Monthly Archives: May 2008

FF3 and bookmarks

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Open Bookmarks and I see

Bookmarks Toolbar
Bookmarks Menu
- Recently Bookmarked
- Recent tags
- then some bookmarks
Unfiled Bookmarks

Try this – bookmark a page and put it in Bookmarks menu. It also appears in Recently bookmarked. Why? Why is it 2 places at once?
Where is the pref telling me how how long these ‘Recently bookmarked’ hang around – because it’s not in Prefs.
Why when I go to change what I see so I do not have to see the Recent Tags and Recent Bookmarks does it have Delete as an option but will not let me delete?
Why do I have to file everything? Tags, filing – can I not be disorganised in my bookmarks without you nagging at me with the ‘Unfiled’ word?
Why can I not make the bookmarks sidebar look how I want instead of this over-complex tree of stuff that actually hinders my getting at my bookmarks on my machine? All I want to see is MY bookmarks and NOTHING else.

And to the Proto devs – please can ‘Use small icons’ actually reduce the size of all icons and not just the oversized Back button?

FF3 may be faster but if using my bookmarks takes me longer then the perceived effect is that FF3 just got clunky.

DSG get it wrong – unsurprisingly.

3

Currys.digital to close 77 stores
Wrong. I’ve bought stuff from Currys and the staff there have clues. They are polite, listen, answer without bullshit and have more than a clue each. Disappointed I have not been. So the above decision strikes me as odd. What it should have said is:

DSG raze all PC World stores to the ground
I’ve bought stuff from PC World and the staff there do not have a clue between them. They are out solely to sell what the manager says, they do not listen, they use words like “centrino” to baffle and “Yes, it has 160GB of memory” which show they are clueless and they scare people into buying complete crap like Norton. Disappointed? Hell yes, and you can throw in furious too.

Mind, both websites suck big ones.

She did take it after all

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So Shannon has left BME. While this is obviously a private matter it proves that (1) Rachel did in fact orchestrate the ‘takeover’ and (2) modblog will go to sh*t like it did before. I said that I thought before in an entry on T2 I just re-published but my money says that IAM will be opened up to search engines or advertisers happy with the content. I recall Shannon saying he would never, but not her. Then watch people run to alternate communities. Oh well, modblog unsubscribed, zentastic added.

one or two not both

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I’ve not been feeling well for a while and chest pain was the main part of it. Last night it got worse, my pulse really slowed (which was weird) and I felt rough. So today I go the doc. He looks at two sets of tablets I’m taking and tells me that I shouldn’t be having those, that they will make me ill and I can only have one. He asked me who said I can have them and I told him another doc said I could. Then he looks at the inhalers which I hardly use these days. He asked me who said I could take just one of them and not two. Another doc I said. He said this was nor good because recent research shows people with asthma have “bad outcomes” if they take just the one I was. He did not elaborate on what “bad outcomes” was but it sounded serious. So I go in taking two tablets and he says just one and I used just one inhaler and he says to take two. But I believe him. He’s new – J called him a newbie last time she saw him – so he’s still mad keen on reading and teaching and telling which can’t be faulted. He’s a decent guy too. And the chest pain? He said there was nothing “sinister” but some tests wouldn’t be amiss so I have the forms for that. (For the record I went downstairs, got some stuff, came upstairs, sat down and immediately took my pulse. It was 60.)

Socialthing is losing for me.

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In Hana I have GMail, Google Reader, Facebook, Friendfeed, Socialthing and Backpack. The one that’s getting the least use and is about to be dropped is Socialthing. Because FB is open all the time I can post directly there. I’m using Socialthing solely to post to Twitter then, and if I put Twitter where it is then why use it at all? There will always be overlap somewhere with all these things going on but in FF I already have del.icio.us and YouTube which is what is next to Socialthing. And it’s also not letting me wander around and see who else is going on – that happens in FF. I guess it’s a case of see who wins in the longer run.

Stalingrad

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Stalingrad. It may well get a good write-up at IMDB. It might even be a good film, it might live up to “Excellent” and “A Masterpiece” on the cover. But this DVD has a HUGE fault similar to ‘Tell No-one”. That one was in French with English subtitles. I really don’t like subtitles for most films but a thriller? It’s still unwatched. But I see Stalingrad, see that good places gave it good reviews so I buy it. And it’s dubbed. If I don’t like subtitles then I really really don’t like dubbed films. It’s like watching something that is not only ever so slightly out of sync but also where the lip movements are different. And the accents are ridiculous. But does it say ‘dubbed’ on the box? Hell no – they want to sell it and they assume, probably rightly, that putting those 6 letters on a box will kill the sales.

Our first cache find

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Yesterday I mended the punctures so P and I went for a 2 hour bike ride around a couple of villages. Lots of ups and downs and we planned it with drinks breaks at a couple of shops. Really enjoyable. She mentioned the GPS when we were out and she agreed to see what we could do today.

