TheChrisD - Rant Central

Too much, even for me?

I do sort of feel like I’m being overwhelmed with things, lately. Although it does seem to all be on the “online” front. RSS news articles spewing out of the inbox, more and more forums to check and post on, and an ever-increasing amount of tweets to check up with! I do feel as if I’m getting maybe slightly in over my head here…

Only a couple of days ago, I changed some settings on my computer so that closing down the lid wouldn’t put it into standby. I wasn’t able to keep track of exactly how many new tweets there had been since I last checked, mainly because TwitterFox could only catch the last 20. There were IM platforms, IRC channels and other programs that took an eternity to sign back in once I started up again. Windows Live Mail would constantly complain and try to bring itself to the front because it wasn’t able to fetch mail while the computer was still connecting to the Internet.

So I changed it all so that my computer essentially stayed on all the time. Now everything comes through no problem. I can put away the computer at night, and then come back the next morning and know exactly how many new tweets there have been (which averages around 250), the e-mails can be fetched as they come in overnight and I don’t have to deal with a moody e-mail client in the morning. The IRC channels don’t bug me for the identification passwords every 10 seconds

Yes, it does consume more power than usual, but at least it’s only a laptop. Of course when I get my proper gaming PC, that’s going to be on all the time - and not just to play games on! Only problem is I still have to get around to ordering the bloomin’ thing, but with such a low credit limit on my card (not to mention the lack of money to pay it off in one go, which my card is set to do), it’s kinda on hold.

Oh, and some more random crap:

• Our new phone books just got delivered about half an hour ago. Only thing is, why do they still print phone books, when it would probably be cheaper and faster to just put it on a CD, a memory stick or online. It’s a technology that doesn’t know it’s dead (via AdjustantReflex).
• Speaking of Mr. Spammer himself, he’s moved blog hosting provider. Feel free to go ridicule him for choosing Blogger.
• This little prick seems to think it’s OK to rip off the “Is It A Good Idea to Microwave This?” videos and re-post them as his own. Well it’s not. Feel free to leave a nasty comment and 1-star ratings on his videos
• I think I’ve finally managed to fix the whole WordPress/bbPress integration thing I had going on over on the Rumble Pit World Series. If you’ve ever added a table to a WordPress post, you’d know that they seem to add each table element on a new line in the HTML code, but bbPress took those extra line breaks and actually displayed them - leaving around 40-50 line breaks before each table. Now I’ve fixed that, althought it did take about 2 hours, and a lot of messing around with the default-filters.php file…
• There appears to be a lot more snow in Pokémon Platinum, than in Diamond or Pearl. I am so getting even though I will have no idea what to do since it’ll only be available in Japansese for about a year.

Think that’s it for now. Stay tuned for the Twitter digest in about 3 hours time

PS: Anyone notice the new fancy dancing favicon yet?