Cas is currently… at life

I was going to have small grump today about the inaccessibility of the Southampton County Council’s website and how stupidly set up their online payment pages are.

But you are to be saved from this fate worse than death because of my inability to download Firefox 1.5.

Whilst this has no actual impact on my daily life (I use Safari still, despite repeated efforts to switch to FF, and me persuading everyone I know to use it), it has bugged me. I want to switch to FF, and from all I’ve heard, 1.5 is going to be the release to do it for me. So the first day of release and… I can’t get it. The links to the Mac OS X (en-us) localisation are broken. All of them. Even the ftp links. And no, I am *not* desperate enough to download the tarball and build it from scratch. I want my nice .dmg file! *wah!* Naughty Mozilla foundation not making sure it all worked before going live. According to the forums, they are “working on it”.

*Grump*

If anyone has a solution to this problem, let me know please!

Cas is currently… at life

So I’m writing this using the new version of Firefox I was having trouble downloading this morning.

On my way back from the hardware store (needed a new bulb for the kitchen) I had a brainwave – sure enough, I was right. You can download the new version of FF, but you need to download it using FF in the first place. Try to download it from Safari, and all you get is the dmg file trying to open up in the browser window. Not good. Let’s hope they get that little bug sorted before too many switchers are put off.
Here, use our wonderful product we’ve been telling you is so much better than what you are currently using… Oh, but you have to use our new product to get our new product….

Yup. Something went wrong along the way there.

I’ve taken the plunge and made firefox my default now. I’ll let you know how I get along with it. First mission – to find a theme that is less cutesy and teletubby land! I had the slick ‘silverskin’ theme for the previous version, but that’s currently broken, and I do NOT like the default theme.

Toodles.

Cas is currently… at life

People keep coming to the blog via a search for ‘chayanne underpants’ on Yahoo!Search. There is nothing wrong with this – whatever brings me readers keeps me happy – I just feel sorry for people who come to the blog expecting pictures of this individual in underpants only to find… whatever it is you find here abouts. That, and who is this Chayanne and why are people so keen to see him/her in their skivvies?

As I have never, to my knowledge, blogged about Chayanne in his/her underpants, I was at a little bit of a loss as to what was causing this result in Yahoo!Search, so I did a bit of sleuthing. Turns out, the post containing a list of the artists involved in the whole SonyBMG Rootkit debacle is on the same archive page as a post containing the word underpants.

I am at a loss as to why this search should bring me up as the fourth result, considering the words aren’t even in the same post, let alone the same sentence. Then again, perhaps there aren’t many pictures of Chayanne in his/her underpants on the web, which is why people repeatedly keep coming to me by mistake? ^*1*

And yes, I am aware that this post is probably going earn me many more hits from the ‘Chayanne underpants’ searchers out there, but, as I said, whatever brings me in readers.

Looking at this picture, however, I am starting to see why people might want to see pictures of Chayanne in his underpants… (click picture to go bigger)

Just what a girl needs to get the day off to a good start

Cas is currently…

This post is a shout-out to the Brainy Snail. Yes, I am alive and no, my computer hasn’t blown up. It’s been a close run thing on both counts, but we’re hanging in there. Just.

If you all will care to look down at the Blogstalking section of the sidebar (or if you are reading this in RSS, here) you will see that we have had visitors from Santiago, Chile. Welcome 🙂 That’s visitors from every major continent now. Woot! If you know of anyone in obscure and far-flung places of the world (bear in mind I am in the south of the UK, so pretty much everywhere is far-flung), please let them know about Bright Meadow. I need more readers east of Germany and south of Greece. Ok, so I don’t need exactly, but it would be nice. Consider that your Minion Task of the Week ^tm.

Todays word is lassitude: lack of vitality or energy, which is pretty darn accurate for a random word. I am going to take it as a sign that todays post doesn’t have to be either very long, or very interesting. Toodles.

Cas is currently…

Todays Sunday Roast will be, I am afraid, a short one. I can’t even vouch for it’s quality. Things have been… not fun… this week at Meadow Towers and this has impinged on my cooking abilities it seems (just how far can I stretch this roast dinner metaphor before it cracks under the strain, do you think?).
Still, eat up, and don’t forget the leftovers if you have room at the end.

Web 2.0 – A good appraisal of what Web 2.0 is, its bad points as well as its good points.

Door thwarts quick exit for Bush . Thanks to Minion Moose for this one. Made my morning.

Google and Anonymity.
With the related – GoogleAnon.

