You may or may not be aware that Mozilla have recently launched their latest offering from the Firefox web browser series. Version 3 contains, according to the official website, over 15,000 improvements on its predecesser. Now I haven’t really got under the hood of it yet, but I have noticed a few of them – namely the interface is quite different. It doesn’t strike you straight away, but when you go to click where you are used to clicking and either a) nothing happens or b) the wrong thing happens can get quite annoying. After a little while when you get used to the new interface then things start looking up. Chris, on his flashy new website, mentions in his review about the fact that Firefox 3 doesn’t leech all your memory and other system resources. Now although I never experienced this with Firefox 2.x, I have noticed that the overall memory footprint is reduced as well as seemingly making fewer demands on processor and hard disk space too. It is still a little early to make proper judgements on it and no doubt I will in the future.
On the whole though, here is to another decent product that is available as open source (which will keep Kieran happy if nothing else)!
It cracked me up. Seriously, how crazy are some people?
For those who can’t be bothered going to the links, here is the the content mercilessly ripped off and reposted…
‘Proof that evolution is wrong’
i saw on your blog that you like to talk about the religion of evolution and trick people by using big words and pretending that science actually proves evolution. I dont know any science or anything and even i know evolution isnt real. for one it isnt in the bible the bible said god made everything in 6 days, not millions of years. second, when we go to the zoo we cant talk to monkies, if we used to be monkies why cant we talk to them? three, how could a monkey become a person over billions of years when they dont live that long? AND why are there still monkies if they turned into people? five, even darwin said he was wrong. on his death bed he converted to christianity and said evolution was a hoax. If there is any science that makes it look like evolution is real then it has to be either a hoax by EVILutionists or put there by god to find out who believes in him.
I hope that after reading my questions you will see that evolution cant be true and people dont come from monkies. i will pray to god asking him to make you think like me.
—
From: GBG
To: kevin
You are joking, right?
—
From: kevin
To: GBG
firstly i didnt give you permission to put my email on your blog. teh email copyright is owned by me and i will talk to my solisitor about making you take it down.
And no im not joking, you know im right thats why you didn’t answer. If we used to be monkies we should be able to talk monkey. its like if a french man becomes american he can still talk french, its called logic. also on tv a scientist says crocodiles havnt changed for million of years. if evolution was true they would be able to fly by now or talk or grow fur or invent things. if evolution happens why didnt it make crocodiles better?
the devil tricked you into believing you are from mud to take you away from god. Why would you want to be from mud and monkies when you have the option to be from gods hand? If you just stop thinking the bible makes sense and you dont have to worry about anything. If you just stop trying to find things out and accept gods word jesus will forgive you.
i thing you should watch expelled by ben stein. It shows how science is from the devil and good christians are being fired from jobs because atheists know they have the truth. evolution believers know its evil and from the devil, and thats why they are frighetened of christianities real sciense
DONT PUT THIS EMAIL ON YOUR BLOG!!! SERIOUSLY! I DONT GIVE PERMISSION!!
Some of you may recognise the tagline I used for my heading for this post… that’s right, it can be seen on some of the O2 advertising from a few months ago.
They now own my services! Yep, I now work for O2 part-time in their technical support department for the newly launched O2 Home Broadband. I am currently in training, which should last for another 6 weeks but it seems like a decent enough job. I am only first line support at the moment, basically a phone monkey, but hopefully some vacancies will open up in second line support soon enough. It is a good place top work in all honetsy, relaxed dress code, good perks and a good bunch of people.
Now, the reason I had to go out and get a job. I have a new house! We signed for it last week and move in around the 23rd June, just after Chris and I get back from the Secular COnference in Edinburgh. It is a really nice house with plenty of room, which is a bugger for wiring it up with networking cable. At the moment it is looking like a good couple of hundred metres!
I will upload some pics of the new house just as soon as I get them off my phone.
Congratulations to all the Computing lot too, they all graduated!
There has been a couple of incidents of people posting some quite interesting self analysis pieces on Facebook, which can be found here and here (You may have to have a Facebook account or be friends with people in question to view links).
