Ennovy.org

I found two interesting links over at del.icio.us today (I always seem to find a lot of sites from there!). Both displays your website in a text-based format. The first one, Shredder 1.0 presents the underlying HTML in a chaotic, random format, so that the site looks like it’s been through a paper shredder. (Reload, the link, it’ll change) The other link, html2text, is a lot more readable. It converts the HTML into readable ASCII text, more specifically in the markdown format.

Aladdin - Friend Like Me

I’m kind of interested in signing up for this Novell/IBM Linux Workshop, which provides free training on how to install and manage Linux. I already have SuSE linux installed, but I still want to learn more about it. I can actually attend one, because they have workshops in Toronto and they’re held in April, May, June and July! The thing is, it’s targeted for businesses and my only interest in it is for personal use. Hmm, I have to remember this…

I had a dream this morning, and although I don’t remember much of what happened, I do remember who was in the dream! There were a lot of movie actors.

- Jennifer Garner
- Brad Pitt
- Elijah Wood

And last but not least, though he isn’t a celebrity, a guy in my Year 7 and 8 class. I have to say he looked sooo cute.

After I wrote up my previous post, I went online using MSN and found all these people on my list had changed their nicknames by adding a “C” in front of them. I asked one of them what that meant, and they changed it as a sign of respect to Cecilia. I thought, OK, that’s strange, but I did the same with mine. It’s really amazing how words get round, because more than half the people on my list have that (well, they’re all people I know offline, and in Canada, so they would have heard about it.)

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Today was really busy, and I’ve been waiting to write up a post (on here) all day, but now I’m not in the mood. It’s just weird if I post about how I had a great time earlier tonight when other people are not having such a good time (for example, her parents).

Also, it sucks that it takes a big story like this (it was covered extensively by the media)  to get people seriously thinking about it. We all know about the famous cases like Holly Jones or Elizabeth Smart etc. But, I think things like this happen a lot, more than people think, and it’s a big problem. As with a lot of other issues.

I haven’t been keeping up with the news this weekend. Just half an hour ago, my roommate told me that they had found the body of Cecilia Zhang on Saturday. Cecilia was this 9 year old girl who was abducted from her house last October. It’s been all over the news in Ontario, and the Chinese community was all abuzz. I really did hope that she would eventually be found safe and sound, but as the months went by the hope dropped lower and lower. Well, I hope at least this discovery will bring some closure to her parents. And that the police will find some clues about who did this.

According to the Plain English Campaign, the most irritating phrase in the english language is “at the end of the day”. The campaign surveyed 5000 people in over 70 countries to compile a list of the most irritating phrases. According to their website, they are “an independent organisation fighting for crystal-clear language and against jargon, gobbledygook and other confusing language.” The next most irritating are “at this moment in time”, “like”, and “with all due respect”.

Other things listed that I personally find are over-used (although not always irritating) are:
- I hear what you’re saying
- basically -> although I use this all the time!
- to be honest/to be honest with you/to be perfectly honest

There were some new terms in there I’d never seen before:
- diamond geezer - a good solid reliable person.
- blue sky - the sky as viewed during daylight.

Here’s a tip for you guys who use FireFox and the Adblock extension. Now every time I saw an advertisement I didn’t like I would right-click on it and use Adblock to block the image. That worked, and the image disappeared. But the link that the image was linking to was still there! So sometimes, when I would click on a bit of white space where the blocked image used to be, I’d find myself taken to another site. Which became really annoying after a while. So, I played around with the options to find a way to fix this. I went to Tools > Adblock > Preferences, and then selected “Remove Ads” at the bottom. When I restarted the browser, the links were removed! Problem solved.

Maybe it was just me who was doing this but someone else might find this useful, right?

OK, so a while ago my roommate and I both watched this episode of Judging Amy. We didn’t watch it together though. So the next time we met, we ended up discussing that episode, and laughing about the ending, which was HILARIOUS. Then later I was thinking about an earlier part of the show. There was a woman in labour who was wheeled into the emergency room in a hospital, and soon afterwards she gave birth. Then, she suddenly fainted. It was quite comical, actually, and I chuckled when I saw her do that. But. What if she fainted while she was giving birth? Wouldn’t that be a horrible thing to happen, if you lost consciousness when there’s a baby coming out of you? And then who knows how long it will be before you gain consciousness? This must be possible, given all the pain and maybe the drugs (to alleviate the pain). Hmmm.. this should be mentioned in books on pregnancy though.

So. Angel, the TV show, is being cancelled. But according to article,  now there is no chance of Buffy showing up in their series finale. Which sucks, because I’ve been waiting for Buffy to make an appearance there all season. Whether she “ends up” with Angel or Spike, it doesn’t matter.

While I’m mentioning news articles, I thought I’d also link to furl.net. It’s a lot like a bookmark manager, but it also acts as a filing cabinet because it keeps a local copy of any pages you add to it. I signed up at the site a while back, and didn’t use it, but I’m going to in the future whenever I link to a news articles. A lot of news sites delete their articles after a while, so my blog ends up with broken links everywhere. For example the link from this post doesn’t work anymore. If I use Furl, then I can actually read the cached news article and know what I was linking to. In that sense it’s even better than the WayBack Machine.

Does anyone know how to remove yourself from a webring using RingSurf?? I’ve managed to log in and edit my info, but there’s no way to delete all of the info.

I’d try contact the owner of the webrings and get them to delete it for me, but I don’t know how to find them. The sites for their web rings show up with 404 errors. Which is why I wanted to unsubscribe from the web rings in the first place. Plus half of the links in the ring don’t work anymore.

I used to have my own webring (and my own clique). But after a while, it just became too hard to maintain - having to deal with adding link, checking for the right code fragments, etc. I don’t think I’ll ever try to set up my own message board, either.