The People Next Door...

The other night, I attended the Annual General Meeting for our Strata council. I've never been to an AGM Strata council meeting, and I've always been curious as to what happens in them, so i thought what the heck I'll skip the flames game and go to the meeting (hah! crazy huh?!?!). Anyways, I arrived a few minutes early to register, and once the scheduled start time came around the property manager announced that we had not reached quorum and according to Strata rules we had to wait at least 30min before starting to allow for late-comers. Oh great...maybe i should have stayed home, i thought...

Turns out someone was able to phone and drag their neighbor to come out, he showed up and we finally had quorum. Anyways, I found the meeting quite interesting cuz i learned things that i didn't know about.

* Always make sure your house insurance covers any renos or upgrades to your unit, cuz most don't...
* If your mailbox gets broken into (like ours) and you ask Canada Post to replace/upgrade the lock it can take up to 6 years! (don't you love gov't beauracracy!?!?!)
* pressure washing vinyl siding is no good cuz it can leave pits in the surface because of the high pressure and allow more dirt to seep through
* it costs over $14,000 to repaint and HAND clean the exterior walls, trimming and grounds..(damn, that's a car!!)

To be honest though, the most fascinating part of the meeting was meeting my neighbors. I've lived in my complex for nearly two years, and i've only met a handful of people. It was neat to meet the "others", especially that guy across the courtyard who has all the loud parties!! hahaha.

Anyways, when time came to elect a new strata council, i raised my hand (for better or worse), and decided to become a council member. . What did i get myself into!! ;-)

Mozilla's Firefox

I've been using the open source web browser, Firefox, from Mozilla for the past week or so, and I must say that I've been pleasantly impressed with it so far.

Firefox was quick to download (couple minutes). Things I like so far are include: the tabbed browsing, the improved bookmarking system (its easier to file your bookmarks), its got more keyboard shortcuts than IE, and it seems to have a pretty good pop-up blocker system. Search support is much better in firefox too. I'm a big fan of the Google Toolbar under IE, but now its integrated with Firefox, and you can also link to other search engines. And for some reason, I really like the ability to pick multiple "home pages" so that when you start your browser it will automatically load more than one web site (for example, your favorite news sites, and blogs).

I also like the extensions, which allows you too add/remove new features or functionality. One extension called EditCSS actually lets you edit the CSS of a webpage and see the changes live (local of course). This is handy for experimenting with CSS blog templates. I really am a big fan of these modular "upgrades" to software apps. This way, you can choose what you want and what you don't need rather than being forced to do a wholesale upgrade -- which is common with Microsoft products.

In terms of overall performance Firefox seems to take a little bit longer to load up (i wish you could keep in pre-loaded in the system tray), but it seems to render pages as fast, if not faster as Internet Explorer. And my home PC is already slow as is (Celeron 466), so the speed improvement is more noticeable. The UI is pretty clean and quite simple (doesn't clutter up your screen), plus apparently you can download free "skins" or themes for it.

And of course, as with all open source, its absolutely free.

Getting a little closer...

I'm such a peeping tom, but i can't help it. These are kodak moments! I'm so excited to see Rico and Ally getting along.