Wisdom teeth

Yesterday, I underwent a procedure to remove my wisdom teeth. Back a few months ago, my orthodontist recomended that I get all four removed since there wouldn't be enough room in my mouth for them if they had grown in any further.

Then about three weeks ago, I visited an oral surgeon for a consultation, and the doctor told me basically what they'd do in the procedure and the possible risks of it.

Now, flash forward to yesterday. My appointment is scheduled for 9:30 AM, I wake up at 8:30, not eating breakfast, since I wasn't supposed to eat six hours before the surgery. I gut into the opffice at around 9:25, and when my mom and I arrived, we checked in, and were presented with a disclamer, stating what risks were involved during the procedure.

At arounf 9:35 or so, I was taken back into the room where I;d get the surgery. First, a nurse took my blood pressure, then I was hooked up to a heart/pulse monitor. After a few minutes, the doctor came in and inserted a needle into the inside of my arm. In about fifteen seconds I was out.

At around 10:45, I had awaken up, but the anesthetic hadn't fully worn out, so, according to my mom, I kept dozing on and off for a while. And at this point, I'd been moved to a holding room, after the surgery was finished, but before I'd awaken, so I don't remember that.

At around 11:30, we left the office, and I arrived at home. When I got home, I had to wear an ice pack around my face to try to reduce any swelling. Also, I had to bite down on gauze pads and change the pads every fifteen or so minutse because they'd become blood-soaked. The use of gauze pads lasted until early evening when the bleeding finally had stopped.

As far as food, for lunch, at around 1:00 PM, I had cherry Jello since I couldn't really chew or bite anything very solid, and then alter in the afternoon, my mom went to my future workplace, Wendy's, and picked me up a frosty.

Also, in the afternoon, maybe a few hours after I got home, my nose started bleeding. We called the doctor, and they told us that one of my top wosdom teeth had roots that hit my sinus cavity, and that's why ny mose bleed. Thankfully that stopped after maybe an hour. But to be safe, I was prescribed to take decongestants for a week on top of the antibiotics(to prevent any infections) and the pain pills I'd been taken.

Today, when I woke up, I was feeling alot better, but after I was awake for a while, the pain in my mouth started to get worse. Also, my cheeks are swelled for now. I also ate some more solid food today: for breakfast I had scrambled eggs and for lunch I had a slice of pizza.

In other news, I've taken advantage of Microsoft's offer of free Virtual PC 2004, and I went ahead and installed it onto my AMD Sempron box. Then yesterday, I went ahead and installed Windows NT 4.0 Workstation on Virtual PC. The installation was alot easier than the previous time I tried to install NT4 onto an old Pentium III box, which basically killed that PC. Infact NT4's installation only took about twenty minutes, including the formatting of a 4GB partition.

While installing NT4 itself was easy, after that, things started to get more difficult: First, during setup, I chose the wrong network settings so I couldn't connect to the internet.

After getting the interent connectiion setup, I went off to update the OS since I was using SP1. My first snag was Interent Explorer 2, as that was shipped with NT4. It didn't take me very long to figure out that I coundn't do anything with IE2, including downloading any EXE files. Thankfully, I had SP4 and IE4.01 on a CD (which was included in the box when I bought NT4 on eBay three years ago). I installed SP4 and IE 4.01, and then I went to update to SP6a. After installing SP6a, I went to get Interent Explorer 6.0 SP1 since I wanted to be up-to-date, so I fired up IE4 and I discovered that it couldn't render Microsoft's own IE download site correctly, so I had to view the page source to find the URL to the IE6 installer. After installing IE6 SP1 and running Windows Update, I went to download K-Meleon 1.0 since I'd never want to use Interent Explorer by choice. As soon as I got K-meleon installed, I recalled that menus in K-meleon don't seem to agree with Windows 95 and NT, so I had to find a workaround by disabling the Rebar and Bitmapped menus plugin from within about:config.

Mozilla Firefox 2.0 Beta 1

I plan to get back into the "swing of things" here, and I'm going to start blogging about Mozilla software releases again, after not blogging anything about web browser releases in over six months.

