Ceci n'est pas une blog.

Just a quickie to say that we were lucky enough to be informed (by my dad) that it's possible to watch live coverage of this year's A1GP autosport world championship online... so we were able to follow two or three hours of a thoroughly wet, windy and miserable day at Zandvoort in near-TV quality!

(My dad and brother-in-law-although-not-actually-married were in the corporate hospitality there, due to BILANAM's mother owning a team-sponsoring company... the lucky show-offs! )

Anyway, I rushed back from scouting out next week's Toulouse Hash just in time to watch it - and I'm bloody glad I did, since:

• the racing was a lot more exciting than F1
  
  
• having national teams makes it quite fun
  
  
• Malaysia bloody won!!! (first in the sprint race, second in the long race)
  
  
  So congratulations to Faruz Fauzy.
  
  
  
  You can watch the next race (Chengdu, China, 9th of November) live by going to the site.
  
  We'll certainly be following the rest of the season...
  

Got a mail from Jazz saying that internet is working at home now.

Yay!

That is all.

The story so far...

The PC suddenly starts crashing every ten minutes, we move house, we send a change of address to France Telecom, I resuscitate the PC, we wait for ADSL to be switched on in the new place...

But of course, depressingly predictable though it is, FT did *NOT* do the change of address properly... so after waiting the specified time I called them this morning and, SURPRISE SURPRISE (not): "they changed your address in the administration but forgot to request ADSL at the new place. That will now take another week."

Yay.

So they manage to do exactly the same f*ck up two times in a row for me. Let's hope it doesn't descend into the same month-long farce of three years ago (engineers who never turned up for appointments while I took time off work (at least five working afternoons wasted), phone on - ADSL off, then ADSL on - phone off, then all off... and all this while I was racking up a several-hundred-euro bill keeping contact with Jazz on my Dutch mobile).

I should also mention that this all started with the woman in the agency convincing Jazz that we should take up digital TV (only French, of course) and VOIP for an extra three euros a month, only to call back the next day to say sorry - they don't actually provide that service in our new neighbourhood - would we mind bringing all the equipment back again? And I had to go online to re-activate Caller-ID since she obviously didn't transfer that to the new address either.

Sigh. Same ol' same ol'.


Anyway, the PC is still sick. The power-pack had a failed fan, and when I replaced it the new fan wouldn't run off the pack's internal power line... so it's probably the power-pack itself that's unstable and I'll replace it some time after our holiday. For now, the PC runs okay with the box opened up and the power-pack outside (its new fan is now connected to an external line) - but it still crashes a couple of times a day. Not that it matters too much when we have no internet, but at least we have a bit of home entertainment back.

I posted a blog item a couple of months ago saying that Google has had some problems recently, and it seems it's still unreliable.

Today, I was out getting lunch and listening to the radio, but the station wasn't tuned properly. I knew I have a list of stations on my home page, so I wanted to use Google on the phone to get there. After about twenty minutes of typing in different combinations of words to get to my page, I reached the office already... so I tried again on the PC. Then I even copied and pasted a couple of distinct sentences that have been on there for about a year and it *still* couldn't find my page.

So Google does not have my page indexed at all!

This is even more remarkable since it actually used to come quite high on the list of search results using just a couple of search terms.

Oh... actually it can't be found in AltaVista, Yahoo!, MSN, Ask, Excite or AllTheWeb either. Very odd indeed! Seems like my host is blocking search engines then. Crap.

You may have heard a lot of the trumpeted fanfare about Firefox the last year or so. Well since I use Opera (obviously, considering the host of this blog site) then there must be some reason why I haven't switched to the oh-so-superior FF yet, right?

Well take a look at this:
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/SupportCD/FirefoxMyths.html

Now I'm not saying that FF is rubbish, but I'm sure most Opera users will have felt that it has been receiving far too much hype for the fairly simple little browser it actually is. It's not particularly innovative or "the best" (by whichever definition you choose), but yes it is better than IE in most respects.

What's really driven the hype is the cult-of-Firefox... the fanboys who praise FF and trash everything else. It's good that they got the public to look away from IE for a while, but you really wish they'd stop saying "we thought of that!" to every single improvement over IE. The truth is that they didn't - almost all features were already there (and better) in Opera for years. Many of them were in other browsers too.

Also, the page I linked to earlier points out that Opera is faster, more standards-complient and more secure than FF. And it's got mail, news & chat (plus BitTorrent and Widgets in the soon-to-be-released version 9) - all in a package that is smaller than FF's.

Yes, I'll admit I'm a bit of an Opera fanboy (though I don't try and convert people any more) but at least I know that Opera actually *was* first and best with most of its features.