Been working and drinking at the pub today where I found myself in a conversation with none other than Eddie Gadd of Gadds brewery, Ramsgate. The hot topic of conversation… Who is Eastcliff Richard? Apparently the local loo roll known as Thanet Times has been asking the very same question. I was and am certainly interested to know who he is, but not at the risk of his blog. Eastcliff brings up some very good points in some funny ways and I’d hate to see trash like the Thanet Times discover who he was and get one over on him. So I will suppress my curiosity and applaud his anonymity.
I sing this song to myself at the start of every week. I like the song, but I think mainly it’s because I have psychology class over at Canterbury College. It’s an interesting subject, but it makes my noodle hurt.
In my honest opinion, I think that psychology is loved by self centred people, perhaps trying to cure themselves. In particular, I think it’s girls that like to do it (thats not saying that girls are self centred). When I meet people and tell them that one of my classes is psychology I can normally guess what their reaction is gonna be based on a combination of their gender and how much they like to talk about themselves and lose interest whenever the subject is on anything but them. I will say though, today raised some interesting points. Such thoughts as, who should be on a list of repopulating the world. Lesbians and gays can be on there, because they can suppress that for the sake of mankind (hahaha). Paedophiles shouldn’t, they should just have their nuts cut off! They aren’t allowed the opportunity to suppress those desires. Perhaps people think that they will pass on those genes to create generations of kiddy fiddlers. Perhaps the News Of The World has more influence in this country than we realise.
Anyway, only a couple of weeks left, then it’s exams. Then I’ll be leaving the sunny climbs of Thanet. I like Ramsgate and Broadstairs, so I’ll miss it. But Oxford should be neat.
“How many times must people tell us their favourite firefox extensions?”
I look at other peoples lists and sometimes I find things I don’t know about, so here are mine. By the way, if your don’t already have firefox (thats a web browser, like internet explorer, or the blue ‘e’ as Danny said to me once), then get it, give it a go and maybe drop it later if you don’t like it like. I love it though. If you have it but don’t know how to instal them, then just go to tools>extensions pop-up appears, click the ‘get more extensions in the bottom right corner. This link takes you to the extensions website where you can pick them out and install them.
Ok, the list: <ul><li>Tabbedbrowser Preferences: This is always the first thing I grab when I instal a fresh copy. Adds a neat little button to your tab toolbar for new tabs, plus some other little preference settings.</li><li>Download Statusbar: Rather than having a pop-up status box for your downloads it put’s them into a status bar at the bottom of your browser. Just one of those annoyance tidiers.</li><li>PDF Download: Because I don’t always want to just open them in a new tab.</li><li>Colorful Tabs: I originaly just thought this was geeky supurfluousness but was hassled into getting it by Jay. The colourfulness is nice enough, but the useful part is that the title on any tab you havn’t yet looked at is italicised. I find this very useful as I often open many tabs when I flick through the results of a websearch.</li><li>FireFTP: I won’t recommend this as a replacement to a dedicated FTP client (for that I’d recommend filezilla, a quality dedicated ftp client). But it is pretty neat if you just want to quickly upload a file or two.</li><li>ColorZilla: It has a colour eyedropper tool, plus various zoom funtions and other such like.</li><li>Reveal: Another one from Jay. It’s thumbs up all your tabs on hitting f2. Also gives you a thumb of the previous page on the back button. Has a very irritating tripple click magnifying glass, but that can be disabled through it’s preferences</li><li>Del.icio.us: If you have a del.icio.us account than this is a usefull extension for quick and easy tagging.</li><li>JSView: Lets you inspect any javascript and css, like the view source function does for HTML. </li></ul> All these extensions I have given the exact name, so it should be real easy to find them. If I’ve missed a sitter, then please tell me.
Are those guys over the pond gonna actually catch up with our good old NHS? Especially at a time when we are looking at privitising it (well, if Dave Cameron gets in). Seems Massachusetts is heading down that road with a compulsory, but cheap statewide healthcare system. Perhaps a starting point for wildfire that will spread across the country, or perhaps just a flash in the pan.
Thanet, Margate, Ramsgate, Broadstairs, Birchington, Westgate, Kent International Airport, Minster, Manston.
I know, it’s a cheap ploy, but I also know that people search by their town names. These are my local towns and I’m a big fan of local stuff in general. Certainly, much early cinema was spread by the publics desire to see their own home towns on film, and perhaps to some extent the same can be said about the internet. Let us hope is remains driven in that way and doesn’t blend into a bland hollywoodnet.
As a further note to my earlier post. To be able to properly use Windows Live Mail you must be running IE6 or later. Good to see old microsoft wants to incorporate everyone!
