Wayne D's Blog

I thought Rickrolling was passe until I saw this video.Sir Mixalot meets Rick Astley

I was IM'd last night by one of my friends, who horrified by how much he was spending of internet cafe's on his vacation, bought an EEEPC. When I first got mine I found eeeuser.com an invaluable resource. Between the message board and the Wiki there is tonnes of information available. As with any large resource it can be hard to find what you are looking for. One the most useful articles was the the how to on shrinking firefox. I wanted to give my friend the reference to it but couldn't remember the search terms I had used to find it in the first place. This morning I decided to make a concerted effort to find it again and document it here. The howto has lots of tips but the ones I found most useful were the items under the heading "Using a single toolbar". I'm too lazy to try to get permission to reproduce those particular instructions so you can go and look them up yourself.

These settings mods may not be required for Model 900 users because of it's larger screen.

I'd like to register a complaint, well a couple of them actually about inconsiderate and/or bad drivers and things they do that just drive me nuts.

1. Turning right on a red when traffic is stopped because of congestion. Where I live right turns are allowed on red lights when the way is clear. Some drivers have taken this to mean that when traffic is stopped and drivers on the green light don't enter the intersection because they aren't sure they will clear the intersection before the light turns red that it's ok to turn right in front of them. This just encourages the practice of drivers entering an intersection and perhaps blocking it on the red that is epidemic level.
2. Next evil driver practice, driving very slowly up to a green stopligt preventing me from making it through on the green and then entering the intersection well after the light has turned yellow and when you could have easily stopped. The result is that I am stuck at the red where you should rightly be too.
3. Following to closely because you are in a hurry. Last week a guy came up very quickly behind me and because I was traveling sightly faster in the right lane than the driver in the left lane decided that traveling a foot off my back bumper would make me speed up. I decided to slow down so he would pass me. I also made a pushing motion with my hand to encourgae him to back off a bit. This did not make him very happy, he roared up beside me , put down his window and began spouting very nasty things at me. I told him not to tailgate me. As I dug for my cellphone in case he road raged out on me and I had to call 911 I decided that this course was probably not the best one to use in the future. Luck was on my side because he roared ahead of me and squealed around the corner about 100 yards down the road.
4. Last item, pay attention people! Two weeks ago I was sitting at a T intersection, on a stale red light, in the left turn lane, waiting for the light to turn green so I could so I could turn left. As i was sitting there a car went by me on the right at full speed, right through the red light. The previous week I watched a car go through another T intersection that had been recently converted to a three way stop. There were large signs to show the new stop but that didn't seem to help this driver.

Enough griping for now, next time I'll talk about the balkanization of the social networking space.

Need a friend on Plurk? Here is a link to my Plurk page, sign up and I'll be automatically be your friend. Then you can tell me whether you think Plurk will really be "the next big thing". If you find the timeline annoying a more Twitter like interface is available at www.plurk.com/m.

Over the weekend I started to hear about Plurk, the "next big thing". I am a joiner so I signed up. Now I hate to jump on the Toronto boys who have decided to try to knock Twitter off the top of the microblogging heap but in my humble opinion there is one glaring omission in their implementation. The first thing I looked for after I signed up was a method to search for people by name so I could start adding friends. Plurk did offer to read in my email address book and invite all the people in there to join up but that's not what I was looking for. I know that people I know are already on Plurk because I saw them mention it in the Twit Live chatroom. I finally ended up typing their name in the Fireox address bar after grokking how Plurk made up profile URL's. Way too much work. There is a reason Twitter has the search box at the top of the page.

The strangest thing was when I went to the Plurk team page the people who put Plurk together are shown but their cutsie icons aren't linked to their profiles. Sigh. Getting a critical mass of friends is the lifeblood of a social networking site and Plurk isn't making it easy.

My advice to the Plurkists, link to user profiles everywhere,and make is easy to search for current Plurkers. Also, don't try to get me to spam invite all my friends like some kind of rogue Facebook app until I have decided the service is worthwhile. Your karma number is a thinly veiled carrot to help you service get to a critical mass.

Good luck Plurk, Twitter has the momentum if they can keep Ruby on the Rails. You need to be three times as good and execute flawlessly if you hope to overtake them.