Argh…apparently the DC Motor Vehicles people didn’t get my mail adjudication request in time. Or rather, perhaps they did get it, but didn’t get off their duff and open it in time. So I am now the bearer of a shiny new ticket, this time for $150. This was for the “red light violation” ticket I got, which was actually invalid because I was making a legal right turn on red. But they didn’t see my explanation, apparently - because surely requesting adjudication puts your “30 days till increased fine” on hold, right? So now I have to march my butt down to 301 C Street NW on Monday and tell them to find my damn adjudication request. I know I mailed it in time. Barely, but in time. Blargh.

Also, Firefox has decided to upchuck all over everything. It started with Tab Mix Plus not working all of a sudden, and then when I tried to reinstall it, it wouldn’t acknowledge that I had restarted multiple times already. So I’m now using Firefox 3 RC2, which is compatible with basically none of my favorite extensions. Ah well.

Those of you who read my RSS feed might have noticed an entry today about an unofficial Imageshack extension. That was because the one I found on the Imageshack site thought its maximum version was 1.5+, so I updated that to be up to 2.0+ and uploaded it to my site and everything was happy. (Well, it took a bit of fiddling, but then everything was happy.) But then I went to look at the original developer’s page (which I’d found by looking in the old version), and I discovered that he had already updated it to work with 2.0+.

So if you want a really easy way to grab images, go get Simon Pitfield’s Imageshack right-click Firefox extension. All you have to do is right click an image and click “Upload to Imageshack” and it does the rest for you.

eudyptes sent me to Firefox Flicks, where users can submit video testimonials for Firefox. The weekly winners get $50 Amazon gift certificates and Mozilla schwag, and the grand prize winner gets $500 from Amazon. So I made a long and fancy video testimonial, complete with subtitles, only to find out that Firefox Flicks insists that you upload directly through their site - and they only give you 30 seconds! So my nice script was pretty much useless, and I just said something along the lines of “Uhh…Firefox is great! It has lots of options! It’s a great product! Go ahead, try Firefox TODAY! What are you waiting for?!” So I made the fancy one into a blog entry instead, and uploaded it here. I won’t bother posting a translation here because it’s subtitled! (I’m not sure if I’ll try that again…it was kind of a pain.)

Added: The testimonial I actually submitted to them can be found here but it’s pretty cheesy.

I forgot to mention this earlier, but our kitty Amanita is apparently deaf. She’s probably about nine or ten years old, and she recently had ear mites, but those have been cleared up. We’re not sure how long she’s been deaf, but my brother-in-law pointed it out to us this morning so we did the usual tests and didn’t even get a flicked ear. We’re holding off on bringing her to the vet because she acts fine and we don’t really feel like dealing with another veterinary crisis right now.

I don’t think I like what Firefox 1.0 is doing to my machine. I know I don’t like it telling me “you are missing plugins” every time I load a page with Flash. (If I wanted a browser with Flash, I would open the page in IE.) I don’t think I’m going to use Live Bookmarks at all. It also feels like Firefox 1.0 is a bigger RAM hog than the previous version. (When you have just 64MB of RAM, a little difference matters a lot.) I think I’m going to “downgrade” and go back to 0.9.2, which I still have an installer on this machine. I’m going to try to back up as much of my data as possible, just in case I have to uninstall 1.0 in order to reinstall an earlier version. I definitely want to get this fixed before tomorrow, though - I don’t want to spend my day off trying to repair my computer!

Added: Well, that went very smoothly - I didn’t even have to reboot! While I was backing up my Firefox profile, though, I noticed that I only had about 130MB of space free on my C:\ drive. (It’s a 4-gig partition.) I deleted some software I’m not using, deleted duplicate copies of photographs that have already been posted online, and went looking for more ways to free up space. To my surprise, the root directory was harboring 190MB of file*.chk files and another 200MB is tied up in save2dsk.bin. (Yes, I’m running Windows 98 on a laptop.) I blasted those .chk files but I’m not too sure about the other one. A trip through the first several Google results reveals that it’s unclear whether or not this file is necessary for hibernation. I’m not sure how it got to be (or why it needs to be) 200MB, but I do put the laptop to sleep regularly (shutting it off after a couple of days) so I don’t want to mess with that. I now have 444MB free, so hopefully my swap file will be happy for a while.