Go Flock Yourself. Yes, that is the tag line of the blog flocksucks.wordpress.com The sheer vitriolic glee with which this blog is written is just making me salivate. This is one time you really don’t have to agree with what someone is saying to enjoy how they are saying it. And, you know, there’s been an awful lot of tosh spoken about Web 2.0 – it’s about time somebody stepped up to the plate and said “Hang on, you bunch of lemmings…”

Open Web Design. So I find a design I like… and no longer have a site for it. Lol. Anyway, there’s some pretty shiny designs here, all available free to download etc. Hence the name of the site! Useful resource.

Meebo. An intriguing little something to play with – a totally web-based IM client that lets you sign into existing accounts (ie MSN). Not played with it really as I can’t spare the time to chat to people, but it looks exciting. Especially if you are on networked computers you can’t download messenger/AIM/insert-IM-client-here for whatever reason (ie school/library). Still alpha, but keep an eye on it.

Xmas light video. The word you are looking for is “why”?

Royal Society: rent-seeking is more important than science. Keen blog-watchers might have notice this appear in the del.icio.us research-stream in the sidebar on Saturday, but I thought it was important enough to Roast it as well, just to make sure you saw it. I could rant away for hours, but Cory has pretty much said all I want to say, so I’ll leave it to him.

A Consuming Experience: Playing MP3s on your blog: beginners’ introduction. There’s been some excitment about this, so I thought I would point out this handy ‘how to’ guide. I would, however, draw your attention to the bit about legality?

Cas is currently…

I’ve been trying to come up with a shiny logo for the header-section of the new blog design. Just to let you in on a little secret – I suck at design. I know what I like, but lack a single original bone in my body. This has, understandably, hampered me in my search for a new logo.

Then I, quite unexpectedly, ended up in a mutual link-love-fest with the good people over at Successful Blog and discovered that I seem to already have a logo (I am now an SOB apparently).

So it’s a bit basic, but I prefer to think on it as elegant, which is what I’ve been aiming for with the rest of the design. I seem incapable of being stripped-back, minimal, or elegant in real life, so it’s nice to think I can manage a little bit of it in my virtual life.

Just occasionally, it takes someone you weren’t expecting to make you look at old things in a new way, to make you appreciate what you have, and to make you sit up and take notice of what you might have forgotten in the rush.

It might be someone who, on a day you were feeling down, unexpectedly says they’ve always liked your smile. It might be an email from a reader who says “you made me laugh today, thank you”. It could be something as simple as the girl in the checkout saying “your hair looks nice”. Or it could be your supervisor saying “I love what you’re doing, every thing is going to be fine”.

So what has made you sit back and go “oh” lately? What made you stop, smile, and make a tiny re-evaluation in the way you view the world?

And because I don’t say it enough, you are all lovely people, and thank you for letting me entertain you for a few minutes in your day.

Cas is currently…

Just 24 hours after telling the CC not to get excited, we never get snow in this country in November, we… go and get snow in this country. And it’s November. Yay! Pretty snow!

At the same time, keeping an eye on the coverage in the papers of all the disruption caused by a few inches of snow, I can’t help but think that we British really do get uncharacteristically excited about a lot of frozen water. Not even that much frozen water if I am to be honest (one thing with living with a Canadian – you’re no longer permitted to say “that’s a lot of snow” to anything less than about three feet).

A fall of mere millimeters (like they had back in my native Somerset) is enough to close dozens of schools. 5 cm will block roads. I just looked at a ruler – 5 cm isn’t much. About the length of my thumb in fact.

What happens to the great British spirit of keeping going regardless of the odds when we’re faced with a quantity of snow that would just about frost a cake, but not much more? We see snow and (excuse the expression) freeze, like so many rabbits in the headlights. Entire villages can get swept away, and we rally round wonderfully. How we dealt with the Blitz in WWII even spawned a phrase to describe it: “the Blitz spirit”. We’re renowned for being able to cope. Along with drinking lots of tea, queueing with equanimity, talking a bit posh, and having a mad royal family, it is arguably one of the more famous British stereotypes.

Yet give us some sugar-frosting on the fields, and we go into a tailspin. More snow falls in an average five minute flurry in Guelph, than fell in the storms that caused so much kerfuffle last night. Though in our defense, British snow is a “different sort of snow”. Wetter, apparently. Maybe that makes it so much harder to deal with?

My point? Oh, I don’t really have one. ^*1* I was just commenting on how wonderfully silly the average British person can be on occasion. And if you have plans to take over the world and, admit it, who hasn’t planned a little light world domination in their spare time? Just bring a snow-machine with you when you try to take over the British Isles.