I know IE (Microsoft Internet Explorer) is not the quickest, not always up to (web) standard(s), not the safest, and of course carries the taint of Windows-integration-you-have-no-choice-in-and-can’t-get-rid-of, but people should be free to choose, and I actually admit to using IE side-by-side with Firefox. A small banner in my WordPress admin interface pointed me to Browse Happy, which states it’s a site to help you “choose a browser that is right for you”.

Yeah. Sure.

I agree that people should be made more aware of alternatives, but for Pete’s sake be honest about it. Browse Happy actively steers people away from IE, pointing in stead to Firefox, Opera, Safari or Mozilla, on the grounds that IE is unsafe. Yes it is. So are all the other ones. What’s your point?

Made and promoted by the otherwise great folks at WordPress, I think this is pushing it a bit far. Make a fair comparison in stead of just quoting articles about IE’s flaws, people! I’m no big fan of IE myself but I also know that with some Googling I can find quotes on the issues on all the other browsers in the world as well. Inform, don’t just shove some subjective opinions and “testimonials” down my throat.

Oh, and as much as I absolutely love WordPress, I really don’t appreciate the banner in the admin interface, thank you very much.

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been noticing that twitter.com is unreachable a lot of the time. I’ve tested it from 3 different connections, and it appears to go on and off…weird…

Update: twitter’s downtime is causing long load times on this page. Gone is the twitter widget henceforth.

While reading up on the history and art of the Soviet Union (don’t ask how I got there, but it was very interesting anyway) I stumbled upon cccpfashion.com. I know that basically any symbol, meme, idea or quote is a free target for commercial exploitation (as long as they don’t have lawyers), and actually I agree with that on principle, but this one got me thinking.

Here’s a regime that for nigh on 80 years dominated the lives of billions of people, was considered the greatest threat to the free world for most of that time (or so we were told), committed loads of heinous crimes against individuals and peoples and generally perverted a pretty neat idea (let’s share what we have amongst all our people equally) into a dogma of hate, distrust and corruption.
And now you can buy the T-shirt.

Yes, you can say the same for basically any symbol: any commercial outing of an ideology, good or bad, could be called a perversion or at least mistasteful. But hey, this is the free market, right?
I guess I shouldn’t whine. I normally find the skewing of established symbols funny (like the Viva the relativity T-shirt from my friends at Thinkgeek), but this one kind of erks me. Maybe it’s because I’ve been reading up on the Soviet Union and what really went on in there (which means that this feeling will pass over time) or maybe it really is kinda wrong.

Yipes. Brain hurts…must decide…funny versus morality…no…answer…

Let me get back to you on this one

I’ve been browsing around FFFFOUND! lately, an image bookmarking site. The fun thing for me is that I scroll through images that are completely random and unrelated to me (only the bookmarkers in question know why they bookmarked it), and it’s great fun. You do bump into some really great pictures that I guess you’d normally not ever see, so I also use it as a jumping board to find out more about where the images I like came from, in te process discovering some really nice sites.

I also sometimes just enter random words in Flickr’s search, just to see what pops up. 90% predictable results, but the extra 10% is quite surprising sometimes. Example: I typed “frustration”, and the first image returned is this:

Not what you’d expect…turns out Jason Theaker does some really excellent picture taking, well wordt browsing through. A real find. And on his profile I found a link to Panorama Paul’s photostream, and thus another great set of phots.

I really advise you to try it sometimes, you end up in surprising places you’d normally never visit. Pretty cool.

In a very interesting post on Techdirt, Michael Masnick attacks the oft-(ab)used “Brain Surgery” argument used by Wikipedia-haters.

It goes something like this: “If you needed brain surgery, would you trust someone who was trained as a brain surgeon, or someone who learned brain surgery from Wikipedia?” An alternative version of the question is “would you allow a ‘crowd’ of people to perform brain surgery on you.”

Masnick takes this (in my view very short-sighted) argument apart piece by piece (and does that very well), but is also open an honest about Wikipedia’s role as the source for information:

This isn’t to say that Wikipedia is perfect. It’s not. It’s got plenty of problems. But the lesson that this professor should be teaching is that you can’t trust any source by itself, and you should double-check and confirm any information you find, whether it’s from Wikipedia, a supposed “professor” or anyone else. It’s not brain surgery to understand such a lesson.

Read the full article here.

No time to type. All South Park episodes ever. Online. Good quality. Free. Legal. Sweet!

Go there.

I’ve been using Bloglines for a long time, but as of yesterday I switched to Google Reader (thanks to a tip from my friend Moqub). Both are web-based RSS feed readers, and they do mainly the same thing, but still I like Google Reader better. Here’s a short comparison as to the why:

• Google Reader integrates with my Gmail account and other Google personalised settings
• I really like Google’s active “read” marking. As you scroll through a feed’s posts, the posts you “pass” are automatically marked as read (can be disabled)
• Adding, managing and sorting feeds is easier on Google (I always found Bloglines’ interface somewhat clunky)
• I like the overview page you get with Google Reader, showing you a selection of your new unread posts

Yeah. Google wins another one.