MSN Footie challenge

A small ironic little quirk with a new MSN website made me chuckle today. If you visit the link, it’ll check your browser settings.

This is what I got when I viewed it in Internet Explorer, where I was told I didn’t have Flash 7:

When visited in Firefox 1.x, I got this:

Correct, because I do have Flash installed. But what really made me chuckle, was the pompousness and vaguely arrogant way in which MSN posted this statement at the bottom of the screen (click to open bigger):

Because we all know how well IE supports W3 standards, don’t we?

New Design

I made a few small changes to the design of the site, mainly going to a centred fixed width and adding a background image.

There’s probably a few bugs here and there. I’d love to know what you think.

Um, yeh. OK.

I’ve been using Webmessenger a bit recently. It works quite nicely so it’s all good. But a simple thing…

Why do they have things like “Record a history of your messenger conversations. Download MSN Messenger now” and “Use Voice Chat. Download MSN Messenger now.” etc. plastered all over it. Why do they think I’m using Webmessenger in the first place? It’s because I can’t/don’t want to use MSN Messenger! Dickheads.

So depressing

It’s not a new thing to remark, but you really can’t read or watch any news report without an ever growing desparation. In my daily news email today:

* Car bomb hits Karachi restaurant *
* Chirac in new pledge to end riots *
* Failing colleges ‘face takeover’ *
* US condemns Uzbek trial verdicts *

They’re not even hugely depressing stories, they just serve to illustrate some of the problems we face on a continual basis, both in terms of terrorism, political bullshit, rhetorical backstabbing and so much other guff, that it’s not surprised that people aren’t just disillusioned anymore, they simply don’t care. They’d probably be apathetic, but it’s just too much effort (and makes an otherwise unwanted statement).

Take for example the Government’s plans to introduce 24 hour drinking. This is quite possibly the only recent example of the Government doing something “worthwhile”, that isn’t a direct response to something (e.g., banning hunting) [even though they claim it's to scupper binge drinking, which is a load of nonsense, it's because they know how lucrative important the booze industry is to them], an unnecessary infliction on our personal freedom (e.g., banning smoking), some sort of international schmoozing to make other people think we look great (e.g., Blair becoming Bush’s little rentboy) or some complete and utter backstep on previously announced (and likely poll-winning policy) (e.g., climate change).

So everyone’s happy about the new plans. It seems like a “good” thing for a change. What do the tories do?

* Tories bid to scupper pub plans *

claiming:

“We have a problem of binge drinking in this country. If you extend licensing hours, all you are going to do is give people longer to drinking”

Uh-huh. So why not shut the pubs at 2030, and drive us all home and tuck is into bed and sing us a lullabye before we sleep, just to really hammer it home? For once, it seems Labour have actually attached at least half a brain to their otherwise overpaid shoulders:

Licensing minister James Purnell said the act was intended to treat people as grown-ups and included measures asked for by the police to allow tough action on binge drinking.

He told the BBC the current 11pm cut-off encouraged “speed drinking”, saying the government wanted “to allow local people and local councils to decide when pubs close according to their local circumstances”.

Hallelujah, finally some sense. Finally someone understands what the people want. It still baffles me that we elect these people as representatives of us, when in the majority of cases, they couldn’t be less representative of us (how John Major ever got elected I’ll never know. Apart from he watches crickets, so props to him for that).

This is a directionless, subjective rant, which has no intended point other than to illustrate the oft futility of existing at all. What’s the point? One thing it serves to do is highlight the fact that life is a bit of hack most of the time, so you better make the most of it.

Comedy genius

Pearls Before Swine

Sony shmony

I’ve been banging on about Sony for a while now. It seems I’m not the only one who has become a little pissed off with them – in anger at Sony CD copy protection software, that is a wopoff vulnerability to your computer, a new “boycott Sony” blog has appeared. And it’s getting some comments and linkage too. But that’s nothing, though, even Microsquish have stepped up to the plate and vowed to remove the dodgy Sony code from Windows computers, using its new anti-spyware tool, Windows Defender. Nice name, not.

P.S. Macro or micro? Is it really cynical of me to smirk at the fact that Microsquish use Flash 8 on their website? Shouldn’t they by now have their own version of it?

Waiting, and then some

I hate waiting. The waiting for stuff to happen. I mean you can do something, or initiate something or other, and eventually the result may be what you wanted, but the problem is you have to wait in the meantime to realise any results. And of course the result you get may not be the result you wanted. So all in all, waiting is a particularly frustrating thing to have to do. But what can you do?

You see the problem with a blog is that it’s public. Well duh. But there might be an occasion that you want to say something, but think that actually you won’t say it because you don’t know who might read it. So hence the previous vague and unstructured diatribe.