Vasil Lalov

Ogy and Emi came visited from Cleveland, OH for the Memorial Day weekend. They have not been to Chicago before so I thought this was a nice opportunity for me to show them around. Erin stayed over the weekend as well, so I had a full house. Lots of fun time.

Riding the Blue Line to downtown Chicago:

On top of Sears Tower:

Chicago Board of Trade Fountain:

Millenium Park Fountain (My favourite spot in downtown):

She tried to push me under the water:

Fun at the “Bean”:

Erin and I spent some time together in downtown Chicago. The weather was very nice and the fact that we did not have to do anything the whole day made us very relaxed and we were able to enjoy ourselves. Its those little moments that I cherish the most!

The Millennium Park fountain in downtown Chicago:

 Reflections from “The Bean” are always fun:

The pictures do not do her justice:

I am a long time Linux user. As a matter of fact, I run only Linux on all of my computers. Ever since Firefox 2.0 came out, I’ve noticed that the web sites do not load as fast as they used to do. Even IE on my dual boot laptop loads most pages faster. Overall, I am still very satisfied by Firefox as a web browser. However, I’ve always felt that there is something missing from the browsing experience. I decided to try the latest release of Opera.

Things that I’ve noticed immediately:
* Opera loads faster than Firefox.
* Opera generally loads web pages faster than Firefox.
* When scrolling down on a very long page, think forums, the scroll action is faster than in Firefox. I mean, I can scroll down faster by holding the arrow keys compared to doing the same action in Firefox.
* Probably, the most important improvement for me was the fact that Opera did not eat my entire CPU when loading a web page which required plugins. Normally, Firefox will eat up my CPU when whatching a Youtube video. Not Opera.

For now, I think I am going to set Opera as my default browser on my Ubuntu laptop and try it for couple of weeks.