Hello 167(..Stu's blog)

So readers it's been a week and I’ve resisted the urge to post anything about Yahoo profiles as I resisted similar urges to whinge or post any final farewell its been great thanks type blogs on Yahoo 360 during the last week or so of that being open. It's not that I didn’t want to mind you, I just found it impossible when confronted with a blank word document not to end up with something containing the words Yahoo, Profiles, Useless, Bastards, 360, Piss-up and Brewery.

Anyhow, to the few that might see this here Thanks for reading my stuff over the last 3 and a half years over there. I’m pretty sure I won’t be re-launching the Sunnyvale flavoured version of Stu’s Blog so it looks like I’ll be spouting stuff and nonsense at irregular intervals mostly from the confines of these here Google servers. Please adjust your bookmarks/objectionable site filtering software to suit.

Hello 166 (Not mincing my words)

Warning this blog entry may contain large doses of political incorrectness It’s about time readers that this sort of nonsense “Red meat raises risk of all kinds of death” got put into proper perspective, for instance consider this particular quote from the article:- ‘The researchers said thousands of deaths could be prevented if people simply ate less meat’… Well I beg to differ. Unless these researchers have been studying a cross section of immortal types who can only be killed by a steak (heh) to the heart what they are trying to convince us is that by not eating as much meat it’s possible you might be able to delay the inevitable by a short indeterminable amount of time. What appears to be happening here is a shift up from promoting healthy living to healthy dying as well.(Bear in mind a lot of those involved here were close to or had already done their statutory 3 score and 10) Ridiculous words like ‘quintiles’ getting thrown in should have alerted me to the green card about to be played, lets face it unless you have a beard, a tweed jacket and walk around with cnd leaflets and a megaphone words like that shouldn’t be part of your everyday vocabulary. No real surprise then when it goes on to indirectly accuse everyone who eats meat of contributing to large amounts of greenhouse gas caused by farming cows. Apparently I now must save myself and the world by turning vegetarian. In a similar vain it also needs pointing out that the thousands of lives that are proudly announced as saved each year by the no smoking brigade would be more accurately described deaths that might have been deferred for a short while. Personally I think the anti smoking campaigns go way too far, to the point where they are non productive. It may surprise a few to learn that I haven’t had a cigarette for a while now, but every time I see any we can help you stop propoganda it just reminds me that I did enjoy it and maybe I should be sparking one up. Before anyone suggests support groups, nicotine patches, hypnotism, acupuncture, colonic irrigation, pacifiers, aversion therapy or anything else that is supposed to assist me in ‘giving up’ I believe that all you need is to have a good reason to not smoke. For me a good reason happened to be not feeling like I’d enjoy one during a bout of indigestion and trapped wind.. Note A once those feelings had passed and after a day or two without a smoke I thought I might ease things financially by not buying the stuff. It certainly wasn’t because I’d been deeply affected by images of someone coughing up a tar blackened left lung. Now I seriously doubt if I could afford to start again and as I’ve not been given the authority to simply print money quantitatively ease the situation I have ended up reclassifying tobacco so it falls in the luxury part of the budget where it is currently competing for pennies with a 50mm prime lens…can’t see me affording that any time soon either. I predicted a while ago when the state finally imposed the no smoking law in pubs and workplaces etc that it wouldn’t be long before the do-gooders and nay-sayers turned their attention elsewhere Note B In particular there are some delightful adverts warning us car drivers of the dangers of exceeding 30mph. Travelling at 40mph apparently carries a much greater risk of causing death, we should expect terrible consequences if we risk travelling at just that extra few mph. Speed kills…Errr, No it doesn’t, stepping out into the road in front of an oncoming car is what kills you. Unless you are an armed robber fleeing the scene or a 15yr old joyrider at the wheel of a nicked BMW you are unlikely to be driving recklessly enough to be mowing people down on the pavement, and lets face it, if you can’t control an average family hatchback on a clear day doing 35-40 you have no business being behind the wheel in the first place. Here’s a wacky idea, instead of targetting decent law abiding drivers, how about ramming the message home that roads were in fact built for driving on and therefore playing on one or running into the path of a ton or so of moving metal that happens to be travelling down one is a tardish thing to do? Think I’m being harsh? When was the last time you saw a think of the consequences of doing over 30 ad aimed at train drivers? Now think of the last one that warned you about the dangers of trains on say level crossings. Eh? Nuff said. Note A: Maybe I should have looked into taking greater care of my colon, if my digestive system had been firing on all cylinders that day I would most likely be still enjoying the delights of Imperial Tobaccos finest virginia blend right now whilst hacking this out. Note B: The opening salvos have already been fired in the battle to free the nation from the grip of alcoholism. Even tea drinkers might soon find themselves cast out as socially irresponsible and a strain on resources. Both shot down for now but as soon as the political climate is more favourable just watch them resurface.

