If you live in the US, the presidential election is coming up. If you need to, read up on the different parties and candidates, then actually go out and let them know who you think the best choice is.

While you’re at it, go to VOTEorNOT.org and sign up. The HOTorNOT.com guys are giving away up to $200,000 of their own money, simply because they think it’s that important. If you win, you get $100,000. The person who referred you also gets $100,000. So follow my link, sign up, and win (because I want $100,000)! The terms state that you may sign up for email notifications when you register. I didn’t actually see any options regarding email, so I used the Remove link at the bottom of the page once I did sign up, just to be safe.

• Federal Election Commission
• PresidentialElection.com
• Democratic Party
• Republican Party
• Libertarian Party
• Green Party
• Reform Party
• JohnKerry.com
• GeorgeWBush.com
• Badnarik.org
• VoteNader.org
• VoteCobb.org

Once again, a night out produces another great quote. The self-proclaimed Princess Of Quite A Lot had this to say:

It’s ok, you’re an adult boy.

Yeah, I know, you don’t care. It was funny at the time though. And I told her I would harass her make her famous on my page.

http://pctech.invisibill.net/iezilla.html

That’s basically just an experiment, but it’s pretty cool, I think. It uses the ActiveX control version of Mozilla, embedded in a webpage, just like any other object could be. This creates a little window on the page which renders the URL using Mozilla’s HTML engine. You can use it to test pages for compatibility, and to see just how broken some stuff in IE is. The default page is Eric Meyer’s css/edge, which comes up with cool things to do with standard CSS. Unfortunately, IE is know for very poor CSS support, and the IE button on the page will let you get a side by side comparison of the two HTML engines.

You do have to download and install the Mozilla ActiveX control for it to work. http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/control.htm#download has the download links. Just download the file and run it, and it will install the control for the page to use. It’s about 4.5MB, but you basically don’t see anything once it’s installed. You don’t have to bother with using another browser or anything, it’s just a behind-the-scenes object that can be called. You may have to adjust the security options for some ActiveX stuff to view it, especially after WinXP SP2. If there’s any ActiveX stuff disabled, change it to “Prompt” instead. That way nothing else will be allowed by default, but you’ll be asked about it instead of IE just silently blocking it.

This thread at Anandtech lists a bunch of free programs which do the same thing as many commonly warezed programs. This is meant to raise awareness of free alternatives, so that people don’t warez. I know there are some people out there who pirate apps because that’s all they know. Hopefully this helps them avoid piracy, and encourages free and open source software in the process.

Spurl.net is also interesting. It’s an online bookmark system. Works pretty well for me in Firefox. Now we just need an extension so Firefox can use Spurls via the native bookmark system. =)