IE is dead! Long live Firefox!

No, no… mozilla.org is not paying me to publicize them… I just like Firefox so much and have got used to a lot of the features now that there’s no way I’m going back to IE.

I only use IE for some sites that have ActiveX controls (usually the Windows Media Player control.) I know there’s a plugin that will allow WMP to work in Firefox, but the last time I installed that it messed up my Firefox install after a couple of days and I had to wipe it and reinstall.

Readers of my blog that use IE will probably notice there’s two things broken. The “currently reading” list is literally broken into two bits in IE. I’ve yet to figure out why. It renders perfectly on Firefox. The second thing is the GNE neighbourhood browser. In IE it opens as a pop up window rather than as a drop down menu type thing.

I can’t really be bothered, if you don’t like the way my blog looks in IE, learn to live with it… or… get Firefox! 🙂

A little better

I’m feeling a little better than my cranky self at 4am yesterday. Not much, but a little. I never did go to sleep, I just went straight to school and kept working through the day, and I managed to catch up on a bit of work and that made me feel a lot better.

It also helped that I have a fairly sweet bunch of students and they noticed right off that I was frazzled and talked, laughed and joked with me through class to cheer me up. And this is despite the fact they had an exam today and were understandably frazzled themselves!

I napped for a really short while in the evening, but all that coffee from the morning seems to have lasted me through the day. Or maybe it’s some mysterious rays from my computer that keep me awake!! hehehe…

Syndication

Blogger allows me to syndicate my blog, I’m wondering whether I need to do that now? How many people actually read this? Lets have a show of hands! 🙂

Update: No comments in days. Apparently no one reads this blog… oh well.

Not Happy…

… is what I am now.

My life sucks… FUBAR doesn’t even begin to describe it. And yet I put on this happy, everything is fine face. It’s stupid, stupid, stupid!

I shouldn’t even be writing this here, but hell, it’s 4am, I’m depressed and I need the release!

I’m falling behind with my work out of sheer laziness. I recognise the signs and symptoms, but inertia prevents me from doing anything. I need a good swift kick on my butt, but in the US, everyone is too damn PC to do that. I need my mom to twist my ears and give me a good talking to. I’m too embarrassed to call her up and tell her that!

Where is this going? Where am I going? I honestly don’t know. I’ve been happy-go-lucky, follow-the-default-path for too long now. Maybe I can still change, but it’s not happening now.

Why can’t someone pay me for doing the things I like to do? Fat chance of that happening, because the things I like to do are reading, watching movies and surfing the internet. And of course, writing inane blog entries.

Look at my reading list on the right. It hasn’t changed in over a month. Wanna know why? I keep finding more books to read and never finishing the ones I’ve started!! And I’m too lazy to change the list on AllConsuming.net.

It’s Thursday and I’ve already been waiting for the weekend for over a day now, when I can be lazy and not feel guilty. Am I self-destructive? I think so!

Oh, damn, it’s 4:20am… I’m due to teach a class at 11:30am. I end this here.

Marriage in the US

Found this really funny comic strip on Salon

You may need to watch an advertisment for 10 seconds or thereabouts if you don’t have a subscription. But trust me, the comic is worth it!

Great Online Music service!

I love having my music as mp3s to play on my computer and not so long ago used to spend a lot of my time on Kazaa or various other p2p apps downloading music illegally. When I began to hear of legal music download services, I decided that it seemed the right way to go.

I spent a lot of time reading up and finally decided that iTunes was the music service I should use. Well, it’s a few months later, and I’m wondering why people have raved about iTunes. Undoubtedly it is the best of the paid legal music services in the US. Nevertheless it’s still tied down by the music industry’s stupidity. All files you download are protected and can only be played on the iTunes player or on your iPod. I don’t own an iPod or any other mp3 player and don’t plan to in the future either, (Just too expensive for me) and I don’t particularly like the iTunes player or interface. So that’s two reasons why iTunes doesn’t work for me.

You could say those are mere quibbles. Possibly. So then here’s the clincher. iTunes refuses to burn CDs on my computer. I have no idea why and the error message quite helpully says “Unknown error.” I can’t seem to find anyone who is having a similar problem with iTunes even after myriad Google searches. So it’s just one of those mysterious voodoo errors I’m stuck with, (and no I can’t buy a new computer and/or CD burner either!)

So just when I thought I was done with online music services for the nonce, someone points out AllOfMP3 to me. Almost any artist you want (even the Beatles and Michael Jackson) available at any bitrate you want, upto CD quality music. On the fly encoding with whichever encoder you choose, MP3, Ogg, WMA or lossless encoding formats. Price? As cheap as $0.01 per MB downloaded and no membership fees! Holy Cow!! I just couldn’t believe this is legal!

But, apparently, it is! As is explained at that link, allfomp3 is situated in Russia and according to Russian law, all digital IP rights rest with a single entity called ROMS (link to English version of site) and ROMS pays out the licensing fees to the artists/owners. So apparently anyone can offer music/content downloads online as long as they pay ROMS for it. I’m still confused as to how this works, but I assume the dollar to ruble conversion rate also plays a role in keeping prices low.

It gets better, AllofMP3 has a client called the AllofMP3 Explorer (thank Microsoft for that ubiquitous Explorer suffix) which when you have it running on your computer will automatically download your purchased music for you. You will still need to find the music using your browser and the web interface, but nothing more after that. The Explorer will start downloading the files as soon as they have been encoded and made available.

Still doesn’t sound good? Just registering on the site (for free) gives you access to all of their music as 24kbps MP3s. These are for previewing purposes, so you can actually listen to entire songs/albums to see if you’d like them before you buy them. You can also download an mru of an album to load as a playlist in winamp/[insert media player of your choice here] which will stream the mp3s for you!

Ok, a little exploration and you will be able to figure out whether you like it or not. I know I do. I’m busy purchasing a lot of music from there already. I’m just worried the RIAA (or whoever are the current bad guys) will discover this loophole in Russian copyright laws and lobby for it to be closed or made illegal for download in the US, so that they can all pay themselves hefty bonuses once more.

This is uncanny!!


You’re Pale Fire!
by Vladimir Nabokov

You’re really into poetry and the interpretation thereof. Along the road of life, you have had several identity crises which make it very unclear who you are, let alone how to interpret poetry. You probably came from a foreign country, but then again you seem foreign to everyone in ways unrelated to immigration. Most people think you’re quite funny, but maybe you’re just sick. Talking to you ends up being much like playing a round of the popular board game Clue.

Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

Add-ons to the blog… or How I love the free services on the Internet

So while spending time chatting on flickr, I came across this website called AllConsuming, mostly because the guy behind AllConsuming, Erik Benson, created a service tied into your contact list on flickr called Connectr. I’ll let you go to those sites and see what they’re all about. What I do want to tell you here, is that AllConsuming allows me to put in a snazzy “currently reading” list into my blog with minimal fuss and with all working links to Amazon and whatnot.

To coin a phrase… “That totally rocks, duuuude!!”

The next thing, HaloScan, the service I have been using for commenting, has now implemented trackback too. More power to them! (More power to us bloggers too!)

And if I hadn’t mentioned this before, both these services are totally free. No strings attached. No pop-up ads, no spyware installed on your computer, no… oh well you get the point.

Let’s tally up a few things that go into this blog: I create it using blogger, that’s free. I host it at webspace my school gives me, that’s free. I use DynDns‘s WebHop service to cloak and redirect requests from oook.blogsite.org to the actual url, that’s free too (with one single small pop-up), and, using HaloScan, I have commenting and trackback, all free. I Love the Internet!! 😉