Mat Bowles

Annoyance is…

Sitting in your very delayed coach as it arrives at the airport, and seeing your plane take off as you go passed the runway. Gah!

November 10th, 2006 Posted by MatGB | Uncategorized | 13 comments

Posted using <a href=”http://www.livejournal.com/community/sms_to_lj/”>sms_to_lj</a>…

next time I drive or go by train. Chris alice and Laurence are at Luton. They left at 9am. Me? Stuck at LHR. I left at 5am. Accident on M5

November 10th, 2006 Posted by MatGB | Uncategorized | one comment

Memo: Oven is not controlled by that dial

When turning on the oven to heat for a pizza (yes, I know, but meh, I’ve got 4 hours before I need to leave the flat), make sure that you actually turn the oven on.

Turning on a cooking ring, then leaving the room to go plug in a charger elsewhere, is teh stoopeed.

So, that was what the smoke alarm went off for.  D’oh!  

November 10th, 2006 Posted by MatGB | Uncategorized | 4 comments

Lemme hear an oops…

Have I mentioned on here how much I like my deputy at work? She’s really cool. Also, she’s 8 months pregnant, and when I get back from my holiday, she’ll have gone on maternity leave, so I won’t be in the office with her again for ages…

Anyway. We’re, amongst other things, a National Express agent. So, naturally, when travelling by coach, I book tickets through us as then I can bitch at people I know if there’s a problem, and they can get better customer service than I can as a random mook. This is cool. Today, given that I’m off to Luton tomorrow, I had to book my coach tickets. That’s easy, right? I’ve checked the timetable, I know how to travel and where to go, and I’ve done the journey before. All I need to do is get there two hours before check in opens, and the flight leaves at 4.30ish. So, the coach leaving at 7.30am (ouch) getting there at 2.20pm is perfect, right?

I mentioned Zoe was cool, right? Y’know why? Because, on my way to reception to confirm the tickets for the coach journey, she asks me if I’m sure I’ve got the flight time right. Of course I have, says I, and goes to check because, y’know, doubt is a good thing. The flight leaves at 3.05pm, the return flight is at 4.30. So arriving at 2.20 would be just after check-in closes, not just before it opens. Y’see, I’m going to miss Zo, because she does my organising for me. So, instead, I’m taking an earlier coach. It leaves Torquay at 5.30am. I’ll say that again.

5.30am! This is me, damnit!

So, if I go to sleep tonight, there is a snowball’s chance in hell of me waking up on time, even if I book a taxi and ask them to ring. So, um, I’m pulling an all-nighter. First cup of coffee already drunk. Expect random spam posts from me all evening, sorry about that. On the upside, I will be arriving at Luton airport really early. Wait, upside? It’s Luton, it’s not an airport, it’s a glorified shed damnit! Good job I’ve got a pile of books to read, and they do at least have bookshops. Is there an airport anywhere that doesn’t have a bookshop?

Firefox 2.0, theming it up good

Right, so many people I know love Firefox simply because it’s not IE, right? Now, I’ll admit, that’s a good reason to like Fx, but despite this, there are some out there, people who seem to know what they’re talking about, that still use IE, and actually like it. I have got used to the idea that sane, rational, intelligent people sometimes have strange ideas. This does of course mean that my friends list, who aren’t really that sane or that rational, will have even stranger ideas. But I still don’t understand a preference for IE. Ah well, YMMV, competition is good for us anyway (does anyone out there think IE7 would have been anything but a POS maintenence release if not for Fx and Opera? If you do, go get a stronger brand of coffee, please?)…

So, last week I finally succumbed, and installed Fx2.0. I’d tried RC1, and I just didn’t like it. Fortunately, someone pointed out to me that you can turn off all the annoying features I don’t like, and last night, I even explored the themes section. So now, not only is the red ‘close tab’ button back where years of UI training says it should be (it’s an option in Tools/Options/Tabbed/Display), but my tabs will shrink much smaller (reduce the minimum width to 75 suits me) but also? It looks like Mozilla Suite! Yay!

Y’see, I first encountered this ‘internet’ thing back in ‘98, when I went on my Access to Higher Education course. I was 24. The college IT suite was ancient, running Win3.1, and the default browsers were Netscape. I didn’t know what a browser was, but it let me mess around online, so I was happy. When I got to Exeter in ‘99, if you used IE, it would delete all your cookies and ‘favourites’ (stupid term, who thought of that) whenever you logged out of your roaming profile. But Netscape (4.5, ouch)? Netscape stored your stuff in your network drive storage, so I could stay logged in and remember by bookmarks. So, for two more years, all I knew was Netscape.

Then, we got internet at our house. Specifically, owned a PC, and had no problem with me spending my spare time when he wasn’t there (and even when he was) trawling around fuelling my huge net addiction. This was good. He also forced me to learn to use the quickstart menu (and, y’know, why would you minimise everything to get to a desktop shortcut when you can just click an icon next to the start menu?), and made me use IE. I can remember when IE6 came out, he was oh so excited because of thing like the image toolbar on hover. No, I don’t know why having something get in the way of the pretyy is better than right click/save image either, but, y’know, YMMV. I got used to it. Because, y’know, Netscape by this time sucked. Big time. So I got used to having favourites instead of bookmarks, I got used to that annoying click whenever I did something. Forgive me, I knew no better.

Then, on a forum, squirrel linked me to Netscape something or other. 6? Whatever. It was the one based on Mozilla, the first with tabs, etc. Also, I’d bought my own PC. It was a POS, but it was mine, shiny, and it didn’t have the min-specs to do anything. But I DLd the new Netscape anyway. I discovered tabbed browsing. I rediscovered bookmarks in an exportable html file. I had a bookmarks toolbar. I had Google built into the address bar. I loved it. When I got my next PC, Netscape was, officially, dead. But by then I knew what Mozilla was. At this time, Firefox was known as Phoenix, and it was in early beta. But the full suite? It was sweet. Also, it didn’t have an integrated and unwanted AOL messenger thing, and looked even prettier. I stayed with Mozilla nearly all the way through, and really only switched to Fx at the tail end of the life of that PC.

So, to me, Firefox isn’t new. It’s not about being better than, or different, to IE. Firefox is based on the original Netscape code. The Gecko rendering engine that runs it (and the now Seamonkey suite, and also the new Netscape) is based on the old Netscape source. Browser wars? Meh, this old fart likes to stick with what he knows. Firefox isn’t new, it’s just what I learnt the net on, with shiny add ons and a better logo.

ETA: a lot of cuts, co’s this one is huge, sorry bout that, mebbe shoud’ve been two posts.

November 10th, 2006 Posted by MatGB | Uncategorized | 9 comments