Go and take Chris Lightfoot’s Estimation Quiz and learn how good you are at making wild guesses estimations.
I got 37% (and 56% on a second attempt aided by having briefly seen the correct answers and hindered by a night in the pub).
I wasn’t helped by the fact that both times I confidently said that the Act of Union between Scotland and England was exactly 1701, which was a stupid conflation of the correct answer and 1801 (the date of that other Act of Union).
I’m downloading and installing SP2 for Windows XP as I type.
This may be unwise.
…
[Update] Still here.
Whilst adding the original entry I got to wondering what the XP in Windows XP stood for. Then I remembered (oh all right, Google remembered for me) that it stood for eXPerience. Bleargh.
I haven’t been watching very much of the Olympics at all, but I have been keeping an eye on one of the sailing events. Congratulations to Simon Hiscocks (who was at primary school with me, hence the interest) and Chris Draper on winning a bronze in the 49er class.
But why is it called the 49er? I’ve googled for the answer but with no success.
So the not-too-bright son of a former world leader tried their hand at a bit of regime change and got into trouble.
George W Bush became president of the “world’s only superpower”™ and embarked on his adventures with all the might of the US military, and a trusty sidekick.
Mark Thatcher, obviously following his mother’s philiosophy, decided to try a private takeover on a shoestring budget.
I’m probably not the first person to think this, but is advertising in Opera worth it?
The only people who see the ads are those who don’t pay the $39 to purchase the ad-free version.
Okay, okay, I know that people have different priorities and that someone who dosn’t spend that money on a web browser may spend it on something else instead. And indeed there are some users who buy the full version but keep the ads switched on as they like them.
Presumably this last group mostly keep the Google text ads switched on as these -
The Google text ads are drawn from the same database as the AdSense boxes that people can include on their pages. But when you visit a page with AdSense enabled page you don’t always get the same ads in the two locations.
On the subject of AdSense, the following one line of CSS in a user stylesheet will hide them entirely:
iframe[name="google_ads_frame"] { display: none;}
Over on the BBC web site someone going by the name of Weasel Girl (I wonder who that could be?) argues the merits of the V&A over Madame Tussaud’s; but surely there isn’t any contest in the first place.
Over at the Virtual Stoa Chris has started serialising Thomas Hodgskin’s Labour Defended Against the Claims of Capital. Read something a bit clever (well cleverer than this blog at any rate) in nice small chunks. Whilst you’re at it read his earlier serialisation – Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism.
And thanks to Chris for being the first person to add Very True Things to his blogroll. And as I haven’t announced the launch of this blog to anyone this is yet more proof of strange powers on his part…
Based on the trailers and reviews Chronicles of Riddick looks like it’s going to be really, very bad indeed.
So why do I want to see it?
Help
Reading the craptastic adventures of SES San Jose 2004 gave me conflicting emotions. Partly it’s just so funny how daft these people are – I have many sites that are built with perfectly valid HTML and which are very well indexed by Google and other search engines – but on the other hand it’s disheartening that people are paying these idiots good money to screw up their web sites.
[Update August 19th 2004] – Well, it seems that maybe the SEO gurus in question didn’t quite say the asinine things originally attributed to them. Eric Meyer tries to dampen some of the flames he helped to kindle and links to a selection of the subsequent debate.
The issue remains that many SEO firms produce really bad web pages that may help with the specific goal of getting search engine hits, but which are actually harmful to human visitors. If this incident does create a decent dialogue between the SEO crowd and the standards/accessibility/usability crowd then everyone would benefit.
Lettice went to see Chicago yesterday, starring David Hasselhoff. I turned down the opportunity to see “The Hoff” in the flesh. You can read more from one of Lettice’s partners in crime.