A while back I ran across a toolbar for Mozilla Firefox that helps you look up the availability of domain names. It’s a very handy tool, however it was taking too much space on my browser, so I tried uninstalling to no avail. Months went by and I still couldn’t figure it out until today.

Here’s how you do it.

Go to C:\program files\Mozilla Firefox\chrome and find xpinstall.manifest

This is where the toolbar is loaded in. If you want to remove the toolbar, remove these lines:

overlay chrome://navigator/content/navigator.xul chrome://whoisbar/content/whoisbar.xul
overlay chrome://browser/content/browser.xul chrome://whoisbar/content/whoisbar.xul
content whoisbar jar:file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/your.name/Application%20Data
/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/av318bvz.name/Chrome/whoisbar.jar!/content/

Follow the path on this last line to delete the .jar file. I hope this helps. I couldn’t for the life of me figure this one out for a while. The name.net bar can be uninstalled in the same way

An alternative domain name lookup is Whois.ws Quick Search by David McBreen. You can find it here.

The April 2006 newsletter is now out. Come check out the sleepy little man and witness the launch of a website. We’ll put a new batch of photos up here in the next couple of days.

As you know, March was the 9th month of our pregnancy. Kelly kept getting bigger and we wondered if James would ever come. Kelly was induced at 12PM on the 3rd of April. During the UCLA-Florida game were some of the hardest hours of Kelly’s labor, but it was worth it because as of 11:45am on the 4th, we had our handsome little man, James.

We are so happy to debut our James on the wagaman web. Here’s our photo gallery from his birth. If you click on the thumbnail, you can view a larger version of the picture. When you’re done, hit the back button on your browser to view the next picture. Enjoy.

James Benjamin Wagaman came into this world on April 4, 2006 at 11:45am. He weighed 7 lbs and was 21 inches long. We brought him home from the hospital today. We are all getting used to having a new Wagaman in our house, but we love our little man. We will soon have some pictures up here, but until then enjoy this one picture and a video. We promise we’ll have pictures up here in the next day or so.

James first video

We’re still waiting for our little J-Moose. Kelly’s due date was on March 29th; if James doesn’t arrive by Monday at 11AM, she is going to be induced. We’ll put some pics up here of the little man as soon as we can.

Star Wars + Transformers

As a child born the same year that Darth Vader made his debut on the silk screen, I was both intrigued and apalled during my latest trip to K.B. Toys. In the front of the store was a collection of Star Wars toys. Interested in what James will probably play with as a kid, I ran across the latest toy:

The Star Wars Transformer.

At first glance, that’s either the coolest thing ever or the wierdest. The coolness of the toy is that you get both Vader and his spaceship in one toy. If that’s not cool enough, get the Luke Skywalker rebel alliance action figure. Now you can have hand-to-hand combat AND fight each other with blasters too.

Luke Skyformer

On the other hand, the wierd part about the Star Wars Transformer is that the characters of Star Wars and the characters of Transformers are based on two completely different mythologies. A modernist would be throwing up in the toilet even thinking about it. After all the ideal of modernism is purity of style and story.

The postmodernist has no problem with a toy of this nature though. The juxtaposition of these two seemingly contradictory things rather than explained away are allowed to simply coexist, even encouraged. After all, you end up with an incredibly awesome toy!

I kind of waver between these two worlds. On one hand having discrete pure toys is a good thing. On the other hand, if all you care about is having some fun, why not combine them in one.

In internet technology the closest thing to this idea of juxtaposition is the Web 2.0 idea of the mash-up. The basic idea is to pull content from other sites into yours and vice versa. As you combine different data sources, you form a hybrid between the two. In fact two of the biggest internet companies, Google and Yahoo, are actually encouraging this behavior by asking outside programmers to hack their site.

Juxtaposition. It’s bigger than you think.