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Webitz - Checking out the Web from an amateur's point of view
Will Shirley of Hollywood get involved? Will Alan of Arkansaw, Winston of Wellington, Russell of Russia and Bertram of England?
Get involved in what?
The great release of Firefox 3 - and it’s coming soon.
Only we don’t know when it’s coming. Sometime in June. That’s not very inspiring, is it? ‘Sometime in June?’
Well, according to the Firefox site it:
Sounds like a good deal, right? All you have to do is get Firefox 3 during Download Day to help set the record for most software downloads in 24 hours - it’s that easy. We're not asking you to swallow a sword or to balance 30 spoons on your face, although that would be kind of awesome.
By the way, the official date for the launch of Firefox 3 will be posted here soon - so check back! Join our community and this effort by pledging today.
The aim of all this is to set a Guinness World Record. At present there are 824 people signed up just for New Zealand, but only 5,562 in China. Sounds a lot? There are over 14,000 in Poland (yup, Poland), and more than 12,000 in China’s neighbour, Japan.
In Madagascar, on the other hand, there are only 14.
Guess it’s slightly less inane than some of the GWRs that make the book, but it still seems to be a bit of a cluttery idea. Isn’t there the possibility of overload rather than download?
And do we actually want Firefox 3? I’ve got the current latest version, and I’ve been surprised at how often it crashes, something that earlier versions of Firefox never did.
Seems to me Firefox 3 is going have to be extra good –even with its 14,000 improvements - especially on top of all this hype.
So what will Firefox 3 have:
Exciting new features, including one-click bookmarking, the smart location bar and lightning fast performance.
Phishing and malware protection, plus our new instant site ID info.
Built-in spell checking, session restore and full zoom.
The ability to choose from over 5,000 add-ons that help you customize your browsing experience.
5,000 add-ons? Just give me a browser that always works!
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Surfing the Net just now, I came across a site that boasted over 20,000 pages of information on bodybuilding which is updated on a daily basis. Find out how you can lose fat. You can also buy products on the Body Building Web site.
Over 20,000 pages? This was why the Web was invented? To tell us where we could find bodybuilding supplements, and information on how to become one of those top-heavy guys who wear the skimpiest of pants and appear in public rippling their seemingly endless series of muscles?
Bodybuilding is obviously big-time – and not just on the Web. But at the end of the day what do you do with a body that’s muscle and virtually nothing else? (There may be a good reason why these guys where such skimpy pants!) Can you hang around the house flexing your muscles and impressing your kids? Unlikely. Can you show how you can lift three or four of them up at a time? Interesting, but not so exciting after the first few attempts.
Bodybuilder, by rev voodoo
Does the bodybuilt woman do the housework any more efficiently, or get through the tasks at the office more speedily, or climb the stairs faster than the lift gets there?
And when you finally decide to give up all this bodybuilding (admittedly some of them go on forever) what happens to all those muscles? Do they become stringy flabs hanging off the skeleton?
I often think that the rugby players who get all the adoration from their fans must have the same problem: they’ve spent years getting fit, building up great thundering thighs (either for shoving the other team over in the scrum, or for hunking down the field casting aside every other player) and suddenly in their forties they’re left with legs that don’t fit any normal off-the-peg pairs of trousers. Worse, those same legs don’t actually carry them along any faster than the bloke who hasn’t spent all those years doing the fitness thing.
Seems to me that bodybuilding – even if there are 20,000 pages (just on one site) about it – leaves you no better off in the end. Better to build the big muscle inside the cranium!
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It’s good to see that the two leading politicians in New Zealand’s up and coming elections (they take place towards the end of the year) are both on Facebook. Prime Minister, Helen Clark, and the opposition leader, John Key, both have representation on the social networking site.
And though you can become a supporter, I don’t think you can actually sign yourself up as a ‘friend’ of either of them. Curiously enough, I see that the long-deceased Robert Muldoon is listed as a supporter on the current opposition leader’s page. That’s a bit naughty. However, I see that one of my real-life friends has him as one of her friends, so maybe Facebook isn't quite as careful about deceased people being online as it might.
The deceased former Prime Minister, Robert Muldoon, with tie askew
Key is doing well on this site, with some 3300 supporters listed. He’s had his face on the site since mid-February. Clark, by contrast, has only 1164 supporters, and she’s been on Facebook for six months. Her spokesperson claims, with what might be seen as sour grapes, that Key and Co have paid people working for supporters to the site – and Key admits that one of his communication staff monitors Facebook, Flickr and YouTube for him. Clark, according to the same spokesperson, only has volunteers to keep an eye on things. Tch, tch – it might be time she got one of her communications people to rustle up some support, then.
