Awesome! (bar)
I’m a full-time Firefox user. It’s a truly great browser. It’s easy to use, pretty quick, and stable. At work, I very often end up with a single session running all week, chopping and changing tabs. I’ve got quite a few add-ons in there too. Some are quite trivial, and some do some pretty useful stuff.
Firefox 3 added quite a few new features, one of which is the AwesomeBar. I don’t think that’s the official name, but that’s what people are tending to call it.
ESXi and the lousy performance
The nice folks at VMWare recently made ESXi ‘free’. I put that in quotes because the licence gets you the server and Virtual Infrastructure (VI) client, but you still need to pony up for the extra management stuff, and fun toys like VMotion.
ESXi is very stripped down too, and missing a lot of commands useful for rolling your own backups. Still, it’s a very valuable thing to have.
*Crash* *Boom* *Click*
On Monday evening, we were treated to a storm around 21:00. The weather had been pretty hot, and storms had been forecast. I was sitting watching the TV and spotted some nice big clouds racing our way, and some lightning.
I immediately jumped out of my chair and went to the back garden and stood and watched for a few moments. The storm clouds were skirting around us; directly above was fairly clear sky. I saw a flash of lightning. “If that flashes again really soon, I’ll get my camera” I thought. Mere seconds later, another big flash of lightning came.
Never is enough
HP shatters excessive packaging world record
Quite amazing. One big box, containing 16 smaller boxes, each containing two sheets of paper (which were also wrapped in foam, for some reason).
Talk about waste! That could just as easily all gone in a Jiffy bag or something. I always thought Cisco’s packaging for Callmanager licences was stupid - an A5 sheet of paper, in an A4 cardboard envelope, in a bigger oversized envelope.
At the very least, they do bundle up many of the A4 envelopes into one bigger one, but it’s still very wasteful. Oh, and add to that the fact each of those A5 sheets of paper is accompanied by a little wad of paper (in itself shrink-wrapped) called the ‘Information Packet’. Nice pun Cisco! All it contains is a warranty - a warranty for a bit of paper, probably.
I bet it doesn’t cover accidental shredding.
War on Drugs
Felony complaint filed against Barenaked Ladies’ Steven Page
Quite surprising. Amazingly bad timing too, considering they’ve only just released Snacktime, an album aimed at kids.
Drugs in music has always concerned me - so many musicians seem to be dabbling in drugs. Thankfully, they’re not all up to the levels of Amy Winehouse or Pete Doherty, but it seems to be a pretty universal thing. I stopped subscribing to Total Guitar magazine as I mostly got fed up with all the references to drugs in the interviews. I personally abhor their use; I rarely drink (I don’t get binge drinking), and smoking disgusts me, so drugs use is a massive nono.
I don’t understand why anybody needs to use drugs. Life can be hard at times, but not that hard, surely?
However, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon was probably nearly all written under the influence of something, and it’s considered a classic album. Who’s to say what it would have been like otherwise? It might have ended up a footnote in musical history. I often wonder what the writers of Family Guy have been smoking sometimes - and I’m not being ironic when I think that, yet I’ll sit there laughing like a drain at it.
I suppose I’m a hypocrite really. Maybe I’ll just stop appreciating anything creative.
1.2 Gigabytes
What happens when you export your iTunes library to an XML file, then try and open it in Internet Explorer 7?
This:
It took me a while to regain control of my machine and kill it. I’ve got 2Gb RAM anyway, but when you consider a normal session for me is using about half that anyway (not Vista’s fault, more the junk I run), it was swapping out to disk like crazy. The end result being lots of swapping, and a PC which is barely useable. The XML file is about 12Mb, but obviously all the other stuff in the default XML stylesheet in IE adds a massive overhead.
I shan’t be doing that again in a hurry.
RATS!
There’s a new sitcom on BBC2 called Lab Rats. The reviews for it have been a bit varied, with some saying it’s absurdist nonsense, and others saying it struck a good balance. Personally, I fall into the latter camp.
It was wonderfully absurd; the whole bit with the lemons was quite zany, and the giant growth serum was a funny angle. The Russian scientist was also quite good.
The ‘issues’ seemed to revolve around the timing and pacing of the show. Some jokes fell flat because there was too much dead space after the joke, or jokes were dropped in (possibly adlibs) which made them miss the beat, so they got ignored.
However, this is the first episode. so it’ll probably sort itself out over the course of the series.
It has potential.
Blind faith in the little green man
No, not little green men from mars. I’m talking about the little green man we all look out for when crossing the road.
I was having a wander around during my lunch break at work the other week. I was crossing over the road using the pedestrian crossing. The light changed, and I felt my legs automatically hurling me into the road and across. At that point, it occurred to me that I hadn’t actually checked that there were no more cars coming.
Since that happened, I’ve noticed quite a few people doing much the same. They’ll stand and stare intently at the pedestrian signal. As soon as that little green man appear, they set off like whippets out of the traps at the dog races. They pay absolutely no attention to whether the traffic approaching has actually stopped.
Sometimes, it’s quite simple, as it’s a crossing on a straight piece of road, so I suppose even in their peripheral vision, it is possible to still see anything oncoming. Even so, it’s a bit of an assumption to make.
Similarly, I’ve noticed an increase in traffic light-controlled roundabouts. These are springing up all over the place, and I’ve found myself driving across them without really looking to my right. ‘It’s OK’ I think to myself - ‘the light will stop them’. All well and good, but a light won’t stop somebody who isn’t paying attention. Same goes for a pedestrian crossing.
I think in future I’ll be looking more closely when I cross.
Picture from Flickr by PhotoOptik