Id Est....ascendo tuum...octo

Another techy post readers, my sincerest apologies.
Ie 8. Hmmmmm
Usually when a beta gets released it’s pretty much there. I had IE7 when that went public beta, never really noticed any problems, Firefox? Ok that’s always in beta but nevertheless apart from FF3 annoying the hell out of me for a couple of days because of its reluctance to handle certain bits of Javascript in the same way as FF2 did, and a couple of add ons dropping the ball along the way development has generally been fairly smooth.
Smoothness is certainly not the case with Ie8. . Ok yes it’s labelled beta I hear you but really…I don’t think it should be. Why? Well to put it mildly it’s quirky. Like very quirky. Think Luna Lovegood…now add a dash of Cassie from Skins…Yep there we go mad as a bicycle…I seriously had problems surfing with it because of the constant warnings it kept throwing at me for what it saw as various misdemeanours on the parts of the surfees…is that a word?? Well it is now. Don’t get me wrong I’m not slating the product itself, in fact on the sites it did work on it was quite frankly superb. Fast, and I’m not saying it’s a couple of nanoseconds faster than so and so browser because some benchmark test program says so either You can actually really tell just by browsing. Innovative too, plenty of new toys on the right click menu, including a developer suite much like the Mozilla camps Firebug... Web slices, accelerators, the latest must haves and crowd pleasers like porn stealth mode and web 2.0 type integration.
The problem I suppose here is that it is trying to change too much and with typical Microsoft arrogance is expecting everyone else to just accept it and change to suit. Much like the Vista outlook on the world, don’t have a driver? Well tough that’s not our problem its up to the company that sold you the usb novelty frat party condom inflator and decorator. I did read somewhere that they had graciously allowed you to add some obscure metatag to your webpages so it automatically behaves as IE7 umm yeah right thanks for that… . Backwards compatibility obviously somewhere on page 3 of 4 on the development meeting agendas, in a 2 minute slot just before the afternoon coffee and piss break. A bit of messing around does allow it to run in a sort of compatibility mode as Ie7, but as far as I could tell this seems to be primarily for guarding against dodgy css. Quirks mode is there as well, whether it does anything is anyones guess
Now then. It can suggest other sites based on your history, good idea in theory but for years we have been warned against stuff spying on our surfing habits, we must delete cookies, delete files, clear history etc etc. and now Ie (and Firefox for that matter) seem to think its ok, even helpful for them to use the stuff all the antivirus and spyware programs throw fits about and banish to the their virus vaults, virtual jails and death rows on your c: drive.
And then on the other hand it seems to want to tighten security in other areas, noticeably where I was trying to figure out why it refused to load a js file. Same domain check, works in ff3—check, opera—check, chrome—check, Ie7—check. It appears to want it in the same subdirectory as well? Or does it baulk because it’s reading it as a full path…or does it have something to do with the security zones or or or or what???? Nope sorry I just can’t be bothered to test any further.
If you are a strictly amateur web site tinkerer and blogger type like myself believe me you are not going to want to run IE8 beta as a main browser yet. Yahoo mail doesn’t know what it is for instance, neither do some online banking sites etc. and seeing as it overwrites IE7 on install if you do want to try it out use a spare box, or dual boot or something unless you want to keep going through the lengthy uninstall reinstall rigmarole to switch between the two. This in itself is a pain, what does Microsoft have here that they think is so special? Why not allow parallel installs, sorry but to me with the rise of open source, particularly in the browser ‘market’ the more hurdles there are in the way (including classing this as a windows update with all the checks that entails for a start) the less likely the Redmond camp are to attract the kind of people willing to make an early beta work with sites and addons…they can’t have their web slice and eat it.
I have just returned to the Microsoft download page, and they are now touting Beta as Rc1... How much difference that makes now is probably a reasonable question. However right now I am not about to answer it..on account of me only just finding this post on my hard drive after writing it a month or more ago and forgetting all about it.