Incidentally, I find when I check out the name Mike Crowl on Facebook, that ten of my namesakes appear on there.
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Among the HitTail searches that turned up one of my posts was ‘Gerald Finzi is gay?’ It’s rather amusing that it turned up the post I did on Finzi; I certainly nowhere say that he was gay. In fact, the post quotes from a book that talks at length about his happy marriage and his two sons.
When I clicked on the same search result on Google, it also brought up another one of my posts, in which I'd
quoted some other bloke called Jerry G who said: The problem is that Lots of people think that when a man dresses that way , that he is gay but thats wrong. Most men who wear womens attire, are straight. I myself dress female every chance i get. The cloths are comfortable and there is lots more varity. So bit the bullet and just do it. Its loads of fun too.
I quote him as he wrote, incidentally, in case you think I’ve suddenly had a bout of apostrophelessness, or inability to spell
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What do you think about this couth character in the vintage sunglasses?
I wrote in my other blog recently about the flip-up sunglasses that I used to wear all the time, and the fishermen’s sunglasses I tend to wear these days. (Which have somehow come back into fashion while I wasn’t looking.)
I’ve just found my sunglasses upstairs where my grandson had been playing with them. (Not that I’ve been using them lately; there hasn’t been quite the amount of sun around.) They’ve obviously survived being tested out by him, which is good, because one of things that really annoys me about sunglasses is that the ‘glass’ (usually plastic, of course) is seemingly fitted by hand, and too often an inadvertent flick of the finger will send the lens flying. Which means that you’ve then got to refit them by hand. And after that they never seem quite to hold in place the way they did at first
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My mother was never the sort of person to have things like life insurance, and, because she lived with us for the last 22 years of her life, she had no need of house or car insurance (she’d given her car away one day to a young man who had his eye on it!). Furthermore, she believed in the principle of sowing riches in heaven, and for some time after she died we were still getting what she rather ironically called, ‘begging letters’, from the large number of the charities she had donated to, in small amounts, for many years.
I often wonder about all the charities that take money over the Net these days, as to whether they make as much money that way as they used to do by sending out direct mail the old-fashioned way. I thought it would be interesting to find out if there’s been a survey done on the subject.
Well, I didn’t get as far as checking out any survey. The first search result from Google was FundraiseOnline.co.nz (which, curiously, has a .com address). They’ve basically set themselves up to help charities, big and small, get themselves represented online in such a way that, hopefully, they’ll see the dollars rolling in. With them you can create a fundraising page within minutes. I guess the good thing about it is that you can use this site for a short-term fundraiser, as Duncan Bayly’s did for Motor Neurone Disease
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Just had fun watching a video made by Ecco shoes, about the making of an advertisement for…Ecco shoes. It has no commentary, just a music track.
It’s basically a straightforward picture of what went into the production of this particular ad (you see it at the end).
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Looking up boardwalk and come across boardshorts
. See the prime example to the right. Splendiferous!
The way fashion has changed in beach wear is rather extraordinary. Men in particular have gone for longer and longer shorts (so long the word shorts seems no longer appropriate). All that wet material flapping around your legs doesn't grab me much, but it's the trend.
Women's gear of course, is skimpier and skimpier, which must say something, surely, about how the two sexes see themselves. Or how the two sexes want to see the other sex. I'm not quite sure which
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If this was my other blog, I'd be talking about memory in relation to the song from the musical, Cats. But it's a web-focused blog, so I'd better talk about memory in relation to computers and such.
I've just had our (older) computer upgraded in terms of increasing the size of my hard drive. Yes, I know that's not memory, but it's like having lots more room to manoeuvre in, and it sure helps
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I don’t often get thoroughly irritated with a site, but when I clicked on the About.com: personal web pages section, I found myself faced with an annoying popup that just couldn’t be got rid of. Of course, when you clicked on ‘cancel’ on it, it just took you straight to its home site. When you clicked on the X up in the corner it did the same. Even my popup blocker failed to sort it out. Vicious.
Even worse, when I clicked on the link to a site called Pyzam, the ad turned up there immediately, but in a different format. And Pyzam’s site isn’t much better. For starters you can only get rid of the upper frame by purposely clicking on it; leaving it means any ads that are playing are full in your face.
Not that I’ll be going back there in a hurry. Pyzam advertises itself as a site for web page toys. In fact it’s basically a widget site, and the widgets for the most part are almost as annoying as the ads I’ve just mentioned
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213 Posts dating from January 2007
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