Well, everyone knows Firefox 3 is out by now (since Tuesday). Unfortunately, it’s not so big an event for me, because although I use Firefox for Windows on my desktop, I use this MacBook for most things, and I use Camino on here.

I am, however, glad that the latest milestone of Firefox was met keeping lowering and optimizing memory usage and speed in mind, because that was the original reason for its existence. I remember up until version 0.9 that Firefox was particularly speedy until they added a ton of features—not that these features are all bad, though, I just wished they’d stayed true to their roots. Now they finally have.

I still believe Camino continues to be faster and better on OS X simply because it’s native, while Firefox is, by nature, not native. I did download Fx 3 for OS X though and am actually keeping it on here this time because the web design and development tools for use with Firefox have become increasingly incredible (and I’ve forgotten about them). And although I’m not going to be using Fx most of the time, I’m glad open source has in some way become mainstream, with the official twenty-four hour release download count of Fx 3 exceeding eight million, as well as the development of a speedy Gecko 1.9, to be included in the next major version of Camino.

\o/

Farewell, Bluehost. I’ve moved this blog (and macroz.net) over to Hostgator now. At Bluehost occasionally I would get an “exceeds CPU quota” error, taking down the whole hosting account for a little bit after trying to do some fairly normal stuff. You can see this guy’s rant/article for more info.

The transition has seemed pretty painless. Hostgator seems great, except for the connection timeouts I get sometimes when trying to SCP or SSH. It’s manageable though. And actually, rendering time for the WordPress PHP pages seem faster than at Bluehost (with or without caching). This is a really good thing.

I still need to make sure I’m not missing everything before the bluehost account expires. But in any case, I promise more interesting content will be coming here this week. Seriously!

It’s weird ending the academic year in college. It’s much different than it has been throughout my life. Whereas in high school I’ve been overjoyed to begin the summer, in college I feel at least a little bit sad. As Sharon put it, it’s a lot like leaving a summer camp where you meet all sorts of wonderful people. Of course, summer at home is great; I’ve missed home a lot. But I don’t get to see some awesome friends for a while. At least during the school year I can visit my friends at home once a month or so… The first year went by extremely quickly. The next three years will as well, unfortunately, but I’ll definitely make the best of it.

Anyway, it’s been a great year overall. Academically speaking, first semester was not awesome, but second semester was not bad. I’ve met some cool people and have had really interesting conversation, like that time Ivan, Won, and I talked after dinner in the commons until 10:15 or something (Victor was there too originally, but then he had to go to his Cooking with Chef Roger class). I feel like I’ve learned so much just by being there. I’ve made really, really good friends (although this is not to say that I don’t have amazing friends from home as well… I certainly do!). Rice is amazing. Rice in both senses. (Okay, not funny, ha ha ha.)

I would also like to take this time to apologize for anything stupid/selfish I’ve done over the school year as well as to thank my friends for all their generosity. Here’s to a more awesome sophomore year.

So here are my current goals for the summer, in no particular order, so I can be sure I reach them by the end of the summer:

• play lots of Go (and improve)
• read Lawrence Lessig books
• read substantially more of Romance of the Three Kingdoms (三國演義)
• make money
• drink bubbletea
• pray/grow spiritually
• become a better person
• keep in touch with Rice friends
• see Cistercian people and hear their college stories
• learn I WiSH – 明日への扉 (Asu e no tobira), which Younha played and sang for her audition in Japan
• learn to beatmatch/DJ well if I can get enough money for CDJs
• make teaching English in Taiwan a good experience
• blog interesting content frequently

Lastly, have a leet summer, everybody. (Haha, please excuse my usage of “leet.”)