Ian Benedict

The school semester is slowly drawing to a close. Sadly though, the snow isn’t.

I’m really happy with my guitar playing. All those days of chord progressions and scales are finally starting to pay off. I’ve been practicing this one particular song which happens to be from Megaman 2 (Yeah yeah I know, it’s a good lick though), and can pretty much play it thoroughly. In addition to the recommendation I made last time for beginner guitarists, I’d also recommend checking out the Metal Method series of instructional dvds. They’re made for the absolute beginner to around intermediate/advanced players. Here’s a video of the song I’ve been practicing (But it’s not me that’s playing, obviously).

In this next section, I’d like to take a bit to talk about a couple of web applications.

First up is Mozilla Firefox, a web browser. Yes I do realize this isn’t something new, however there was a beta released recently for the upcoming Firefox 3. I just installed this yesterday on my home Vista laptop, and so I wanted to talk about it a bit. The biggest feature here has to be the huge cut in memory usage. There have been reports that it uses around 60% less memory as you keep the browser open. This is a huge deal for me because I sometimes leave my browser on overnight and it can just be downright unusable in the morning. That and the fact that I haven’t had the need to use the task manager to kill its process yet is what sold me.

Finally, the other application I wanted to talk about is the not so well-known IM client known as Digsby. What makes it better than the standard MSN or Trillian clients? Well, not only does it support a plethora of IM protocols, it also can track your different email accounts as well as social networking applications! That’s right, this client offers a more connected experience to your social networking platforms like Facebook, for those of you who aren’t already addicted enough as it is. I’ve only just set this client up yesterday on my Vista laptop and it tracks my MSN, GMail, and Facebook accounts. So for example, if someone posts on my wall or sends me a message via Facebook, I’d get a little notification on the bottom right corner of my screen much in the same way as MSN. This client offers just about the closest experience I can get to Adium on OSX (Which I am in love with) while offering features that even Adium doesn’t have. It is currently in beta and only available on Windows so far, however Mac OSX and Linux versions are in the works.