I picked up a new BBQ over the weekend. I was tired of dealing with charcoal, so I went with an LP gas unit. I looked around at various models, and for the price you sure get a lot of grill by shopping at Costco.

Although it’s listed at $999.99 (shipping included) on the Costco website, the “Kirkland Signature Stainless Steel Grill”:1 was $799.99 at my local Costco. I imagine the difference is the shipping costs for this beast (it weighs in at almost three hundo pounds).

* Heavy gauge all 304-stainless steel construction
* (3) 17,000 BTU/hr stainless steel burners
* 10,000 BTU infrared rotisserie burner
* 12,000 BTU built-in side burner
* Deluxe all stainless steel rotisserie kit with motor and counter balance
* Built-in removable smoker tray
* Deluxe removable grease tray
* Dual ball bearing convenience drawers
* Deluxe stainless steel lift-off serving tray
* Tailored insulated PVC cover

Let the grilling begin!

Man, this just shouldn’t happen…

In this post “here”:1 I wrote about the Canon MultiPass “MP390″:2. Here’s my review: It rules!

I finally got around to plugging the thing into a USB 2.0 port (instead of my keyboard’s USB 1.1 port), and it just cranks now. Super-fast printing _and_ super fast scanning… _and_ it’s also a fax machine. This is what happens when you stop ever using “parallel ports”:3 ever again. Life just gets better.

OMG, remember when you had have a “SCSI”:4 interface to get a scanner to work? Or trying to get a file scanned into a “PDF”:7? The software that comes with my MP390 does that automagically.

Hum… but I really wish I would have waited a bit and picked up this one, the Canon MP750, with the auto document feeder… deeeamn, as of today, 7/9/05, it’s only *129* bucks at “Amazon”:8. Man, I paid $149 for my MP350 just back in April. That’s just wrong.

Oh… _and_ both my MP390 and the MP750 are photo printers, of course. Where’s the margin in printers (or scanners or faxes or photo printers) these days?

[8(Amazon page on the Canon MP750)]http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000650R0M/qid=1120967408/

[7(Wikipedia on PDF files)]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_Format

[6(Yahoo quote for HPQ)]http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=HPQ&d=t

[5(Amazon page for the Canon PIXMA MP750)]http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000650R0M/qid=1120967408/

[4(Wikipedia on SCSI)]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCSI

[3(Wikipedia on parallel ports)]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_port

[2(Amazon page for the Canon MultiPass MP390)]http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0001CJECC/qid%3D1113278325/

[1(Zoinger post on the Canon MultiPass MP390)]http://www.zoinger.com/words/archives/2005/04/13/how-to-annoy-your-local-starbucks-staff-lesson-1/

I recently re-installed Firefox on my computer (I had a bunch of extensions installed that I wasn’t using, so wanted to “clean up” the build) and found some cool settings for Firefox’s “_Tabbrowser Extensions_”:1 extension.

If you select the author’s settings when you first install the extension (the settings box comes up after you install the extension and restart the browser), the _TabGroup Mode_ is set to “on.” Here’s a screenshot of the settings if you want to try them out without reinstalling the whole extension:

These settings group tabs together depending on how they are opened, and also color the tabs based on these groups. Here’s an example of how it looks in my browser:

In the screenshot above, the green tabs at the top are all pages I got to starting from Jon Udell’s blog on Infoworld. I originally went to the upper most green tab, Jon’s blog, and opened three links from this page in new tabs. Notice that, in addition to these three tabs all being green, that these three new tabs were spawned directly below the parent “Jon’s blog tab” and not at the bottom of the tab list.

Oh, I used a hack in Firefox’s @userchrome.css@ file to change the color of the active tab’s background to yellow — that’s why the first tab in the list, Yahoo!, is yellow. It’s handy for keeping track of which tab you are on when you have a bunch of tabs open. Here’s the @userchrome.css@ code I use:

 /* Change Active Tab Color */
tab {background-color: white !important; color:black !important}
tab[selected="false"] {color: black; background-color: white !important;}
tab[selected="true"] {color: blue; background-color: yellow !important;}

Using colors in tabs rocks.

[1(Home page for Tabbrowser Extensions)]http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/tabextensions/index.html.en

Back on my old blog, I “wrote”:1 about using Costco for your photo printing service. Well, I’m finally getting around to doing some prints. I must say that to do it right, it’s a pain in the butt. First you gotta configure Photoshop, calibrate your monitor, pick the shot you want to print, crop it, color correct it, enhance it, sharpen it, download the ICC profile for your local Costco’s printer, change the image profile, add any boarder necessary for the print size you want and, finally, save it to a @.jpg@ file. Only then can you run down to Costco, and get a print.

If you want to know how to do all this, it’s simple: Just buy this book, and read the whole thing.

[2(Amazon link for Photoshop CS Artistry)]http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/073571374X/qid=1120779473/

[1(Old Zoinger on Costco for prints)]http://www.zoinger.com/archives/2005/02/15/10.34.22/index.html