Here is the first blog entry of mine in a long time (insert profound "Duhs" here), and I'm going to talk about lots of stuff as a consequence.

First of all, my dad and I have several jobs lined up. The one that looks like I'll do for a Scout fundraiser (I'm in Troop 351, see the link at my site) is a thing where I buy coupon books for somewhere around $10 and sell them for $25...around here the actual coupon value is between $240 and $480, minus $1 per coupon mailin...

Let me explain about the coupon books. They aren't the normal 'buy something you'd never use otherwise and get something you don't want for five dollars off' books that you buy out of sheer pity for some organization. They also aren't useful little cards that you buy for $10 and if you're smart can save $20 over a year with. What you do is fill out one of the twenty-four $10 coupon certificates in the book with codes that are shown in the back of the book, which partain to the coupons you'll get, and mail the certificate, along with $1 and a self-addressed stamped envelope, to a placee called Coupon Connection of America. A few weeks later, you get $10 in coupons. Nifty. Technically, the last $40 in coupons are compensation for the envelopes and dollar you have to send them. Anyways, you get $10 of coupons you picked out per certificate. If, like our local Super S, a store near you, say,k doubles the value of all coupons up to a dollar, you've almost certainly got yourself $480 in coupons! Wow.

Okay, next up: I've just found that Mozilla Thunderbird 0.7.1 has strayed away, in a good sense, from the AOL Instant Messenger smilies, replacing them with more handsome ones. When the new Netscape comes out, who know? Maybe these nifty smilies will flood into Netscape's Mail client and even AOL Instant Messenger! Yes, yes, thousand times YES! Of course, that isn't as good as having about sixteen more smilies to add to your esxpression range, but it's an improvement.

Next, I want to talk a little about the neat extensions (addons) for Firefox that I have.

Tabbrowser Extensions - This nifty little addon gives Firefox tons more functionality in the tab arena. There are tons of features, like coloring tabs and telling tabs that they can't auto-refresh, but the two most-used functions for me are an ability to undo closing a tab (very useful for when you wanted to take a look at a reply to an email but had an itchy mouse finger) and a function that makes every window have to open in a new tab, aka no popups for any reason at all, aka a very nicely consolidated browsing experience

Image Toolbar - I don't use this much, but the three shortcuts on it, rendered in true 'XP Pizzaz' style, is just the ticket for people missing the feature that Internet Explorer 6 has. I think it also resizes pictures to fit in your browser window when the pictures are viewed alone, but that may be Firefox itself.

DOM Inspector - Disects and trisects and so ons a webpage into the minuteist parts. It's pretty useful for figuring out just how that whiz-bang site's style sheet is set up. I don't use this much either, because I think my site is set up just fine, but it is useful.

Sage - This RSS reader is an extension of Firefox, meaning that it's small, light, and great. It shares your bookmarks view, which can be annoying if not set up right. To kill that annoyance, I made a subfoler 'RSS Feeds' and redirected all of its power to there. You can read headlines and text from hoer-overs in the sidebar or you can view the feed as a handsome webpage.

GMail Notifier - This little gem tells me if I have new mail in my nifty GMail account. It also gives me one-click access there from its statusbar icon (I could use a toolbar icon but I'd call that wasting space). Plus it gives me info on how much of my 1000 MB of storage is filled up (it is at, and has been at, and will be for at for quite some time, 1 MB, 0%)

These are my nice little set of extensions for Firefox.

I am now integrated into the wonderful world of Yahoo, with its chess games, homepages, comics, headlines, news, and the inability to get my Yahoo Mail account working. But I've gotta say that even without a working email the experience is impressive. Yahoo's new Messenger 6 draws a little closer to MSN Messenger in some areas, but that's not a bad thing.

Well...that's about all for right now. I have to keep my mind on the game of chess or I'll be beaten very badly. I've already lost a knight...