My first reaction was to put these posts down to late night musings and a touch of emo behaviour that is particularly noticeable in the two individuals in question. I would even go so far as to dismiss them. However, on deeper contemplationa and a second reading I came to a different conclusion. There is an element of honesty here that is raw – I imagine that neither piece really outlines the true fears and hopes of the authors but there is definitelyan insight into something worth seeing. Both of the writers are close to me in some way and so there will always be something personal to see in these kind of pieces but I think there is something more here, a more basic human need. At the moment, the exact nature of that need eludes me, but these pieces – after initially falling into the crappy Facebook notes category – have touched me in a way I really wasn’t expecting.
I don’t know if it is the end of era type emotions that come with this time of year, especially as there definitely is going to be an end of an era when most of my university friends graduate and head off into the world of whatever they choose to do, or whether it is the general aging process that I seem to be feeling more and more these days but there is definitely a cloud of self analysis around a lot of people at the moment and I think it might end up being an important thing.
Chris was approached recently by the BHA about setting up a national body of student atheists/humanists etc and we came up with the idea of Secularportal.com which currently consists of about fifteen member societies from across the UK.
The forums are slowly being populated and there are some really good ideas floating around and being bounced back and forth. I think that we could have created something really worth while!
Having not had home Internet that has worked with any kind of stability it was quite a shock to get home today and find that everything seems to be working normally again.
Check out the difficulties we have been facing here.
Well it is that time of year again, the exam period has officially begun!
I have been quite good this year, got most of my coursework out of the way before going home for Christmas so I could take a good week off for the festivities and then got stuck into full time revision on the 2nd January. It means I have had a solid week of 9 – 5 preparing for the two exams that matter and the one that I am actually looking forward to. I have a philosophy exam and a history and philosophy of science exam on Wednesday and Thursday respectively and then my CR11 mock on the following Wednesday.
I think I’m pretty much ready, whcih is the first time I have said that since my GCSE’s (which weren’t exactly taxing..). To be fair, though, only the two philosophy exams actually matter and I don’t need to pass either save for pride and bragging rights.
This time of year always makes me reflect on the sacrifices we make for exams. I have a couple of friends who should be celebrating their birthdays in the coming weeks and I am fairly sure they haven’t managed it effectively for the past ten years! I have been spending little or no time with Liz and even have pared down the amount of time I am spending on the phone or the internet with her.
An interesting time of year, one where you realise just how much assessment we go through these days. I say bring back the days of three years work and a single session of finals!
Last night my hard drive failed. The second hard drive in six months to roll over. Well technically this is the same drive that rolled over last time, so really I should have expected it. The first time round the Windows installation was affected by a damagaed disk surface – or so I thought, but after a re-install and a few weeks of messing about I managed to recover the disk. This time it is a total failure, so a new hard drive is currently winging its way from Ebuyer (many thanks to my sponsor, Liz ).
Unfortunately, the hard drive that failed was my windows install drive and I don’t want to install windows on my second hard drive. So until the new disk arrives I am stuck using my linux box for everything. Now I like linux – it is easy to use and definitely the most intuitive system I have come across (I use Ubuntu 7.04 (for desktop) at the moment) but it does have several drawbacks. First the chess game AI is far too difficult. I am a good chess player and struggle to beat the computer on Easy and Medium. The other fault is its incompatibility with modern games. It is a bind to install them and then it’s a lottery as to whether they will even run. This wouldn’t normally be a problem for me as I tend to only use my linux machine for programming and other work related things. However, in the current situation it is annoying – especially as our internet keeps going down!
Anyway, my new disk should be here today so hopefully I will be back up and running by tonight.
During a routine trawl of YouTube I came across a really funny vodeo about Emos. It is performed by a band calle dhte Lancashire Hotpots a pop-folk band from Lancashire (the clue is in the name). I have posted the spoof video as done by a YouTube user involving Lego figures as I think it adds a special something to the song – not taking anything away from the band’s actual video release.
Anyway, take a look and I believe the single is available from iTunes.
Just a quick post to say that we have working internet at home now, which means that I can post more and generally be more of an online nuisance to the world from now on!
The internet isn’t perfect, we are still having modem vs router issues and are currently running multiple DHCP servers and the port forwarding is a bit screwed but we can all get online and play WoW. Which is the important thing!
).