Google Does Recipes

I logged into Gmail earlier (for the first time in a while) and I was clearing out the Spam bin when I noticed the recipe just above the email area.

:-)

One thing that tends...

...to annoy me is how your name looks when you send an external email from your place of work. It still amazes me that "Last Name, First Name" is still the accepted default for most places; whenever I see someone get it right, i.e. "FirstName LastName", then I do find myself nodding.

When I send an email externally, I'd hope it turns up in someones inbox saying "Daniel Redican" and not "Redican, Daniel"

However, I understand that it is probably easier for people to file this way; especially for long term storage, but I can't help but feel that it looks a bit, well, rubbish.

:-)

Those of you who receive email from me at home will have noticed that my display name is "danredican". But that is because I'm too cool to be consistent. Yup.

Prophylactics by Text

This is a novel idea:

Safe Text Services

I strongly suspect an on demand service would be more useful to people looking to make use of this!

Made me laugh though - I was searching for phone backup software and this was one of the sponsored links on Google.

Obviously made up? Illegal in the UK

I present the text of a recent forward out of interest - I would love to know how tropical fish stores get an exemption, for example!

---

In London, Hackney taxis must carry a bale of hay and a sack of oats.

It is illegal to be drunk in a pub or club, or any other licensed premises.

Oddly, it is illegal to consume a mince pie on Christmas Day.

In Hereford, you may not shoot a Welsh person on Sunday with a longbow in the Cathedral Close.

However, in Chester you can only shoot a Welsh person with a bow and arrow inside the city walls and after midnight.

Also in York, excluding Sundays, it is apparently legal to shoot a Scotsman with a bow and arrow.

In Liverpool, it is illegal for a woman to be topless in public unless they are a clerk in a tropical fish store.

It is illegal for a Member of Parliament to enter the House of Commons wearing a full coat of armour.

Sleeping with a consort of the queen is classified as treason, and as such, until recently carried a maximum penalty of death.

Placing a postage stamp of the queen upside down, is also considered treason.

It is unlawful to impersonate an Chelsea pensioner.

It is illegal to sell most goods on a Sunday. It is however legal to sell a carrot. It is also legal to sell it at any price, and to give free gifts with it, such as anything else one might want to buy on a Sunday.

The following are legal though:

a male may urinate in public, so long as it is on the rear wheel of his motor vehicle, and his right hand is on the vehicle.


all English males over the age of 14 are to carry out approximately two hours of longbow practice a week, supervised by the local clergy.

Running without Internet Security

I remember asking a former boss of mine about what anti-virus software etc he had installed.

The basic answer was none - he didn't need it as he didn't download anything he considered unsafe and steered well clear of attachments from people he didn't recognise - that is, he used the computer in a fairly cautious way when it came to inputs and outputs.

I've followed this methodology by uninstalling commercial AV and firewall software. The net results have been a faster computer - in fact, a fairly disturbing lockup problem disappeared completely when I removed SIS (Symantec Internet Security) from my computer - and generally happier usage.

I left the Windows XP built in firewall on, but again, I probably don't need it - I am connected via ethernet cable to an ADSL modem/router (with wireless off) and that has a perfectly good hardware firewall built in. NAT (Network Address Translation) is the icing on the cake.

I tend to play games on the 360 these days so don't download the demos I used to.

Spyware would possibly be a problem but I run IE in limited mode and a Spybot scan found nothing a few days ago (one month in). Or I just use Opera (which beats Firefox in my estimation anyway).

Anti-spam software is still essential though.

April disappeared too

In a markedly worrying new trend, it would seem that the bulk of my recent posting is to complain about not posting for ages. But instead of flogging that horse, I thought I'd have a think about some stuff. Any stuff, in fact.

First off is that I've fixed a few computers for some folks recently. Some of it has been the usual spyware nonsense where it's somehow the end user's fault for not being a member of the BCS (British Computer Society) and instead they are just a consumer who bought something of the shelf that they expected to just work because they paid alot of money for it and it didn't. These are a pain but are fixable and you can mitigate the end user's ignorance (justifiable ignorance? That's a debate for another day - but they don't have to update their fridge or washing machine... yet!) by installing software that arguably should be placed on there by the seller for example.

Some of it has been faulty software; Symantec Internet Security is a major culprit here as it has limited people's internet or email access without indicating that it is to blame (hint - remove any rules relating to internet/email applications from within the admittedly annoying to get at personal firewall interface and try opening those applications again to set up new rules). My disgruntlement at this consumer aimed software is further increased by the EULA (End User License Agreement) which disowns any responsibility for the software not working correctly and the fact that recent updates for the software seem to have caused these problems.

Some of it has been hardware related. Upon opening a Time (now defunct, you might guess why after reading the following lines) computer it became obvious that anything the user might have tried to upgrade had been glue-gunned in place - it was very difficult to remove the memory but a bit of work with a scalple fixed that. Plus, it was a P4 and it had no AGP slot (something else I've also seen recently) making a decent graphics upgrade nearly impossible anyway.

There's a lot of reasons to like computers. It seems that there are even more reasons to hate them.