If you’d like to use Google’s Safe Browsing Firefox extension but you don’t live in the U.S., you might have thought you were out of luck. However, as it turns out, you can simply use Google’s translation services as a poor man’s proxy service by translating the extension’s page from English to English. Hey, it worked for me.

Technorati Tags: safebrowsing, SafeBrowsing, GoogleSafeBrowsing, translationhack

There’s nothing quite like having holidays during the Christmas season. It’s been 4 years since I’ve been able to take any time off at this time of year, so I intend to really enjoy myself. Josh is already getting used to the idea that I’ll be home for more than a couple days, and has already roped me into watching “Wiggles Space Dancing” with him this morning. Can’t beat cuddling with they boys in the big brown chair though! (and the Wiggles aren’t really that bad…)

A few weeks ago I installed a WordPress plugin that will list the most popular posts on your blog based on post views. The numbers it reports are as of the time it was installed. My most popular post was one I almost didn’t write. I was experiencing an eye twitch for a prolonged period of time, and I felt the need to vent about it a little bit. As it turns out, in the past three weeks, that post has been viewed more than 1380 times, which is more than double that of my next most popular post. The Eye Twitch post also has 128 comments on it as of the time I write this, which is far more than any other post here.

This makes me wonder if there’s a real need for people with eye twitches to have a site that would allow for a community to thrive where people can support one another and help to collect information about this affliction. Since I really have no desire for this blog to become a touchstone for the eye twitch community, it makes sense to try to redirect the energy that is going into all of the wonderful comments on that post to a more appropriate forum. I’ll have to work on that.

What strange things we learn when we start posting personal gripes for all to see!

Google Web Accelerator tells me that I’ve saved 3.7 hours of my time using their caching program. I hadn’t realized I’d saved so much time, and now that I have almost 4 hours, I’m trying to decide how I should go about using it! Here are some initial thoughts:

- Read more blogs
- Find more stuff to post here
- Drink beer, and veg out in front of the TV
- Sleep

Ooh, sleep – we have a winner!

Wait a second; how does this extra time work? Is it tacked right onto a day at midnight? In that case sleep is definitely my first choice, since I’ll be able to take advantage of it without even thinking about it. But what if it’s tacked on to the end of my life, you know, like penalty time in soccer? That would be kind of cool – at least I’d know I was nearing the end because there’d be an indicator that I’d run out of regular time, and was now using my extra Google time.

What would you do with an extra 4 hours? Or better, what kind of trouble could you get into with 4 extra hours at the end of your life?

Thomas Hawk posted a photo to Flickr that he took of a man driving around with a Starbucks ™ coffee cup affixed to the roof of his car. That’s right, not forgotten on the roof, put there, on purpose. The point is to get people to notice it, and when they try to tell him the error of his ways, he simply says “Happy Holidays from Starbucks”.

Now, I suppose this is a clever marketing tactic. But I can’t help feeling that it borders on being dangerously distracting. Maybe I’m getting curmudgeonly in my old age (is that even a word?!), but the idea that someone is driving around doing something that will no doubt attract more attention than it deserves where people are supposed to be driving makes me a bit nervous. On the other hand, I love that billboard on my way to work where the woman is showing all that cleavage… oh, never mind.

It really, really sucks.

What a great article from Men’s Health - it’s practical advice for hacking your body’s natural functions towards your own purposes. Draining your sinuses without drugs, preventing getting stitches in your side when running, beating a brain freeze into submission… there are tons of great tips here. 18, in fact. Funny, that.

This idea of not mentioning GYM (Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft) in blogs is just silly. Just talking about it defeats it’s own purpose - each time I see “GYM” in the title of somone’s post, it makes me cringe; it’s self-defeating!

