Justin at home on Jan 29, 2004 (BEFORE his haircut):

Justin at My Gym on Feb 15, 2004 (AFTER his haircut):

Justin actually got his much-needed haircut on Feb 14, 2004 at "Magic Mirror Kid's Hair", the specialist kids' barber shop which reopened in the newly-refurbished Lee Gardens Two building (formerly Caroline Centre where it was originally) in Causeway Bay.

Looking for a web browser like Apple's Safari that supports tabbed browsing but for Windows? I've done some research and highly recommend Avant Browser. It uses Internet Explorer's rendering engine so you get the same website compatibility but it adds tabbed browsing and a ton of additional features and yet it's free (donations accepted). "Tabbed browsing" is awesome: from a site's main page, when you click on links that interest you, those pages are loaded in separate layers "in the background" while you continue to go through the full page undisturbed. When you're ready to look at those linked pages, there's no backtracking and, best of all, no waiting because those pages are already loaded — just click on the tabbed layers.

UPDATE (2004-04-21): I now recommend Mozilla Firefox over Avant Browser. It also has tabbed browsing but pages load much faster. A colleague, Peter Smyth, introduced it to me.

TIP (2004-04-21): If you have used web page links or bookmarks/favorites that have a username and password embedded and use a non-standard port (non-working example: http://username:password@myserver.com:8080), you will have probably found out by now that they no longer work after recent Internet Explorer security updates have been applied. Solution I have found is to use the Opera browser — or a Mac!

This tip from Macintouch reader Peter Chin in the Safari 1.2 report is a winner:

Feb. 9, 2004

Safari 1.2 update released

Peter Chin
I have observed that sometimes while surfing with Safari my CPU usage jumps to and sustains 100% (even when idle!) and scrolling is sluggish, especially while browsing UBBS and similar HTTP-based forums. I also noticed that entering text in those forums and in web-based email pages was painfully slow. Thinking that this could be similar to the problems with Sherlock and Adobe Reader, where there were too many enabled languages and/or plugins loaded, I did a Get Info on Safari and went to the Languages window and found all of the languages enabled.

So, I unchecked all languages except English, closed the Get Info window, and launched Safari. What a difference! Now scrolling seems back to what it was and my CPU usage idles back to the usual 15-20% when idle in Safari.

It definitely helped me out on my 3-year-old PowerBook G4/500. I suspect this problem is only noticeable on older, slower Macs and on web pages that support multiple languages. Prior to coming across this tip, I suspected Safari was the problem after trying to investigate by opening up 2 terminal windows and running tcpflow in one and the top -u command in the other. top revealed high CPU usage whenever my machine seemed to stall or hang as it never did before.