The design of this page is somewhat messed up, I know.

In a spate of installing programs, I gave Firefox a try and was pleasantly surprised. It’s still a “preview release” and crashes now and then, but seems faster than Internet Explorer because it can display more of a page as data is still coming in. Images display gradually as they load (there’s actually a point to progressive JPEGs), like in Netscape Navigator when we all used to use it years ago. The program loads quickly after the initial load. I missed the Mouse Gestures feature that Opera has until Zenia laughed at me and pointed out that such plugins exist for Firefox.

I installed Apache 2, PHP and MySQL for some planned Web design and programming work.

A few months ago I quit my office job as a jack-of-all-trades at a small (4-person) financial consulting company. I left on good terms and ended up with a retainer agreement to provide a certain number of hours of consulting services per month, most of which can be accomplished from home. My goal now is to have my own small consulting business (of which I’ll be the sole employee) and do freelance project-based work; so far I have a few programming projects lined up.