Now that Firefox 3 has an official launch date of June 17th people all around the world are getting in line to download the newest edition of the Mozilla browser. A campaign has been launched by SpreadFireFox.com to set a Guiness World Record for the most downloaded software in 24 hours. Based on the turnout so far I think they could actually succeed.

If you want to join the challenge on June 17th, sign up here and specify your country or region.

I’ve been playing with Firefox 3 Release Candidates for a while and they are definately faster than Firefox 2 in loading web sites. However, I have not been able to do a true scientific comparison due to the fact that I have almost 20 plugins installed in Firefox 2 – over half of which are not yet supported in Firefox 3.

I was looking around Plaxo the other day and stumbled upon some new features that I hadn’t seen before. These are features that were newly added with the launch (beta) of Plaxo 3.0. You can read the full details on their Blog post “Introducing an All-New Plaxo”.

The functionality that I thought was a nice touch was the extended list of sync points that you can now connect with. I found them while browsing through the online calendar section (see picture below).

Apparently, you can now do some basic synchronizing with your cell phone without paying any monthly fee. Before you had to use their paid service for any cell phone connectivity.

Plaxo has been my favorite tool since it’s early days. I’ve had all my computers connected to Plaxo to keep my contact list and calendar up to date. I’ve also enjoyed getting automatic updates from friends and family who are on Plaxo without having to read emails from them containing their new contact information or updates.

The Plaxo Pulse is another feature that I’ve been using for a while. But lately with all the new features (groups, feeds, etc) it’s starting to get a bit noisy. I’ll have to start filtering down the amount of information being sent to my Pulse stream. There are also some redundancy in functionality between Facebook, LinkedIn, and other sources but still a nice application.

There are a number of feeds you can aggregate into your Pulse stream. I’ve only bothered to hook in Facebook and LinkedIn so far. There are plenty of others you can hook in to get all your notices in one location.

I have an HP ze5385us notebook whose LCD backlight went unreliable 1 month after the warranty expired. I’ve been tossing around ideas as to what to do with the notebook but have not settled on anything.

Originally I wanted to give the notebook to my wife so that she could use it for her own use but when it became clear that getting a new LCD screen off Ebay was risky and cost too much, that idea went out the window.

The next plan was to convert the notebook into an apache server in the Data Center (aka Garage). But I would need some way to get the notebook to function while the top was closed. I wanted to see if I could remove the notebooks LCD screen and attach it to a physical monitor. This way I would not have to get another keyboard and mouse when connected through a port replicator. When I started looking into what it takes to remove the LCD I figured it wasn’t worth the effort and it would be risky if I could not piece it back together correctly.

Now I’m just going to buy the replicator and install it with a keyboard and mouse since this is the least time consuming plan. If I get a chance to tinker with the machine later on I’ll try to remove the top and see if I can hook it up to a monitor without the LCD area attached.

After 3 false starts at converting from a .NET based platform to something else, I’ve finally settled on Wordpress. I was originally working with Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal. After letting the original 3 implementations sit idle on my dev server for 6 months I finally realized that Joomla and Drupal were overkill for what I needed.

I will go ahead and modify this site going forward in an “incremental” and “iterative” manner (see Agile development philosophies) as time permits.

More to come soon.