I checked out geocaching.com and sent a few to the Garmin, played with the unit so I had more of a clue as it’s been a while since I used it and then checked out the site for the 3 caches in the village. P read the descriptions too then off we went. To Russia, with love was first. Rated easy and after about 45 mins we gave up. Although we’d both read some of the clues we hadn’t read them properly so we were actually looking for the wrong thing. I was thinking Russia / Bond / Fleming. Wrong. So off we went to Ratae corieltavorvm . This was up at the very rich end of the village. Expensive cars, big houses, manicured lawns and in one case gaudy fountains either side of a gated entrance. The path we needed wasn’t marked as we headed out but we got it on the way back. A wander through a field and bingo – our first cache.
We hadn’t really known what to expect but this one had everything. Several small items, a laminated guideline card, the notebook. We hadn’t taken anything with us to we took nothing. P complete the notebook and I put the box back. Pleased we both were. We then went to try for Thomas’s Legacy. We have lived in this village for 19 years and we had not the slightest clue. We sat at the start point for a while then decided to go back to the first one. This time I said the clues out loud so I concentrated better and actually read the gravestones. 2 minutes later I called P over and she discovered the second cache. Micro-size – a 35mm film canister. Notepages and a 20p coin. Notes left – as was coin – and we called it a day and came home. Some googling and thinking later we headed out again for the local park to try the Legacy again. The cache is rated as difficult which I assume is for the clue and the location and despite going to and fro along the track we found nothing. As I type P is on the computer trying to dig more clues out. But knowing it is meant to be hard is not so bad.
There is a choice of 3 for the next discoveries, all with cycling distance for P. Really good fun doing it though, even if it was just a couple found.

Cult of Cruise

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http:// www. tomcruise. com/
In the ‘Biography’ there is no mention of the Cult of scientology. Why ? Is he ashamed? Why would one of the top guys in the Cult not want to proclaim how wonderful it was and that people should sign up to the Cult of Scientology and give them all their money for lessons about whatever crap it is.
It also has autoplay music which puts it firmly in the same league as Myspace.
It also has flash
It also has frames
It degrades terribly.
Check the Source and the keywords.
Check the link at the bottom which says “Unsubscribe”. I didn’t know I had subscribed in the first place. Maybe I should give him by email just in case?

So it looks like crap and it’s about crap too. But you want to know what makes it totally the pits? It also has his smiling f*****g face.

Scientology

Scrubs and a stone

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P has just finished a week of SAT’s so had the time to come for a walk earlier with Winston. Chatted about a variety of things – including Scrubs – and also found great place for some pics. Some huge boulder sized stones which she sat on and I fired away. They are good but not as good as I would have liked – tremor and lighting being the problems. So as this weekend we’ll do it again in the time before sunset. I also agreed to watch some TV later (rare event – I usually work past her (late) bedtime. Bedtime? Wrong word – she goes bed when she is tired. Never have seen the point in a ‘bedtime’. Why send someone to bed to go to sleep when it’s plain they are not tired? Pointless. That said, the deal is they get up and go school regardless. That works.)

I loved Cheers. It formed an essential part of my learning the art of sarcasm (Rebecca could never pull it off as effectively as Diane) and it was the only US comedy that I actually found funny. Not just amusing but actually LOL. According to wikipedia there were 269 episodes and I’d love to see them all again. Other US comedies I just didn’t get. Some lines seemed so forced you could tell the huge writing team had sweated for it and just to be really sure the audience knew how hard they worked they threw a laughter track at it. I would talk about how John Cleese and Connie Booth wrote Fawlty Towers, or Curtis / Atkinson / Elton who brought us Blackadder. 5 people, two extremely successful series. And then came the one I hate with a passion.

We have all seasons of it and if DVD’s could be worn out these would have been. P has seen them so many times I swear I could give her a line of dialogue and she could tell me which episode, which character, what happened just before / after and a precis of the full episode. I absolutely hate Friends. From the first bars of the opening track – which I used to like before it was hijacked – to the last credit I abhor everything in between. It’s just plain horrible. I fail to see how anyone can find it even amusing. Scripted and scripted again. The ‘perfect’ people in it with the perfect this that and the other. It’s all so freaking (the new family-friendly swear word here. I still prefer the alternative – it has passion. While we were out I said to P that my boots were pretty cool now I’d worn them in. Apparently it is sooo old to say ‘cool’ now. I checked on ‘awesome’ and that was ruled out. The phrase in vogue right now is ‘hip-hop fresh’. I tried but that just does not trip off the tongue. Seems so wrong. While I’m on the subject, I played Advance Wars on the Nintendo DS. Was it about a year ago that ‘word’ was the .. word .. for something? Or two years? I never got that one. But that is used in Advance Wars – which instantly both dates the game and makes it clear the demographic they were aiming at. Bad move.) predictable. There is nothing interesting happens and the love thing? Crap – that’s like those coffee ads we had here. If Friends had been so short maybe it would have had more depth. Given the choice between replying to support tickets that would take twice as long or sit through one episode of Friends I’ll take the tickets every single time.

So when the girls started watching Scrubs I was dubious. We bought the Season sets and when we did they would both sit through them laughing constantly. But as I’m moving past the TV I catch the odd line, see something happen and I would laugh. I’d even stop and watch a few minutes. Not bad for the first US comedy since Cheers. So while out with Winston P finally got me to agree to watch Scrubs from the very start. Work felt good today so I stopped at 10 (or maybe 11, I forget) and we watched the first DVD (of 4) of season 1. Excellent. Very funny but not stupidly so. It didn’t feel so over-scripted and false and contrived as Friends. It had no laughter track (a ‘live TV audience’ is still a laughter track). I didn’t look at the credits and I don’t actually care if more people wrote it because the overall package that is Scrubs is really good. Thoroughly enjoyed it. I’ve probably seen a lot of bits of lots of episodes so I’ll now be able to flesh them out. I think P is looking for a DVD a day. Which probably wouldn’t be a bad idea.

New IM

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Because (1) I got into a mixup with someone about a hotmail account which did / did not work and (2) because I could I changed my IM details. so AIM / Y! are m69105, MSN is m69105@live.com, Jabber is m69105@jabber.ambrero.nl. Skype and GTalk are the same. Twitter is now 69105, Friendfeed is 69105 and socialthing stays as it was. I think these are (were) the last ‘podz’ ones and this brings everything slightly closer. A real mix of names was annoying.

Being just a number isn’t so bad :)