Read the news today, oh boy..

It was the tradition on Sunday mornings to break the Sunday NYT into its various parts, triage the parts and proceed to be informed.

Sunday mornings are now taken up with scanning the headlines of the various RSS and Atom feeds, going online to the NYT, Guardian, Scotsman, Yahoo! News, Google News. This is followed by opening Thingamablog and scanning the Tech News feeds.

The good side of this is my fingers don‘t have the weekly ink smudge, but my brain is certainly assaulted with information.

Reading papers online, papers I would‘ve had to go to the international newsstand in Times Sq. to get before, broadens the reporting on things in the US:

This morning The Scotsman had articles on McCain‘s plans of the 2008 presidential race. It was well written, insightful and from a non-committed point of view. This is refreshing.

Then there was the article on the airline the C`I`A is using to ferry its agents and customers around the world. I would say that article had a slightly paranoid slant, but that is common outside of this country, where they dont understand it really is no more than an extension of a Yale Fraternity.

There was another mocking article about the MoD losing a multi-million dollar unmanned submarine only to have it found by a Scottish lobster fisherman. At first the MoD refused to admit to its ownership of the vessel. This they flipped when it was pointed out to them the hull of the boat had MoD printed all over it.

When the ponied up to owning it, The Scotsman reported, the fisherman wouldn‘t give it back to them until they paid him for the expense of hauling back to port and getting it out of the water. They refused, so the wily Scottish fisherman hid it.

The Tyson Surrender and the Jackson trial were reported with the usual relish papers have for reporting the downfall of American Celebrities and the royal family with its many branches.

Bits and pieces of the tech news found to be interesting will be reported at Home Grazing.
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Firefox

If you go back a few months or so in this blog you will see several articles about Opera web browser and how much better it is that Internet Explorer. It still beats IE hands down, but...

There’s Firefox.

As a shareware/freeware junkie, I try everything for a few days and only incorporate the software into my routine when I find it either increases the speed, lessens the typing or increases the fun. Otherwise, I delete it. If you don’t do that you will soon find your hardrive overwhelmed. This is especially so for programs that assume you want them to start everytime you reboot your program.

Ooops, off soapbox, back on topic, Firefox.

With it’s themes and extensions, Firefox is extremely personalizable. (there’s a word SpellCatcherPLUS
didn’t like.) I tried a download manager extension for 15 days, it reminded me of this in fifteen days. I found it didn’t add to the plate in comparison with the default download manager. I when to the Extensions menu choice, deselected it and it was gone. That simple.

For Opera , not so simple. Opera is customizable to a point, but the ease of customization isn’t at all as simple as Firefox.
. As with any software designed to do a similar job, the similarities will always be greater in number than those features that make each program unique. The focus in comparison shouldn’t be on the bells and whistles, it should be on those features they share.

Starting quickly has always been one of Opera selling points. In this it is better than Firefox.
only if you have loaded Firefox down with a heavy theme and a truckload of extensions. Out of the box, it is as quick if not quicker starting up.

Time to go to the beach. Try them both, then choose Firefox.
because there are no adverts attached in the free version, in fact there is only a free version.
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Blogger is Free Service - Back Up, Back Up!

After reading this article at Wired.com, I went to my Blogger page and said I really need to do something to back this up.

There are several years worth of mindless ramblings there that some student of the crazed minds of bloggers may want to examine in latter years. Then I thought, most of this is crap. The only thing I wouldnt want to lose are the graphics. I lost a good deal of them when a server crashed on me last year.

Now I know well enough to store them at GMail, oops, another free service...

Oh well, I guess when we put down our thoughts in a storage media that consists basically of rust glued to plastic and the whims of magnetism, we really cant expect anything close to immortality.

There is always the cuneiform on marble option...
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A Celebratory Dilemma

It is a dilemma when news arrives that is good news, to a point. There was the distinct possibility that it could have been great news, but doesn’t qualify. On the other side of the stick, it could have equally been bad or even very bad news.

An extreme example would be lottery news. You could have got all seven numbers and won 150 millions of dollars. But you only had six and won $100,000.00. The $100,000.00 is good news, but it wasn’t the very good news it could have been. The opposite side of that stick would be if you lost the ticket. The bad news would be you lost a ticket worth $100,000.00. The very bad news would be you lost the ticket worth the full amount of the prize.

Nothing that extreme has happened here. After initial elation the realization of what could have happened has set in, putting a slight dampening on the celebratory mood.

Don’t ask for the details, they would only bore you.
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