So I graduated last Friday. Cool, no more high school, on to college! Cool, graduation parties---a bit of fun with these guys before I probably never see them again. Really cool: graduation gifts!

Went to my dad's house yesterday, and found that there were some gifts waiting from me. Something like this:

First, from my dad's sister (someone I've met once as a baby, and will be meeting again at the end of this month), I got a silky "4-leaf clover plant," a cool gift considering my dad is probably entirely Irish, an iron for pressing clothes (goodbye wrinkles?), and an 8.0 megapixel camera. Sweet deal, have to make sure I thank her when I see her in a few weeks.

Next, from my dad and his girlfriend, a Sony Vaio laptop w/ Windows Vista Ultimate (200GB HD, 2GB RAM, Intel Core 2 Duo processor), a couple of 512MB memory sticks (for my desktop, which should put me up to 2GB for that now), and some rechargeable AA batteries (for the camera). I'm posting from the laptop now while installing FF3 rc2. I don't care much for Vista, but it's bearable I suppose as long as the system specs are well-off enough to handle it. My only real gripe with the thing so far is all of the junk software it came with, which included a 60-day trial to Norton 360 (I've tried unsuccessfully to uninstall it several times), and a lot of AOL software that I don't want.

Kudos to them, now it's time for me to get my laptop running up to my own standards (I'm leaving the Bad Vista sticker on the page because I still think it's bad, regardless of whether or not I care enough to remove it from the laptop). =)

So, sometime last night Firefox alerted me to the available update, which turned out to be the FF3 release candidate. I downloaded it, and shortly after my router crapped out on me, so I restarted my computer (which I don't do often enough), and went to bed.

Fast forward to me getting home from school and deciding to launch the new Firefox install. It loaded in seconds, whereas the previous beta would sometimes take as much as 5-10 minutes to come up. I'm just really glad that whatever was doing that got sorted out somewhere in the update.