window and quickly switch between pages using tabs just under your links bar. Friggin' AWESOME. (it's explained better here, in case I thoroughly confused you just now) (3) great quick-links toolbar under the address bar. I can put way more links in, which is fantastic coz I am all about being one click away from pages I visit frequently. (4) Themes (skins) for the browser. I am a sucker for slick looking skins on plug-ins and such, and you can download lots of skins for your browser and quickly switch back and forth to new looks if you feel the need for a change. Very cool. (5) Beside the address bar at the top of the browser is a tiny little Google search window. Me likes that I don't have to open a new window/tab to do a search. Don't like Google? No problem, you can add other search engines and use them instead! (5) A streamlined browser window that lets you see more of the page than any other browser. Coz who doesn't want to see more of the page they are looking at?? (6) I don't know about anyone else, but Internet Explorer crashes on me at least a couple of times a day. Firefox *seems* to be more stable, and isn't susceptible to the new hacker problems plaguing IE lately. That's some scary shit.

Drawbacks: (1) It's a bit of a pain to sort bookmarks, which is a beef with me because I am highly organized with my bookmarks. I have to be, I have hundreds. I had to install a plugin that sorts the bookmarks which didn't take long at all (seconds, really) but still...I shouldn't have to do that. That's ok, I think it's a sacrifice I'm willing to overlook. Now that I have the bookmarks sorted I'm getting over my annoyance. (2) You have to install Java and Flash again. Took me a bit of time to get Java installed properly since I apparently don't know what I'm doing, but if I can stumble my way through it, anyone can. And, admittedly, I like how Java is looking in Firefox. It's way cooler. (3) I hate the way my own blog looks in this browser. How much does that suck? For some reason it makes it look like my entry was written entirely in bold font. That really chaps my ass since I am a freak about my blog looking "just so" and it sure doesn't look like how I want it to in Firefox. Let's face it, I'm on my blog a million times a day and it might just make me crazy that it looks crap in this browser. Hey, not everything is perfect, I'll have to agree on compromise.

I'm sure there are lots more features and benefits to this browser I haven't found yet as I have only been using it for one day and have spent most of that time configuring it. Here is a screen shot that nicely shows the tabs I mentioned (shown under the links navigation bar) and overall look of the browser (all of which can be configured and skinned). That would be a screenshot of MY screen so you can have a look at what my blog looks like with it, and my peeve about the bolded looking font. You can also see my links if you like (ya snoops!). I think Crawler and Rat use this browser, don't you guys? Speak up if you do and maybe offer some words of wisdom on what you have learned.
Did I mention it has a built in popup stopper??? *Dreamy!*

Other than that, today is a rainy, laid back day. I have been up for hours but have yet to eat; I have been too absorbed in my new browser. Later on my geek friends and I (aka: the geek brigade) are getting together to see Spider-Man 2. I am trying not to get my hopes up about how good it is, but everyone keeps saying it's better than the first (including my brother and he's a harsh critic) which is good coz I didn't like the first one very much. *fingers crossed* I'll let you know what I thought......