Anyway, today the Mozilla Corporation has released Mozilla Firefox 2.0 Beta 1. So far, I think I can only identify one new feature listed in the release notes of Firefox 2.0 Beta 1 (Gecko 1.8.1b1), and that is support for JavaScript 1.7.

I did, however, discover how to revert back to the old-stlye tab strip in Firefox 2.x. Previously in all other pre-Firefox 2.0 (and Mozilla) releases, the tab bar had a close button at the right side of the window. In Firefox 2.x, the tab close button was moved to show on each tab. IHMO, I don't like the decision. It makes it way too easy to accidently close a tab (thankfully, you can now reopen closed tabs), and it clutters up the UI. Today, while browsing the MozillaZine KB, I found a document which details instructions ho now to revert back to a Firefox 1.x-style tab close button. The preference is an about:config enrty, but before Firefox 2.0 goes final, I'd like to see the option available as a preference in the Options dialog.

Screenshot showing before and after changing browser.tabs.closeButtons:

What's the big deal with MySpace?

If you've been on the internet during the past year or so, you've probably heard of a service called MySpace. Infact, I've never heard of it myself until sometime last year, when someone at school asked me "Do you have a MySpace?" I replyed "No. What's a MySpace?"

Since then, many, many more people have asked me the very same question, and I've replyed "No" each time, and I plan to continue that response, as I refuse to get a MySpace account. Why?

Well, first, 90% of the pages I've seen look horrible. A typical MySpace page seems to consist of the following elements:

• A background image. Most of the MySpace profiles I've seen use background images. The image is usually some sort of image that obscures the text in front of it, making the text next to impossible to read without highlighting the text.

• A Flash-based embedded music player. The annoying part of the player is that the music starts playing automatically on page load. Very annoying, espically if you're listening to your own music playing on your computer. I want to hear the music I choose to listen to, not what someone else listens to.

• Some kind of embedded video. Again, either a Flash-based, YouTube-like selection, or an embdded WMV file. Personally I find the latter very annoying, as many times embedded WMVs like to slow down or even freeze up my web browser.

• A blog, which at times can get way too personal. Do I really want to know how much you drank at someone's party? No. Like my photography teacher once said, 'why do people put that much personal information on the internet for everyone to see?' If you want to blog, fine, but if you're on MySpace exclusively to blog, do yourself a favor, move to another blogging service, like Blogger, Moveable Type or WordPress.

Next, the grammar and spelling of most MySpace pages I've seen is atrocious. Sure, I make mistakes in spelling and grammar, but most of the pages I've seen look they're conversations directly out of a typical teen's instant messaging session. I have a hard time desiphering some of the text on some pages, and I'm around this AIM-style language a heck of alot more than I want to.

So this ends my short rant on MySpace for this evening...

Stupidity and the Fourth

Today is the 230th anniversary of the signing of a draft of the United States' Declaration of Independence. And for this one day a year, July 4, people do some crazy stuff. No, not lighting off fireworks, but stupider...

Yesterday, I call Spencer and I ask him if he's doing anything the night of the Fourth. I invite him to come over to my grandparents in town to watch the fireworks show. He takes me up on the offer. Then, today at around 5:00 we pick him off at his house and head in town. We get to my grandparent's place, and we eat dinner, whih was more like a picnic inside their garage.

After we wat, I call Brandon and see what he's up to, since I've not heard from all summer break. I ask him if he wants to come over to watch the fireworks. He says he'll be there in about an hour.

So in the mean time, Spencer and I walk doen to Moul Feild about a block away, where a large group of people always hang out on the Fourth to watch the bands play before the fireworks and the actual firework show itself.

After seeing that there is nothing to do down at Moul Feild, we walk back to my grandparent's place, where Dalton (son of my mom's one friend) is there. I don't really like to hang out with him since he;s four years younger than me, and he does some pretty stupid things. Then we got there, he had a few smoke bombs lit out on the sidewalk.

Then we head out behind my grandparent's house, where they have a an apple tree, and a whole bunch of rotten apples that have fallen off the tree on the ground.

