After a length hiatus caused by my move into my new house, I’ve redone the look and feel of HellFood.com, to be more like a periodical than a personal blog. There will be new food reviews, more links, and now monthly Hellfood features where I will do extra research to explore a topic of interest to Hell Food readers.

So click on over to the new Hell Food!

Techcrunch is reporting that development on the Netscape browser will officially end on February 1st, 2008. This kind of signals the end of an era. Those of us who were on the web early on, remember the great advance Netscape was over other browsers such as XMosaic. I remember when Netscape 2.0 came out, and the great advance tables seemed to be in HTML.

However, the Browser Wars were not kind of Netscape, and by the late 90’s even I had switched to Internet Explorer. By then, Netscape 4.x was a bloated mess that I remember crashing about every five minutes no matter what I did. It became unusable, and I, like so many grudgingly moved to IE.

What seemed like a desperation move (and it really was), Netscape was bought by AOL and soon open sourced the browser, creating the Mozilla Foundation. Years later, I was still using IE as the project had nothing had come of it. I did use Netscape a little here and there, but it never really worked right. Finally came Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox in 2002 and we finally had a modern browser to use. IE was forced to update to catch up to Firefox, and we’re all better for it.

Netscape has long been left behind, and no one I know really uses it. I can’t remember when I last actually used a Netscape branded browser. Though its spirit lives on in Mozilla and Firefox, it still stings a little to see Netscape come to the end.

During the holiday season, I was given an iPod 1GB shuffle (pictured above), my first iPod. I’ve not been a big fan of the majority of the iPod product line. I think they tend to be overpriced, have clunky interfaces, and I’m not a big fan of iTunes either. For the money, if you’re looking for storage and a good price, Creative and iriver are probably better bets. I also have an Apacer shuffle like ripoff that I’ve been using for a couple years, which at the time seemed like a good deal.

So, now I have an iPod. When I opened it up, i was surprised how damn small it is. It’s small enough that I would worry about losing it. The docking station is a little inconvenient because you can’t use a normal USB cable at all to connect or charge it, but to keep the unit simple I see why they did it the way they did. The first thing I tried was installing iTunes, version 7.5. What a failure that was. No matter how many times I installed, uninstalled, reinstalled, iTunes would never come up. What I finally ended up doing, was just using an older version (7.2) that installed and worked. I’m afraid to upgrade now, in case it doesn’t work and I screw up my library trying to downgrade later. It’s running, though, and that’s all I can ask for.

I don’t actually like using iTunes though, so in reality, I’m using Winamp to manage my songs and transfers. I find it less clunky than iTunes. Using the actual iPod is easy. The buttons make sense, the battery life is great (> 12 hours), and it’s nice to just clip it on and go. When checking the prices, I found that they can be bought for anywhere from $70.00 to $80.00, which seems completely reasonable for the form factor, battery life, and easy of use. The tiny size is definitely a premium feature worth paying for.

So, I still don’t think I would buy a regular iPod, but I am a fan of the small shuffles. I’m enjoying mine, listening to podcasts, music, and audio books for hours and hours on a tiny device.

Well..I’m a day late. Let me explain.

Anyone who knows me and my wife, know we’re atheist. On the Richard Dawkins scale of atheism, I rate even more atheist than Dawkins himself. I don’t think we should be discussing if there is a god or not, I think we should be discussing why people even ask such a silly question to begin with. Why don’t we debate the existence of pink, winged, unicorns while we’re at it?

Now I despite being an atheist, I’ve always celebrate Christmas, because my parents did. They never baptized me, never sent me to church, and never said anything either way when it came to religion and the connection to Christmas. You could say I had as secular a Christmas as one could have. Considering how commercial Christmas is now, and the litany of secular traditions now associated with the holiday, I never felt uncomfortable celebrating.

This year, however, in honor of our atheist convictions, we changed up the holiday. For starters, the central figure in our holiday is the Flying Spaghetti Monster and all the accompanying traditions. Pasta and pirates play a big part in Pastafarianism, and Kelly really decided to go out all this year to celebrate the holiday we now call FSMas as well as the celebration of the first holiday in our new house. You can see all the decorations she did up here: Flickr Set. I think you will be impressed at the depth of her devotion. In addition to the name change, new decorations, we now celebrate on the 24th. The 24th is for presents, the 25th is for relaxing and using said gifts. The traditional FSMas meal is vegan lasagna with vegan tiramisu.

Because of the rather large purchase we made this year (our house), we kept gifts between us rather small putting a roughly $100.00 limit. Kelly early on went slightly over, so the limit ended up being $110.00 or so. When asking me what I wanted for Christmas, I kept telling her over and over again, all I really wanted was Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock. I thought it looked fun. The though of seeing a grown man play a small toy guitar was too much for Kelly apparently, and she said no way would she get me that game. Later, on a South Park episode featured GHIII and pretty much mocked exactly the same things Kelly did. So I thought my chances were pretty slim or non of actually getting it.

To my surprise, when I opened up my gift (it was the only gift), I saw GHIII staring back at me. The only thing I wanted, right there. Kelly had basically been messing with me the whole time, and actually bought the gift pretty early on. Apparently, the Wii version was hard to get (as all thinks Wii are), while PSIII versions were aplenty. I played about for about an hour and a half yesterday, and damn, it really is fun. It takes a little while to get used to it, but you can get sucked into the songs pretty easily.

Oh, and I really do look ridiculous holding a toy plastic guitar, but I really don’t care. My hope is that Kelly also likes the game, and we go and get a second guitar to play co-op career mode with.

For Kelly, I bought her 2 Wii games, Mario Party 8 and Resident Evil IV: Wii Edition. The ResEvil game is one of the highly rated games on the Wii, and has been called a modern classic, so I hope she really gets into it. We played Mario Party 8 and got pretty sucked into it. I know the reviews were kind of middling for the game, but those seemed to be from people who played the previous games, which we haven’t. It’s all new to us.

So that sums up our celebration of FSMas I think. Not sure what we could do for New Year’s Day, but we’ll see!