Performancing's excellent tool Performancing for Firefox is a great boon to blog editors everywhere. There are, however, a few key features missing from this tool. With a little luck version 1.3 will have three new features or fixes. One is the ability to add free tags to a post's categories. With Drupal and WordPress it is possible to have tags one types in at the time of the post but it takes an extra edit once the item is posted when using the Performancing tool. Spellbound compatibility is another area that needs to be improved. While spellbound can mark misspelled words while you type you can't do a spell check or get suggestions. The final improvement and perhaps the most critical for the tool's audience of serious bloggers is a better way to identify the various blogs one posts to. In the current release Performancing doesn't allow the user to change the names but forces a naming convention of "username: blog". I use the same username on several systems, as I'd think do many bloggers. In my case I end up with a list of "joshb: blog." Guessing which one is which blog is cumbersome.

With consistent problems on my laptop doing software updates I went looking for the information I'd come across before about how to fix it. The method of fixing it is removing a bad cache file. During the search I came across this Apple Knowledge Base article. Rather annoyingly Apple's solution is to suggest calling Direcway for support. About as much help as trying to call a man in the middle of the desert for a glass of ice water.There is good to come from the search however annoying Apple's suggestion is. While I wasn't paying attention Apple released a Broadband Tuner last fall. It does the same thing as an earlier third-party script but makes browsing on a DirecWay connection much easier.

A colleague got a notice this morning that their email had been rejected by AOL. "I can't even email my mother," said the user. Well it turns out AOL decides it can determine how anybody should name their servers. If the reverse lookup for your mail server has a dhcp000-000 in your reverse lookup it will prevent AOL users from getting email from your mail server.

I had a 0500 show time yesterday to serve as part of the day time "stand by" crew. There are two crews that have this duty every day. More often than not, the crews do not launch. I woke up at 0415. I was very tired but figured Id be able to rest all day once we did our pre-flight of the aircraft and confirmed that we did not have a mission. Much to my surprise, the battle captain told us to be ready to leave for Baghdad by 0700 for about four hours of "battlefield circulation." Apparantly a Colonel decided at the last minute that he needed to get from Baghdad to Speicher.

Washington helipad was our first scheduled stop. This pad, the busiest army helipad in the world, is in the heart of Baghdad's Green Zone. It is co-located with the US Embassy at Sadaam's former palace. I have flown there many times but have never gotten out to look around. We usually just land, pick up the passengers, and depart. I had heard that there is great shopping and sight seeing in the area so I hoped out loud that we would find an excuse to shut down.

About 10 minutes from landing at Washington pad, the second helicopter in our flight hit a bird. The bird broke the chin bubble. This is not a big deal except that it means that the aircraft could not be flown until it was checked out my a maintenance test pilot. We all had the same thought - we are spending the day in the Green Zone.

We spent about four hours touring the area. We did some souvenir shopping, checked out the palace (which now contains the embassy and other military offices), walked around the swimming pool, and ate at the chow hall (which was very nice). It was pretty strange walking around the palace area, passing civilian contractors, a variety of foreign soldiers, diplomats, soldiers, marines, and sailors. There were concrete barriers and barbed wire everywhere and, obviously, everyone was well armed. Even the $100,000.00 Mercedes SUVs were armored. This was all in stark contrast to the manicured lawns, crystal blue pool, elaborate chandeliers, and enormous murals of the palace. We walked by what I can only describe as a "statue graveyard" behind an iron fence. It contained several of the Sadaam efigies that used to decorate the grounds but were now discarded. Read more about The Green Zone