In one of those random, serendipitous moments of web browsing, I happened across this retrospective of Expo ‘86, the last North American world’s fair that happened here in Vancouver, British Columbia. I was 11, and was lucky enough to get to go a few times. The site brings back tons of memories, and I find it odd to feel so nostalgic for something that occurred less than 20 years ago. But the sheer lack of remnants from the fair is somehow overwhelming. Aside from the large structures that have become part of Vancouver’s landscape, like Science World (always a favourite place to visit) or the Plaza of Nations (I once saw the Dave Matthews Band play there - best live musical performance I’ve ever seen), there’s really not much left. The “whatever happened to” page is great, as is the page dedicated to the site 15 years later, full of photos taken in 2001.

For a fun (and somewhat creepy) story of how some folks paddled out to the final resting place of the McBarge, broke in and took some photos, check this out. At least I now know where to go if I ever need a crapload of McDonalds trays!

And I should point out that all of this is courtesy of UselessDegree, who’s post I found while searching Technorati to see if anyone else had noticed that GOOGLE IS FREAKING DOWN!

Technorati Tags: google, google down

This is really creepy. When I start my browser (Firefox, of course), the first two tabs that load are my personalized Google start page (www.google.com/ig) and Gmail. Both are currently down (as is plain old google.com). I’m getting a timeout error on all of them right now, whereas 10 minutes ago I was at least getting a Google-generated error page for Gmail - I think it was a 350 error.

I don’t know if this is a localized phenomenon, but it sure feels like the internet is broken right now.

[UPDATE] Looks like it was only unavailable for a couple of hours. Still, weird.

[UPDATE] I received an email from PureTracks today, November 1st, over two months after the original with the following two lines of text, including the typo:

Original post from August 25th:
PureTracks is an online music service a la iTunes. Aside from the fact that is uses crappy DRM (which is why I’ve avoided it until now), the reason I’m complaining today is that as a new user, I can’t believe how much frustration I’m experiencing. I’m a seasoned computer user, and their site so unbelievably hard to use, it makes me want to throw my computer through my window.

There are two tracks that are not easy to find elsewhere that are available on PureTracks that I wanted to download. Since I don’t have a PureTracks account, I asked a friend to download them for me. He discovered that there’s an option to send them to a friend rather than download them himself, and since we were nervous about their DRM scheme, we decided that would be the easiest way to go.

Well. Of course, I can’t just get the tracks - I have to register with PureTracks, which is what I wanted to avoid in the first place. But worse, once I register, the songs are nowhere to be found. I finally discovered that the email address they were gifted to was different than the one I registered with, although it wasn’t obvious anywhere that they needed to be the same, and since I receive mail from multiple accounts to the same location, it didn’t dawn on me that they might be different. Anyway, I change my email address, and now a line shows up in my order history. Clicking it, however, just takes me right to their main page!

After some discussion, I discover that PureTracks does not support Firefox well, so I ought to try IE. Well, in a word, that SUCKS. But I try it. Same deal. So my friend is out $1.50 (they’re short tracks), and I can’t get the songs. PureTracks, I was avoiding you before, but now I want nothing to do with you ever. If you see me coming down the street, you’d better cross to the other side.

[Update] I received a reply from PureTracks’ support over 12 hours after I sent my reply to their initial canned “turn off your popup blockers” message. Twelve hours! And guess, just guess what it said? “Please log in to our support system, as replies to support emails are not supported.” What a steaming pile of crap! It took their system twelve hours to reply with a canned response stating that replies are not supported? I couldn’t be angrier! To make matters worse, when you click the link to go to your support ticket, their site just redirects you to their login screen (even if you’re logged in). So you have to navigate to their help page, then scroll to the VERY LAST FUCKING LINE, to click the link to get to their help desk. And, of course, my call is “on hold”, since I must be a complete fucking idiot.

PureTracks - It’s clear that you hate your customers, and I hate you right back more than you can possibly imagine. You are pure evil.

Most of my visitors see this site through their RSS aggregator, so they won’t notice that I’ve just done an overhaul on the design. Well, I applied a new theme, anyway. But I quite like it now. What do you think?