I’ve been compulsively using StumbleUpon for a little while now, and every single day, without fail, I still find a half dozen or more really great sites that I probably never would have seen otherwise. My bookmarks have exploded since I started using it.

The first day I installed the toolbar for Firefox, it seemed like every single time I clicked the “Stumble!” button, I was taken to a page that was either extremely useful or cool or both, and that happened probably a good hundred times in a row. I’ve been hooked ever since. It really is a marvelous little toy to tinker with, and I highly recommend it. You can see the pages I’ve liked by viewing my StumbleUpon homepage.

For some time now I’ve had this little javascript “The Secret” banner across the corner of my site’s index. I first watched the movie in July of 2006. I thought it was fantastic, and still do. Since then, it’s had a lot of skeptical press and negativity rained down upon it by about every media outlet on earth. I think they are misunderstanding the film.

Unless you are a really vapid individual, you don’t view The Secret and then start thinking that you can conjure things from midair, which is apparently what these media types are taking from the film. What the film is trying to tell people is that positive people attract positivity into their lives, and that no one ever successfully jumped through a hoop without thinking about successfully jumping through a hoop first. It’s about believing in yourself, and caring enough about the things you want to try and make them happen. The presentation is gorgeous and engaging, and the message is sterling and clear. If you don’t feel energized and excited after watching the movie, your skepticism has murdered your imagination, and you should immediately make every effort to snap out of it and regain some shred of the spark for life you were born with.

I just uh…”stumbled across” a copy of the Flock developer preview, and having messed around with it a little bit I can say for sure: it’s pretty cool.

Click the screen shot above for a bigger view. I really like the blogging features, and I can’t wait until they all work properly so I can test them more thoroughly, but this is very promising! It definitely makes the whole process very easy and intuitive, and it works just fine with Movable Type 3.2 for me, even though the site said it wouldn’t.

Most of my bookmarks aren’t things that anyone else would find interesting, or they’re work-related and thus not eligible for sharing, so the favorites-sharing features don’t really interest me, and I haven’t tried them.

I can vouch for the rest though. They took Firefox and prettied it up while adding some advanced functionality that isn’t really available via extensions or plugins at the moment, and thus is extremely valuable to those who have a blog or desire some of the community-oriented features that are present here. I’ll put some more screen shots up later on for anyone who is interested.

A lot of you are already using Firefox. You will probably read this post even though you know everything I will mention in it, because the average Firefox user is gung-ho about the browser. Not only does it “just work” like all software should..it works so damned well that it ends up making you take it for granted, and some of you have already experienced this..but using someone else’s computer with IE becomes a real drag.

Firefox is a lean, fast, extremely advanced web browser designed by the Mozilla Foundation. It is standards-compliant, which means that it displays web pages the way the designers meant them to be seen. It is cross-platform, which means that whether you run Windows, Linux, Unix, MacOS, or what have you…there’s a Firefox for you. It is built with security in mind, which means that it keeps your files and information more secure than the competition, by eliminating ActiveX and by having sensible default settings. It blocks popups by default, it has a built-in RSS/ATOM feed reader, it uses tabbed browsing, it has a small resource footprint, it rarely (if ever) crashes, and it’s customizable to an extent never before seen in a web browser. If you’re a geek or a tinkerer, you can literally tear this browser apart and rebuild it to your liking. It is modular times infinity.

It is small and fast by itself, and with it’s extensions system, YOU decide what features you want and which you don’t want. No compulsory bulk that reduces speed, wastes space, and annoys the shit out of you.

Firefox is an amazing little piece of software, and I am confident that if you try it you will switch to it for good. It makes web browsing convenient and hassle-free again, if you use IE chances are it’s been a while since you experienced that. It had been for me!

Give it a shot, and post a comment here if you need help with something and can’t find the answer. Make sure you check out extensions and themes too!

AMCGLTD has a link to an extremely bizarre and creepy photo-story type hoaxish-thing which no words I can come up with quite do justice to. Very worth checking out, read the comments too. Direct link to it is here. (edit) Turns out these pics and the story were hijacked from a thread on SomethingAwful. Original post is here. (/edit)

Also here is the link to the Ted the Caver chronicle, which is also a strange and creepy tale, well worth reading.

CNN has a story this morning about a man who had a new jaw grown within muscle tissue in his back from stem cells. Doctors implanted a titanium cage along with the stem cells, and the new jaw grew within it. They then removed it and put it where it ought to be, in his head. Shortly afterward the man had his first meal in 9 years, a bratwurst sandwich. Within a year they expect to be able to remove the cage and implant teeth into the jaw.

The writer of WhyNotResist noticed this article as well, and her reaction to it was calling it gross. Understandable, since it is a pretty bizarre and foreign concept to us still, but my perspective of it is that a man who had suffered for 9 years with no lower jaw due to a cancerous tumor is now able to eat a normal meal again.

Even better is that this is not a transplant, nothing was harvested from anyone but the guy, and even then it was just a small amount of tissue. His new jaw will be an exact duplicate of his old one, and probably function every bit as well. This is nothing short of miraculous and revolutionary medical advancement, and I think that cases like his are more than enough reason to re-open the books on stem cell therapies here in the U.S.