ajuk: my blog

Oh well, better late than never:


So it's all over again. The family have come and gone, the presents have been opened and the turkey's been eaten.

Meanwhile, at 6:57am today (31st December), I became an uncle - my sister had a baby boy.

Gmail is a new kind of email from Google, and it's absolutely brilliant. Being Google, you can forget popups and adverts slapped all over the page. You do get adverts, but their from Google's text-only AdSense system and show adverts relavent to what's in your messages, instead of ones that are of no interest to you.

Also, you don't make folders for you messages. Instead, you give messages labels. Each message can have several labels, which could not be done with folders. Sent messages and replies are displayed on the same page as a conversation, instead of seperate messages. Spam filtering is built in and you get a massive 1000 megabytes of space to play with. You can even set up POP forwarding so you can use your email program.

It's free, but as it's still being tested you can't sign up for it yet - you have to be invited to use it. You can still sign up for the mailing list for news though.

Go and have a look here. If you want to email me, my address is !

So the tree and decorations are up, the only things missing are the presents. Merry Christmas everyone!



Soon I'll post a picture of the tree with the presents! BTW, is the image too dark on your screen?

Okay, don't get me wrong. I mostly love Microsoft Office 2003. But there are some things that I just can't stand.

Open up a blank Excel workbook, and then another one. Look at the taskbar - two Excel buttons, one for each worksheet. So like any other Windows application, each workbook is treated as a seperate window, right? Wrong. Minimize them both. Open one up, move it a bit, and then open the other one. You'd expect the second one to be shown in a seperate window, but it's not - it takes the first workbook's window. Eventually you notice the second set of minimize/restore/close buttons in the top-right of the window and realize that you can press the restore button to see both workbooks at the same time. Great! It seems that there is just one main Excel window which contains all open workbooks. Thing is, Excel should have just one taskbar button for itself. Microsoft should know this better that anyone else for obvious reasons. So why must they completely balls up the system - is it just to confuse people?

Word has a small problem too. Why are there two close buttons for each open document? It would make sense if Word was like Excel, with just one main window containing all open documents. But it's not - each document opens in a seperate window. Why can't they just make it so it acts like you expect it to?

The new issue of Sniff Petrol is out with the usual car-related funniness. Go on, have a look, you know you want to. Fact me harder!

Want a cheap F1 game, motherboard, graphics card or ISDN modem? Then please have a look at my eBay auctions!