Random Spew

posted at 20:27:51
By Flipping Heck!

Posted In
Personal

Slightly off topic-type post as I've found a few interesting bits and pieces in my Internet Travels tonight. I've had a very unproductive day as I've had to do the weekly shop, go to the local rubbish tip and have an eye test - the good news is I have 20/15 vision, (actually the optician said it's better than that but the room wasn't big enough), the bad news is that I can no longer blame playing pool and darts badly on bad eyesight

First interesting site of the week is from Broadband Reports. This nifty little Java Applet scans your computer in a variety of ways to see how easy it is to hack into your computer - a handy way to check if your firewall is behaving as it should.

Secondly, how is your website doing? Silktide use various measurements to check your site: popularity in Google, Design, Accessibility, Links, Speed of loading etc. Both my sites have fared pretty well, although Flipping Heck! needs a bit of a health check when it comes to the British Disability Discrimiation Act which I find rather odd as I specifically designed to to be super accessible (I think the only thing I didn't get around to testing it in was Lynx)

Trouble with project management and procrastination (Ha! Me? No!

) then head on over to David Seah's site and download his Printable CEO Progress chart as well as his Project Task Tracker, I'll be trialling the latter next week and will report back (it's good to be paper based again as I think I've completely killed my PDA but that's another story).

I've bought a New Printer, a Lexmark X1190. I'd been looking for a while but has been put off the price of most of them. I couldn't justify shelling out £100 on something that's rarely used. I happend to come across this one when I was in Tescos Extra buying some blank DVDs (I'm still blaming you

, you can't get out of it that easily!). Seems to be working quite well seeing as it was only £50, the only downside is that it didn't come with a USB cable although this apparently is common practice now; according to my boss even the printers we buy for £2000 don't even come with a cable - how cheap is that?

I also bought the new Madonna Album - Confessions on a Dance Floor, Kate Bush's Aerial and Depeche Mode's Playing The Angel (eccletic selection or what?!) reviews of all to follow when I've listened to them and fully "got" the concepts as a whole (how pretentious am I?!)

People can't believe that someone who's livelihood depends on the Internet has never downloaded an album from the Internet. Sure, I use Napster (I won't go near I-Tunes, they dominate the market too much and I prefer to support the smaller guys). I use Napster as a means to buy tracks for Albums I burn myself for

and Sandy to listen to, the are usually tracks from Artists that I wouldn't want the whole album (Charlotte Church and Girls Aloud are two of the culprits). Plus there's something about sitting down with the CD in your hand and leafing through the sleeve notes whilst listening to it the first time - priceless. Of course they take up far too much room (I've run out of space completely so I will be ripping them all soon - on to what I don't know) but I still like the physical aspect to them - plus you have a back up if your hard drive goes poof. Anyway. enough of the raaaaant!