Internet

Something that everyone and his dog have been into on the internet these past couple of years has been social networking and the whole "Web 2.0" thing. There are problems with how it currently works, however. Today, everyone goes to social network portals, such as MySpace or Facebook, and while this may be easier for the less technically apt, it's pretty annoying when everyone's trying to get you to use this or that "app" for your portal of choice.

I've noticed a distinct rise in annoying, obtrusive advertising that covers up actual content with lame animations and unwanted noises. Since I got internet at home again I never really ran into those ads for a while. However, I just witnessed a bunch of stick figures hopping out into the middle of a news story to play a round of golf.

Since getting internet access at home again, I've pretty much completely shifted back to using regular e-mail. There was a time when my coldacid.net e-mail addresses forwarded to my GMail account, but those days are over, now that I can use Thunderbird again. I do miss the ease of tagging in GMail but when it comes down to it, Thunderbird offers a more usable interface to my e-mail than GMail ever has. (Plus, threaded e-mails are a lot better than a flat view of an e-mail conversation. You paying attention to that, Google?)

Although I'm hearing about it a bit late, I just read on Michael Geist's blog that Rogers is intercepting bad DNS hits so to earn more ad revenue and pretty much break your internet.

Am I the only person who has found that Firefox 3 won't keep you logged into various sites between sessions, whereas Firefox 2 would? Between this and the fact that some of my favourite add-ons won't work with the newer version, I'm considering switching back to the older version of everyone's favourite open source browser. I'd rather not, as some of the changes in Firefox 3 are real improvements, that I have found quite useful.

Perhaps the problem will be fixed in 3.1, which I hear is coming out in a month or two. I hope it will be.

I was taking a look at the new design of coldacid.net in IE8 beta 1, simply to find that it doesn't look right with the new rendering engine. Putting the browser into IE7 emulation mode, it comes out looking just fine, however, and I already knew that it works with Firefox 2 and 3. It's pretty interesting. Likely things will work just fine by the time IE8 final rolls out, especially given that the site (or at least the front page of it) is nearly perfect HTML and CSS (and the only validation errors wouldn't affect the rendering anyway).

Twitter is overloaded, Facebook keeps logging me out for site maintenance, and the Pickering Public Library's wireless internet service isn't working the way it is supposed to. I'll be lucky if this article even shows up.

I didn't even get to wrestle the bear that wandered into my neighbourhood this morning.

With this week, notable online game magazine The Escapist starts it's third year of publication! Unfortunately, part of the celebrations of this anniversary have included killing what made it so unique.

I've done a bit of work on the site today, changing what feeds are aggregated for my blogroll (see the Syndicated block on the sidebar). I've also added the FeedBurner module to the site for tracking the main feed, blog feed, and the new articles feed. In the near future (perhaps tonight or tomorrow) I'll also put up the feed counters, although the numbers will be disappointingly low (at least to begin with).

For quite some time now, I've been using a service called Geni to keep track of my family tree. Actually, I've been able to get a couple of other relatives on there to also manage it. Unfortunately, things come to an end only three generations above me. It'd be nice to have more of my living family on there, but I'm even more curious about my ancestors from Ireland, Wales, Germany, and Ukraine.