MenZa’s Weblog

I’m not planning on being online very much the coming weeks, for personal and medical reasons.
I won’t elaborate further, so please don’t ask.

This is mostly a bulletin for the ones of you who already know me, the rest of you–just ignore it.

Comments are closed.

Songbird is a cross-platform desktop media player, built on Firefox.
A while back, I stumbled over the Songbird website and decided to give it ago, but back then, it was still a proof of concept–making practical use almost impossible.
I was impressed with the look and the planned features, and was excited to see it develop from something more than a good-looking interface, which would barely play back my library of music files.

However, in the new release, a lot has changed–and all for the better.

Continue Reading »

For Thomas‘ sake, I’m just going to answer a few questions for a survey. Please, join the survey!

1. When did you start blogging?
Mid 2005

2. Average, how often do you blog?
Variably; between once every week and about once a month.

3. How do you host your blog?
Self-hosted.

4. What blogging application/service do you use?
Happily using WordPress

5. Do you use an application to blog directly from your desktop, rather than from your blogs administration?
In rare cases, I use Flock’s built-in blogging application. I still prefer /wp-admin/post.php though :)

6. Do you use a free theme for your blog?
Custom.

7. What type of blogging do you do?
Personal

8. What is your primary blogging motivation?
I think it’s fun, and I need somewhere to share my thoughts.

9. Do you care much about the amount of visitors?
No

10. Does the total account of visitors on your blog count more to you, than the amount of visitors who comment on your blog posts?
N/A

11. Do you use some sort of anti spam solution for your blog comments? (Such as Akismet)
Akismet, yes.

12. If you run advertisements on your blog, do you sell the ads yourself?
N/A

13. If you earn money on advertising on your blog, how much do you approximately earn per month?
N/A

14. If you are running a business blog - have it helped your business to start blogging?
N/A

15. Are you a member of a blogging network such as random shapes or 9rules?
Yes, Random Shapes.

16. If you are member of a blogging network - has it helped you noticeable in any way?
Mildly, maybe.

17. How many daily unique visitors do your blog have?
Usually between 0 and 100, but up to 200

18. Do you keep statistics of feed subscribers?
Yes

19. Do you put work into search engine optimisation for your blog?
No

20. Have you ever bought advertisement on other websites for your blog?
No.

Don’t forget to leave a pingback to Thomas!

I rarely post asides on this blog–but I thought this particular blonde joke deserved a blog post of it’s own. Thanks for the spot, topyli!

I’ve been using Windows Vista since the Customer Preview Programme back in June, where 1,000,000 beta tester slots were made public.

I was fortunate enough to be one of them.

And today, I installed the latest public upgrade; RC1.

Beta 2 has definitely felt like a beta release with quite some bugs, and a few annoyances–for example an ever-crashing graphics driver and random waking up from sleep.

This seems much, much nicer in RC1–it feels cleaner and more polished, and I haven’t had my graphics driver crash (yet).

Vista seems like it’s going to be an operating system in the same league as Apple’s OSX.

Yes, Windows Vista might very well be the first Microsoft operating system I’ll ever buy seperately, once it’s shipped (in January, I hope)–Home Premium is rumoured to cost no more than $299.00, so it won’t be that much of a hole in the pocket.

Flock is, and I’ve said it before, a fantastic browser. Not everyone agrees, saying it’s just Firefox with a bunch of extensions added on top.

This isn’t the impression I’ve gotten–I’d like to see an extension do some of the stuff I really like from Flock.

Let’s start by looking at the feedreader. Everyone one using Firefox knows about the “Live Bookmarks”, as they’re called in Firefox–most people, anyway, and sure: it works quite well, assuming you only want the headlines to display in your browser.

Flock, on the other hand, has a really nifty built-in feed reader, which automatically loads any RSS feed opened and asks you if you wish to subscribe to it.
Furthermore, it allows you to read all your news, choose between displaying headlines, excerpts and full articles and save any post you might find interesting for later use.

Sure, this particular feature probably could be achieved with a simple extension–I wouldn’t know as I’ve never attempted to code any kind of extension or theme for Flock or Firefox.

