This hardly warrants an entry, but it's a simple one to fix that was irritating me for a long time.

Go to Edit, Preferences, Extensions, Utilities, and add a tick in Notification Area Icon (which will remove the tick from Sound Menu Integration).

Dur...

Perhaps one of the better uses of this blog would be to make myself mental notes for the future when it comes to fixing problems, since whenever I stumbled upon them 6 months down the line I've completely forgotten what I did the first time round to fix them, and have to spend another couple of hours doing so.

In today's case it was getting the poxy wireless card in this laptop working under Kubuntu again.  ...click to continue...

So apparently you can now get married at McDonalds. Just when I thought I had seen everything, this comes along and blows my world-view sky-high once more. What I'm curious about is whether they offer you a choice of service, and if you choose the Christian service whether they'll offer you an Order of Friars on the side.

And they'll live Happy Meal ever after. ...click to continue...

Actually this should probably be titled "BBC News and the Blatant Shameless Lies", and would probably make for a better paperback release.

I recently commented that BBC News was my former resource as far as news of the world was concerned, and that still remains mostly true. However, there are times when giving Silvia breakfast that I stumble on to the horribly laid out web portal that is BBC News and see if things have improved. Sadly, no they haven't. ...click to continue...

Halloween having past, and with no knocks at the door for "trick or treat", we found ourselves with a rather considerable amount of candy leftover, consisting of chocolate eclairs, Werther's Original, and fruit sherbets. My wife happened to be sitting on the sofa while I was standing next to the bowl of candy, and asked me to toss a Werther's over to her, which I did. I followed this up by throwing a total of 5 at her, for a laugh, the surplus of which she tried to throw back at me, with rather sub-par aim. "I'm terrible," she said, "I can't hit you with them." ...click to continue...

Since I don't have enough focus to write a proper blog entry right now (or most days, for that matter, judging from the lack of content on my blog), some random thoughts that came to me at lunch.

Musical Greeting Cards: While these can be amusing for all of 3 seconds, and I'm sure that some people must like receiving them, there surely must be an unwritten rule that states that it is unacceptable to stand in WHSmith and spend more than 5 minutes trying out as many as one can, especially if older than the age of 5 (let alone 40). ...click to continue...

I hate Microsoft SharePoint with a passion. It is the most utterly useless pile of turd they have released since WinME. When viewing a folder of documents, I am given the option to "View in Windows Explorer" no matter what browser I use, but knowing the compatibility issues trying to load this in Firefox under Linux would present, I log in to a remote Windows system and open it in Internet Exploder. What am I presented with?

"Your client does not support loading this folder in Windows Explorer." ...click to continue...

 I could have sworn I just left this party.

I've spent the past two weeks carrying my Moleskine around with me jotting down notes for this occasion, trying to work out what on earth to say about Barry, and  it isn't out of a lack of things to say about him, but instead out of not even knowing where to start. So you can probably expect this to be very disjointed and muddled. Picture the scene right now as I type this out: sat at the breakfast bar in the office at 2 in the morning, where Barry and I have spent the better part of the past 3 years either sharing a chippy dinner in the evening, sometimes with Sonic if he was still around the office at that hour, or handing over our respective shift's work in the morning over a cup of tea as the office fills up with people giving us bewildered looks, as if to wonder if we ever left the breakfast bar the night before.

Part of me is expecting him to walk in through the door, sit down in front of me, and say something like "You know this speech you've been working on? Well I've been giving it some thought, and I might just have the angle you're looking for", as was so often the case. Whether it was the drainage in my garden, the slow loading times of my computer, or an annoying "donk donk donk" sound coming from my car, as if I'd left something down the back, he was never short of an idea or two, and would come back days later if he thought of something. ...click to continue...

I have found what could probably be considered my first "silly" gripe with Drupal, and that is the default action for Anonymous comments. Since I don't necessarily plan to start opening regular accounts for people (not enough traffic will ever visit this site to warrant that, let's be honest), comments to blog entries and the ilk will be of the "anonymous" kind, which is fine and dandy. I think just about any blogging tool allows this now. ...click to continue...

I've somehow always found the idea of blogging to be extremely complex for something that is seemingly so simple: "Write what you want to write about when you want to write about it, irrespective of having anyone reading it" pretty much sums up the overall premise of the task at hand, but at the same time we still want someone out there to read it, which forces us into writing something that we think will be entertaining to someone else, but can also impede from writing either what we want to write, or writing it when we want to write it. ...click to continue...