Battle of the betas I see. Hotmail has upgraded to Live Mail in a blatant attempt to challenge Gmail. Of course, like any old web hand I have a hotmail account and I’m happy to try this out. Is it as cool as gmail? Not on your nelly! They’ve tried to make it too much like outlook. It lacks gmails addictive simplicity and inventive ideas and the last thing I want are huge picture ads in my mail windows. Still, it’s better than old hotmail, you can’t deny that. Loading up a new page for each and every action was soooo annoying before.
Sites like myspace give people so much opportunity for people to say something, that nobody ever does. There is no quality content on there. People seem to think that by having a flashy layout that is all they need to do… and collect friends of course. A comment saying ‘your so cool’ does not give the visitor decent stuff to read. This is the sort of thing that could just as easily be done with an email and the rest of us don’t have to suffer it. You see bands that do all their promotion through myspace. They go to a myspace layout generator site, pick out some colours from a little chart and tada, instant ‘website’. It’s easy, it’s cool, it shows your slack. Worse still, music promoters will post the bands that they have playing, the venue and that’s it… slack. Alot of the time they’ll only use bands that are on myspace so as to make their own jobs easier. What about bands that don’t use myspace???
Ok, so that was a bit of a myspace bashing, but it’s not all bad. Its good that people are getting on the net and communicating. And I do use it myself, so you can call be a hypocrite. There is even a link for mine just to the right there. I just wish there was more quality content and bands made a bit more effort.
Firstly, I’m loving the new talk inbuilt into gmail. Shame I don’t know hardly anybody who uses it. Everyone I know is on msnm. Just getting people to use gmail can be difficult, the answer is ‘I already use hotmail’. Damn it, I say, hotmail blows. Ah well, it’s up to them I guess.
So, I’ve been playing with some new google toys. Hitting that magical ‘more…’. I installed their web accelerator off google labs. A quick look through the blurb tells of how it can speed up your load times by pre-loading pages and running your connection through google servers. It’s happy to use firefox (I wouldn’t even consider it if it was for IE) and I’ll give anything a go once. So I plug this baby in. Alas, I seems to make my internet connection freeze. That’s not the sort of reaction I hope for out of an accelerator. It’s happy to tell you how many seconds it’s saving, just a shame it doesn’t pass on the benefits.
I loved firefox. It’s a very very cool browser. I proudly have the ‘get firefox’ button on my website (along with a songbird button, a media player based on the same engine) and I’m not the only one, of course. But I keep seeing peoples buttons with ‘get firefox with google toolbar’. So like any web junky who wants to see al the bells and whistles I go check it out. Like with anything like this, I like to read about it first. Here is what it includes: * Search box: It has a spell checker, but other than that, it’s just a search bar and only a google one at that. Firefox already has a search bar that is modlicious * Safe Browsing: This tells you whether you are on a phising site that has previously been reported. Personally, I wouldn’t trust that anyway. Just stick to using your normal entry point to websites where you put your card details in and think about who you use. You wouldn’t just give money to any old monkey off the street and ask them to go get you something! * Subscribe to RSS: Hello?!?! I use firefox, do I not have this feature?!?! * Use gmail as default when clicking mail links: Ahh, now that seems kinda useful. * Google Page Rank: I always ignore this when I have to use an IE with a toolbar. I can make my own damn mind up whether a site is good. And it won’t be based on whether or not someone has gone to SEO effort. * Search for words on page: Already a function on firefox, just hit F3, and it already highlights those words your looking for.
There are a couple of other bits on it, mouse over to see a word in another language for example, but I’m not impressed. There is too little to make this worth it for firefox. Of course, if you insist on staying with IE, then you really should get the toolbar, otherwise, firefox without is cool for cats and makes me happy. :)
Also I’ve started to use the calendar, but that’s all a bit too early days yet to see what that’s like, but it does seem kinda neat. I’ll talk about that after a bit more play.
It’s the first Saturday. Infact, the first day of a new blog. I’m sure there are 1million and 1 other blogs like it, but I want my own. I think that’s the whole point. To get lost in the sea of people shouting.
I’ve been reading blogs for a good while now. I have some favorites. EastcliffRichard, Arts and Elbows, that sort of thing. I already have my own website called oonagi thats been going for about six years. That’s kinda blogish, but is tailored for a specific topic; rock in Thanet. So I can’t really say whatever I want about whatever I want there.
I’m not really a diary kinda person, but I do have stuff I want to write. So here is where it will be. If a topic is relevant, I will post it elsewhere too, but this is really for me at the moment. :)