Ronald Reagan, 40th President of the United States, dies at 93.

I’m writing this from work because my computer is dead. Well, not actually dead, but it might as well be. It won’t boot. Now, before I get a string of “Boot to Safe Mode using F8” comments, I need to let you know that I know what I’m doing, and if it was that simple I wouldn’t be writing this post. What’s actually going on is that my computer can’t read the boot partition — which won’t allow Windows XP to load — which means that I can’t even get to where I could press F8 to boot into Safe Mode.

At first I thought that Hotmail was down when it hung as I logged in with Firefox. After a bit, I tried to login again. Still no luck. I tried logging in with IE. No problems. I tried again with Mozilla. No problems. I tried with Opera. No problems. I tried with Firefox. Problems. Is Microsoft beginning to see Firefox as a threat? Is that why they’re blocking access to Hotmail from the oh-so-popular Firefox? Of course, it might just be me wanting to rag on M* for something else, but it doesn’t appear that they were trying to be subtle about this one.

This is a problem that I ran into, and Google didn’t offer any answers, so I’m going to add the fix for this to Google. I’m not sure if this means anything, but I’ve got the Tab Browser Extensions installed. Last week, I went to click out of Firefox with multiple tabs open, and was presented with the “Close Multiple Tabs” dialog box. Normally, I close the one to the left, but this time, I accidentally clicked the one in the middle.

First off, I don’t watch a lot of TV. The only show I even really care about is Alias. My wife watches Alias, 24, and American Idol. Over the last couple of months, I’ve gotten more and more into American Idol. After the auditions (where we all saw William Hung for the first time), I watched the very first group perform, and Diana DeGarmo and Fantasia Barrino were part of that group. They make up two of the three finalists! I remember saying to my wife and her friend that these two would be in the final three or four, and I was right.

Thank goodness for Andy Budd and his mentioning the scam that is the Domain Name Registry of America. I’ve got all of my web stuff consolidated within a single company, and I know it’s up every summer. I just call them up, and inform them that I want to renew. I got a letter from them today trying to get me to renew my domain with them. The name sounded familiar from something Andy had said, so I went to work and looked it up.

I’ve been reading Paul Scriven’s Whitespace for quite some time now. I’ve always enjoyed the content, but while the interface as always been usable, it hasn’t always been terrific. Nowadays, Whitespace is looking much better these days. I think that Paul has gotten much better at displaying lots of information in a usable — yet minimalistically beautiful ways at the same time. There are many features that I’ve been wanting to add to my website. Most of these aren’t big, new fancy features, but they mostly involve the intelligently elegant integration and layout of metadata and information in general.

I’ve spent the day scouring the web for information on whether or not any build of Mozilla has support for the CSS2 text-shadow property. It doesn’t, which sucks. Why does it suck? Because I’m not able to see what Safari 1.1+ users are able to see: drop shadows on text without graphics. Now, I know that there are other ways to do it, but they require syncing the text on the page with text in your CSS file — which is fine if it’s a permanent header or something.

Two and a half weeks?! Ryan, that’s just no good. What’s your deal, man? Why are you being suck a slacker? This is the obligatory “Sorry, I’ve been busy” post as made famous by Dan Rubin, Todd Dominey, and Adam Polselli. Every time that I’ve come across something cool lately, my boss has handed me another 5 hours of work that is due in three. Everytime, I’ve gone to work on Feed Parser, or Blocker, or Blogroller, my wife says “Time for dinner!

Paul emailed me today with an invitation to check out his new Web/Design/Music/Apple/etc forum. Granted any new forum is always wanting new visitors, but it’s been cool seeing other webloggers like Paul, Andy Mac, Darice, Sken, and others. This will definitely be a new stop on the internet for me!