Another really cool feature is browsing Photobucket or flickr galleries–in a seperate pane! It even notifies you of any new photos uploaded by your contacts. If that’s not kickass, I don’t know what is.
When you mouse over an image on flickr or Photobucket servers, a small banner flashes over the image, that lets you click it and load the person’s photostream in the pane.

Those, along with the new theme, are the most notable two new features.
I want to grab hold of one more though, the del.icio.us integration. There was a Firefox extension for it, but let’s face it–hardcoded features are much, much nicer than extensions, right?
You double-click the star (which denotes a favourite) left of your addressbar and type in regular favourite-options and it simply posts it to your del.icio.us–which it asks you for on startup (which is the case with flickr, Shadows, Photobucket and such services aswell).

Of course, there are tons of more features like these–like dragging snippets into your browser window and drop them in a pane at the bottom and various other things–it’s not like they’re not worth mentioning, because they are–though I don’t want to bore you anymore. Instead, point your browsers to the Flock website and click the fancy download-link.

The WordPress administration–at least the layout–is ancient.
Not since 1.2–and maybe even earlier, I couldn’t get confirmation–has the administration interface been properly redesigned.

It did get an overhaul with 2.0–adding AJAX and a new colour scheme.

That’s just about all that’s been done for the past few years of WordPress development–it looks like the guys over at Automattic don’t care much about what greets the administrator of the site (please don’t hurt me, guys).

Anyway, Automattic newcomer Bryan Veloso has been given the task of redesigning the administration panel, and he’s now asking WordPress users for help.

I think this is how things should be done. I personally don’t have any suggestions for it, but I can definitely see something’s wrong with it.
The commenters have left some pretty interesting ideas, some I like and some I don’t.

Head over to Bryan’s blog and–er–leave your juicy bits.

About a week ago, I ordered one of the kickass Avalonstar t-shirts.
I just got it in the mail.
You’ll have to excuse my stoned look, but here be I:

Along with the infamous, kickass packaging:

It fits me like a glove (shirt?) and it’s very comfortable.

Thanks Bryan!

I am eagerly awaiting the arrival of these books:

Will review them both once I read them :)

I spend a lof of time at my computer, I’ll start by admitting that–maybe I sohuld do other stuff.
I don’t know, should I?
Personally, I think it’s up to one self to decide what you spend your time doing. I mean, it’s your life–if you decide to go and waste it all by computing or juggling 24/7, shouldn’t you be allowed to?
My great passions happen to be such stuff as computing, IRC’ing, creating websites, IM’ing and the like, as those are things I really like, and enjoy doing.
Sure, I’m just fifteen, what do I know about life? On the other hand, maybe I should be doing other stuff, but I honestly don’t know what.

This has come to my attention due to increasing pressure from my mum who insists I should really reduce my time at the computer–greatly, and participate in family stuff, and, really, I’m a hundred percent cool with that. I really hate to say this, but I really find it hard to disengage at times., though I’m not addicted to computing as such, I just feel bored with most other activities.

Sure I’ve thought of sports, and that really worked for almost a year (January ‘05 - January ‘06), when I took up Judo.
I did reach yellow belt, which was a great personal achievement for me. However, I got bored with it in the end, and I decided to let it go.

One thing is cutting computing time off for me: my job.
It’s difficult–almost too difficult at times–but it robs me 6-9 hours a week, and I get paid for it at the same time (well, duh!).

But when you look at it in the context… 6 or even 9 hours isn’t a lot, when I use my computer for an average of 7-8 hours on a normal day and up to 14 hours now I’m on holiday from school, 6 or 9 hours just isn’t enough.

Yes, I do want to take up sports again–I really do–but I’m having trouble finding something I’d be really passionate about.
I’ve been thinking of diving for some time, but not only is it very expensive, I also have acute agoraphobia (fear of wide open spaces, if you don’t wish to read the whole Wikipedia article), which kind of messes it up for me; I’d probably freeze up if I were to ever dive on the open sea.

A thing I really like, however, is reading. I love reading. I recently finished the masterpiece Nineteen-eightyfour by George Orwell. My only problem when it comes to reading is… I’m very, very picky about what books I choose to read.

Oh well, I haven’t actually referred to the title of this post except for the very first paragraph, so here goes:
Sure, perhaps I really should take up another hobby or interest–but it’s still my time.

Why can’t I just be me? I’d really appreciate your comments and thoughts on this.