We go out front and put an apple on the street, and se how long it takes a car to hit it. A few minutes later, splat. A car hit it. Then we got a few more apples, and put them in a line of about five apples, and a car comes by, very carefully and runs over all five apples. Pop, pop, pop... The sound of apples as a car runs over them.

All this time, we were sitting in the back oy my dad's truck, which was parked along the street, and Dalton wants to keep throwing the apples onto the street. We tell him, "Don't throw them at cars!"

Then we sat a couple of more apples onto the street, then here comes Brandon in his big primer-colored '84 F150. Splat! I quickly get out my cell phone and call him, and tell him to park his truck in the alley behind the house.

After getting his truck parked, he gets out and pops the hood. Sonce his truck stalled out while he was parking it, he pops the hood, and says he probably has a loose throttle linkage.

All four of us head out front, and set in the bed of my dad's truck. Dalton gets a few more apples. After a few minutes, and some more warnings of 'don't throw apples at cars,' and a few cloce calls of theowing apples behind moving cars, he throws an apple at a moving car, and hits the back window of a sedan.

The apple bounces off the window, and I saw the brake lights of the car, then the white back-up lights. At this point, Spencer, Brandon, and I jump out of the truck and run behind the house, leaving Dalton to fend for himself.

While Dalton takes the blame, and says that he did it, the guy gets out, and says I saw four guys, where are the other three? We come out from behind the house, and I thought the guy in the car was going to get in a fight with us or somthing.

We come out into the garage, infront Dalton's mom, my paremts and grandparents, and the guy just lectures us for throwing the apple and how not to do stupid things like that. He sounded really pissed off, and rightfuly so. I'd be that mad if it happened to me.

The rest of the evening until the fireworks show, Dalton sat inside, watching TV with his sisters, my sister, and my suster's friend, while Spencer, Brandon, and I were outside talking.

Then at 9:30, everyone gathered at the front of the house to watch the fireworks show. Normally, lasting about twenty minutes, the fireworks show is enjoyable to watch. But this year was different. It couldn't have lasted more than ten minutes. And there weren't even that many lit. What a disappointment. Even the fireworks I saw a few weeks ago at the lake which I saw from my house, which is over a mile away, was better.

Then after the fireworks, we normally light sparklers behind their house, but that didn't happen. Instead, Dalton lit off some of his fireworks.

When I got home, I lit off a box of sparklers just to light somthing myself and not watch other people light things off.

Happy birthday, SeaMonkey Project

Exactly one year ago, today, the SeaMonkey project was founded. If you're out of the loop and don't know what SeaMonkey is, it is an all-in-one internet application suite build upon the codebase of the Mozilla Application Suite, complete with a web browser, email client, HTML editor/creator, and IRC chat client.

The story actually started back on March 10, 2005, when the Mozilla Foundation announced their transition plan to focus their efforts on the stand alone products, Firefox and Thunderbird and abandon any new development on the once flagship Mozilla Suite product line. The news didn't come as a suprise to most, since the creation of the Mozilla Foundation back in 2003 revamped the development roadmap that pushed the standalone products over the integrated suite.

After the March 10th announcement, a group of dedicated developers and end-users came together in a community-run group for the support of the suite. The group dubbed the project as "SeaMonkey," taking the name from the early codemane of the Mozilla Suite.

Then on July 2, 2005, an announcement was finally made, officially creating the SeaMonkey Project; the name of the continuation of the app-suite was to be "SeaMonkey."

On September 15th, 2005, complete with crude placeholder graphics, logos, and icons, SeaMonkey 1.0 was released, the first public release of SeaMonkey.

In the following months, the project gained professional artwork, a beta was released, then the culmination of the SeaMonkey Counsil's work, SeaMonkey 1.0, which was released on January 30th, 2006.

In the months leading up to the 1.0 release, many new features were checked into the SeaMonkey tree, including autoscroll, tab drag and drop support, download notification, phishing protection, and inline spellcheck in mail were all added - backports from Firefox and Thunderbird - and most likely would not have ben added if the Mozilla Foundation were still in charge of suite development.

On this, the SeaMonkey Project's first birthday, I'd like to say thanks to all those who have worked on the SeaMonkey project, and for making a great product - one that I use everyday, and would be lost without!