My last blog drive-bys for the month include some of the blogs in my neighborhood at BlogCatalog as well as some new Technorati favorites. I'm going to try to keep adding Technorati favorites to every batch as well as culling from other sources. I'm going to be going through my blog's post comments starting with the next batch. It should be interesting to see how long it takes to go through over 500 posts without hitting the same commenters twice.

Please take your time and enjoy today's…

Kevin over at Pointless Banter has a sense of humor that's slightly more warped than my own. I ignored this thing about Madeleine McCann in the news, but he completely trashed it. I couldn't have done a better job if I tried.

I skimmed over some articles earlier today about the Firefox upgrade. After spotting a short article on Project Afterlight and digging into the links provided, I immediately installed the update. The only thing that got disabled on my installations was the Java console and I'm not even sure how that's integrated into Firefox in the first place — it's not an add-on.

Although some of the one-liners posted at RATPage Entertainment Plus harken back to the days of Windows 3.11, it's still amusing to see some I've never seen posted before. My favorite: 4) Press any key… no, no, no, NOT THAT ONE!

Only the second Norwegian blog I've come across, I will never forgive Renny of RennyBA's Terella for posting pictures of delicious-looking food on his blog, especially since I accidentally skipped breakfast and lunch today (busy, busy, busy). I had to take a break right then to go eat something fishy!

Hari, if you're reading, you'll like this. Miss Cutie at Scary Ghost Story related one of her spookiest experiences while working as a Confidential Secretary. I had to stop right there. I don't read scary stories at night. Not that I'm scared or anything like that but… I'll wait until morning to go back and read it.

Mattsofi at Sapphire Knight wrote a tutorial about how to enable gravatars on WordPress themes. The same coding techniques can be used to grab avatars from other places such as Technorati and MyBlogLog. Do you use gravatars or avatars on your blog? I don't and I'm wondering if they would add to the reading experience or be distracting.

I spent a few minutes watching the video and checking out Microsoft's surface computer at Derrich.com. I'm sure a home version of this will be available within the next 10 years, and it might not even be from Microsoft. I pity the housewife (or househusband) that has to take the time to clean all the fingerprints that will amass on a device such as this. I'll bet the commercial version will have to be wiped several times a day.

Kate at Starmedia Communications wrote an interesting article about the aging work force in North America, specifically in the US and Canada. She's right about a lot of things and I'm glad I'm not the only one that understands that things are not changing for the better. Read it and you'll see what I'm getting at.

Thomas Jankowski wrote about how Google is learning from Microsoft's monopoly mistakes. Google was praised for offering terabytes of free storage, hardware and support for scientists transporting large amounts of data between various teams. The amount of storage surpassed 120 TB. Now we know one of the reasons Google was buying up all the dark fiber they could get their hands on.

DanTien at Woke Up Today Into This has some really good music (in my opinion) posted on his front page. What I enjoyed the most was the link to a video about 14-year old boy who was given a $50,000 car to drive and promptly crashed it. People with that kind of money to waste… I have nothing good to say about it and will stop right there.

Mike, the guy who's going to make a million dollars in 12 months or die trying, posted a humorous outlook on eBays acquisition of StumbleUpon over at Twenty Steps. I wonder if he's concerned about it, or maybe he'd rather watch a good game of cricket, like he talks about over on Flintoffs Ashes. I don't know. Cricket versus boring business news… I'd go with the cricket.

Micki launched a mini-tirade (perhaps tirade is too strong a word) toward the Cajun Redneck Man who gets to eat all the fatty foods and such and ages (or so she says) better than she does at My Rearview Mirror. Is this that guy I used to see once in awhile on TV with the thick Cajun accent? If so, heck, he's much older than me and looks better than I will at his age. I think it has something to do with heredity.

How does that saying go? Mimicry is a form of flattery or something like that. Well, I couldn't end today's travels without mentioning Maurizio's first batch of blog drive-bys at Nafurai. I just hope he can keep doing it more regularly than I do. It can get difficult to find new sources of blog addresses if you don't know where to look. I read a statistic somewhere that 80 percent of our links come from 20 percent of those that link to us. Linking to the same blogs over and over again is what causes that. There's nothing wrong with doing that, but you don't want to do it every other day. By the way, this is also called "speed linking" on some blogs. I don't know about the speed part, though, because it takes me a long time to go through blogs to find the stuff that I find interesting or amusing.