Sunday, April 22, 2007

Tango performance

Just to show how behind the times I am, here is my first ever appearance on You Tube. This is a Tango performance Niki and I did last weekend at our friend Yeow's birthday party. Niki and I have been dancing Argentinean Tango for 6 years now, and it is becoming an all consuming passion.

 

 

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Wednesday, April 18, 2007

It's had its fair chance, time to switch back

That's it I've had it with IE7, I used to use firefox for the vast amount of my work until IE7 came out, and in the spirit of giving IE7 a fair trial, I decided to use it as my default browser. I started this back when I was still running Windows XP, and I was then using IE7 Beta 2, and the odd crash was acceptable for a beta product. I liked the tabbed browsing, and thought theat they actually did some things slightly better than firefox. I was impressed with the efforts made in standards support, and for this reason, I had persisted with it, even though the rendering engine is significantly slower (up to 5 times slower in some cases). When I started running Visat in november last year, I noticed that from time to time IE would crash (even though it was now out of beta), but I thought "patience... Microsoft are fairly good at stabilizing their products.... eventually, and the release of Vista was a rather rushed one, just so they could get it out the door before the end of the year, so I can expect that there may be some bugs that they find and fix along the way". Well, it's now mid April, and Internet Explorer is still crashing quite frequently, and today as I was browsing some Micosoft web sites, it crashed again. This is the final straw, I think they've had long enough to fix these problems. I've just switched back to firefox as my default browser.

Monday, April 16, 2007

Blog posts as an indication of my state of mind

When I started blogging way back at the start of 2004 (see http://scottbaldwin.blogspot.com/2004_03_01_archive.html, (I'd like to say before blogging became popular, but that would definitely be a lie) I was in a very stressful job that I didn't really enjoy, it was taking up far too much of my time, and was making me feel quite frustrated with the IT industry to the point where I was almost ready to leave the field for good. So even though I found out about blogging through my work in the IT field, the first blog I started was nothing to do with IT at all, in fact musings of a morbid mind was where I intended to post all of my political rantings and ravings, my general thoughts on topics (generally outside of IT), family and travel photos etc... , and just a general writing exersize for me. I started my geek blod Daily Dribblings of a Demented Developer shortly after (May 2004), but it was always the poor cousin of my musings (btw no prizes for guessig that alliteration is one of my favourite literary devices). I started work for Readify at the start of 2005, and since then, my writings on my Geek blog have steadily increased, and my writings on my musings blog have decreased, to the point where I noticed today that my geek blog has almost caught up, and what's more surprising the blog articles I've got in the pipeline are almost ALL for my Geek blog.

Its amazing the amount of difference working for a good company can make, there are still aspects of the IT industry I'm not enraptured about, and I still get stressed from time to time when things don't work the way I expect them to, but I have come to realise that there is a lot I do enjoy about IT.