It’s interesting how much can go wrong in one day when I’m not here! I spent the first 2 or so hours this morning dealing with issues that arose yesterday… Then I’ve spent the rest of the day being nicely productive and am quite happy with what I’ve got done today with the new Jobbags pages.
Month: October 2003
Day Off!
I went shopping in Birmingham and bought a new jumper… see how exciting my life can be at times!
Hightlight of the day was going to pick up Jon from nursery. He was thrilled that both mummy and daddy where there to pick him up!
More US Senate Sense
It appears that more US senators are waking up to the dangers of the US-PARIOT act and are proposing some safeguards. Reading through the list proposed, I think that the proposals can only be for the good.
New Single!
Matt Goss has a new single! I didn’t realise that he was still doing music as I’ve only ever heard about his brother recently.
Also, yesterday the Treasury Minister gave an official denial to the talk about capital gains tax on the sale of your house. Now that it’s been officially denied, I think we can safely assume that the Government’s thinking about it… What really gets me is that after around 60 tax rises since 1997, they are still spending more than they earn!
Blair's Heart Scare
Clearly being prime minister is a stressful job and I hope Mr Blair gets over his scare quickly. I imagine that his children were particularly worried over the last couple of days and hope that they’re reassured by the news that it’s unlikely to happen again. However, having a heart scare surely will change his outlook on life? I’m sure it would change mine and I certainly wouldn’t be actively seeking stressful situations “just in case”. It’s not easy if you really enjoy your job either, though looking at how Mr Blair has aged in the last few years, maybe it’s not that enjoyable being prime minister?
New Microwave
Our microwave finally died on us today. Well, I say “us” when I mean “me”! Our fry up breakfast was late as a result, but still very nice!
This afternoon armed with some of our own cash and some of my mum’s generosity, we went shopping for a new one. The most noticible thing was that silver is “in”. Most of the microwaves for sale today are silver. So we bought one! It’s a nice Sharp combination one that appears to do everything and is very nice. I even used it this evening to defrost the mince for chile-con-carne :)
Teenager Cleared
According to BBC News, Aaron Caffrey has been cleared of a computer attack on a US port authority’s computers. His defence hinged upon his insistance that someone else did it using his computer via a Trogan computer “back-door”. In my opinion, it is good that he was acquitted. With the state of security on Windows computers, the fact that an attack originated at a given computer is certainly no proof that the owner of the computer is to blame. On the flip side, there certainly should be some onus on computer owners and Microsoft to ensure that computers can’t be hijacked so easily. It would help if Microsoft wrote software with a security mindset and so we wouldn’t have to deal with so many patches on what seems like a weekly basis. Anyone who runs a Windows computer without a firewall and up to date virus scanner deserves all they get anyway!
Incidentally, I installed 7 security patches on our live server today :)
Mozilla.org Redesign
There’s a preview of the new Mozilla.org website that’s been designed by Dave Shea, the guy behind CSS Zen Garden.
Dave’s design looks very very nice and his thoughts on how important it is to have competition in the web-browser market are well thoought out too.
Mozilla Firebird 0.7 is now out too – go get it and see the web without popup!
Good Day!
Getting a decision out of the top brass of my company is like getting blood out of a stone, but I was assured yesterday that things would be changing.
Seems like they have as today I was given a pay rise! I’ve only been chasing for a definititive pay review for the last 4 months. It appears that the error I made was letting the MD deal with it… now that someone who’s prepared to make a decision is controlling it, a decision was made and my paycheque will be larger :)
Trackback and Google
An article in the Register today points out that searches from Google can end up with empty Trackback articles in the results list. The article blames the inventors of Trackback and similar technolgies for this phenomenon. I think they’ve missed the boat here. Surely it’s a result of Google’s search technology not being good enough? Google became the number 1 search engine because their “PageRank” technology resulted in better search results than their competitors. Now, their technology is inferior for the current state of the web, and so I think that they need to innovate or lose their crown to another search engine that can deal with today’s web.