Back in 1995, the Internet came to my hometown of Timmins, Ontario. Vianet was the lone ISP and I signed up for an account while I was still in highschool living with my parents (yes, I myself paid for the service). With the floppy disks of tools provided by Vianet (Trumpet Winsock, Netscape Navigator, Eudora and PowWow) a new world unveiled itself to me that was far beyond the local BBS I had become accustomed to. The sheer amount of information available on the burgeoning World Wide Web fascinated me. I had to learn how websites were made.

After learning what a search engine was and how to use one (in this case, it was Altavista), I queried to find out what a web page actually was and how to make it available to the world. I learned that in order to allow people to access the web pages you create with HTML, you need someone to host them for you. In 1996, when I began to seriously experiment with HTML, Geocities was the free web host to use.

A friend and I put together our first website, the Lords of Digital Consciousness. It was, by today's standard, extremely basic and horribly tacky. We abused repeating background images, the MARQUEE tag and animated GIFs. The point I'm trying to make, though, is that Geocities made it super-simple to put together a site for the entire world to see at no cost. Geocities allowed you to store your website in neighbourhoods that matched your site's theme; Area51 for sci-fi, WallStreet for business, Colosseum for sports and so on. Naturally, we parked our Lords of Digital Consciousness website in Silicon Valley - the neighbourhood for computer-related websites.

Even if Geocities becomes just another footnote in Internet history, I won't forget the impact it made on me. In 1996, while working on the Lords of Digital Consciousness in my spare time while I was in university, I wanted to improve and understand the process of creating websites by reading more. Being a pre-pharmacy major at the time, I should have had my nose in biochem and human physiology text books, instead of the HTML, JavaScript and Perl books I had been buying and reading for "fun". I eventually switched my major to Computer Science and the rest is, as they say, history. However, every once and a while - when I'm deep into modern frameworks, n-tier architectures, and enterprise design patterns, I think back to simpler times when completing a project only involved editing some HTML and JavaScript in Windows Notepad and storing it in my place in one of Geocities' neighbourhoods.

There's a lot of exciting tech, sports and life topics I'm hoping to write about, but until I get the chance (again, not a bad thing), we'll all have to make-do merely knowing what kind of music I'm listening to lately.

Future of the Left - Travels With Myself and Another
Like a more-accomplished mclusky, Travels With Myself and Another is an energetic and entertaining scuzz-rock record.

Manic Street Preachers - Journal for Plague Lovers
With lyrics entirely provided by notes left behind by Richey Edwards, Journal for Plague Lovers makes it look like the Manics have been reinvigorated with a sense of urgency.

Mew - No More Stories...
Even more grandiose than ...And the Glass Handed Kite and much peppier and hopeful.

Modest Mouse - No One's First and You're Next
Holding me over until we see a new Modest Mouse full-length.

Muse - The Resistance
Operatic, classical and rocking.

NOFX - Coaster
The anti-Bush sentiments are no longer required, so they boys have settled back into their old ways, with a couple of mature tricks (Example: "My Orphan Year").

Pearl Jam - Backspacer
Best PJ album since Yield.

Yo La Tengo - Popular Songs
Combines all of YLT's best fuzz-pop, drone, twee elements into a single cohesive album. My easy fave is "More Stars Than There Are In Heaven".

Friendly Fires - Friendly Fires
Funky and tuneful with a splash of shoegaze. Hip wedding receptions would play some tracks off this album to get people to kick off their shoes and spaz out on the dance floor; "On Board" (made famous by the original Wii Fit TV commercial) at the very least.

The Horrors - Primary Colours
The Cure + Bauhaus + My Bloody Valentine = The Horror's Primary Colours; that's the best way for me to describe it.

The Most Serene Republic - ...And the Ever Expanding Universe
Grandiose songs for a hip romantic comedy. Too bad "hip" and "romantic comedy" are mutually exclusive. With love, from Milton, ON.

The Rural Alberta Advantage - Hometowns
A friend of mine knows the folks in this band and gushed about them for so long, I gave in. Turns out, he's right. Bedroom rock with big ambitions.

Wilco - Wilco (The Album)
Wilco, Wilco, Wilco will love you, baby. Need I say more?

Mozilla released Firefox 3.5 last week with loads of new features like the zippy TraceMonkey JavaScript engine. It also includes another feature that I don't think I can ever warm up to - a revamped NSS module that causes ridiculously long launch times on Windows computers.

The NSS is responsible for handling encryption tasks via SSL, TLS, etc. When we're talking about encryption, random numbers are par for the course. I'm not sure how they generated random numbers in previous NSS versions, but for 3.5, Mozilla decided that using various temporary files on people's computers was a stellar way to calculate a seed for a random number generator. Generating truly random numbers on computers is hard. Hell, randomness itself is hard. Yet whatever Mozilla was doing before seemed to work well. Why they decided to use temp files now is anybody's guess. Especially given the fact that typical computer users don't even know of the existence of the various temporary folders on their systems, so we could be talking thousands of files that the NSS has to iterate over to generate a random number generator's seed. Thankfully, this issue has been logged as a Priority 1 bug, so we (hopefully) can anticipate a speedy resolution. In the meantime, if you like Firefox 3.5 on Windows but its slow startup has you at your wits' end (and you don't want to revert to a 3.0.x version), keep the following folders on your computer as clean as possible until this is fixed in a point release:

Windows 2000, XP and 2003

• C:\Documents and Settings\[user_name]\Temp\
• C:\Documents and Settings\[user_name]\Local Settings\Temp
• C:\Documents and Settings\[user_name]\My Recent Documents
• C:\Documents and Settings\[user_name]\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files
• C:\Documents and Settings\[user_name]\Local Settings\History

Windows Vista, 2008 and 7

• C:\Users\[user_name]\Temp\
• C:\Users\[user_name]\AppData\Local\Temp
• C:\Users\[user_name]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Recent
• C:\Users\[user_name]\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files
• C:\Users\[user_name]\Local Settings\History

Alexisonfire - Old Crows / Young Cardinals
Yes, I like "that screaming band". You hear screaming - I hear another texture in the wall of noise. And I don't shun noise. This time around, though, the screaming has been toned way down with Dallas and Wade sharing much more of the vocal duties. Lotsa mid-tempo numbers too, but it all sounds great to me.

Dinosaur Jr. - Farm
Album number two for the re-united J, Murph and Lou (yes, I rhymed that on purpose - I'm lame). Their ninth album takes all of Dinosaur Jr's best traits - noise, J's solos and more noise - and puts them together in a nice package. Even Lou's songs, which are traditionally mellow and introspective, are rockers. It's good to see them in fine form.

Sonic Youth - The Eternal
Contrary to many reviews, this album does not hark back to EVOL, Sister or Daydream Nation. Finely tuned out-of-tune guitars aside, this album chugs along (thanks to Mark Ibold?) with the energy of a band not showing their age.

Think About Life - Family
I don't want to say that Think About Life are Canada's version TV on the Radio, because you'd only agree with that after the initial listen. Repeated listens will reveal their upbeat nature and put you in a good frame of mind.

Winter Gloves - About A Girl
Catchy electro-rock that leaves me anticipating a new album.

...it pains me to say it, but I think Detroit is going to win - again! Ugh. At least this time, I wouldn't be annoyed as I usually would. Detroit and Michigan have fallen on some serious hard times - have you seen the empty seats at the Wings' home games during these playoffs? Maybe winning it all would make this financial meltdown a little bit more bearable for those in Detroit.