My new rice cooker

Welcome me to the 21st centry, I've finally gotten myself a "fuzzy-logic" rice cooker. It is a Sanyo ECJ-F50S.

Why is it a big deal... um... it's not. The inner pot of my old Tiger is scratched and rust is seeping out, and that was the second pot I had for that unit, so it was time to rid of it.



Everybody knows, when it comes to rice cookers, Japanese brands rule. And amoung them, it's between Tiger and Zojirushi (them like their zoo animals don't they). Well, I've tried a Tiger, its trash. And I wanted one with a thick non-stick pot, which is only available on the high end models for Zojirushi, so I picked a Sanyo.

This unit has a good enough look, unlike your traditional Japanese rice cookers - pinkish body with floral decorations, oh gee, what the, shame on them - but the real gem is the inner pot, which is extra thick and sports a round bottom for even heating and a titanium coating that promises never to wear out.




Oh, the rice? Disappointingly, no difference.

Firefox never fails to disappoint

Don't get me wrong, since the first days of Netscape (and I mean when the icon was still an M instead of an N) I've been using it as my main browser (between it and Mosaic, it was an easy choice). But boy I cannot take it anymore, the Mozilla franchaise is just all hypes.

The fact is, Mozilla is slow. "Oh, because of the seperate Gecko Rendering Engine... which we will integrate into the browser binary..." With an integrated GRE and ridding of its HTML editor and mail reader, Firefox 1.0 promised to be the slimmer nimbler new born of the Mozilla browser. But it wasn't really any faster... especially on slower machines (version 2.0 takes 8 seconds to come up on my Pentium II, versus 3 seconds for my IE 6). Firefox 3.0 promised a memory trim down, numerous editorials hailed the triumph... sorry, still slower than its counterparts in all 5 of my PCs. Ironically version 3.5's tagline is speed... it takes a whopping 9 seconds to start (in safe mode!) on my C2D 1.6 Lenovo x61s. Pathetic (this article blames a bug, yeah, we'll see).

Disappointingly, Firefox lags in features, in every sort of ways. I've talked about its feature sets before. Version 3.5 introduces Private Browsing, a moderately good idea, but Chrome and IE have already done it. Look under the hood, you realize it's still about copying other people's work. For example, it's messaging infrastructure - XPCOM - is really a copy cat of Microsoft's DCOM, just download the source and see for yourself.

I do like Firefox's ability to let me customize it; which is not found in any other browsers. But with its sluggish performance and incompatibility of many web pages out there (authors of those pages to blame), I am seriously considering switching...

CAPS lock? Really?

I mean, really, who uses the Caps lock key nowadays on a computer keyboard. "Oh gee, I need to type EVERYTHING IN CAPS AND GOD FORBID I AIN'T GONNA USE THE SHIFT KEY" Really, that happens? Really?

And I don't have the foggiest idea what Scroll lock and Pause are for. Come on.