King  Gary 

Okay, maybe that is a goal that’s way too far-fetched for a blog like mine, but the number of subscribers to my blog this past day has dramatically increased – by well over 50% – in one day. I’ll be going on vacation in a few days, to Europe (once again – I’m traveling to 3 countries this year), and I’ll do my best to blog as often as possible while I’m there. I’m hoping that will also help to boost my blog’s readership!

The number of subscribers that my blog has every day is clearly displayed in the right sidebar on my website – it’s no secret, and it usually fluctuates around 20 to 25 subscribers each day. The following image is a bar graph that shows the number of subscribers that I’ve had in the past month.

On a side note, I’m almost at 6,000 views for my Flickr account!

My BenQ T701 17″ LCD monitor just died this morning. I turned on my computer and my monitor, and the display showed the desktop for one second, and then it went black. I tried it on another computer, and it didn’t work there, either. So now my monitor is being sent to BenQ, courtesy of CompuSmart (which was where I bought the monitor.) It should take about 3 weeks, and hopefully not any longer. I’m forced to work with my Samsung SyncMaster 151s 15″ LCD now, which I took from my Windows XP computer.

I suppose that my monitor dying now is a better time than never, since I’ll be away in Europe for a week and a bit in a few days. Once I return, WWDC will have taken place, and I’ll then be able to make my final decision on which MacBook to buy for university in September.

Browsing my iTunes library to play a specific song used to be a chore on Windows. I had to open up iTunes (which takes a short moment to load on Windows), go to the playlist that I wanted (so that the songs that are looped were the ones that I wanted), type the name of the song in the search box, play the song, then clear the search box so that the other songs in the playlist were also included in the song loop.

Well, I’m no Quicksilver aficionado, but I do know that I can use it to do exactly what the above paragraph describes – all without even leaving the window that I’m working on at the time. Hitting ctrl+space just opens the little window that you see below; I then type in the first few letters of my playlist (my favorite playlist is aptly named ‘good songs’, and so I just type ‘go’ to find it), hit the right arrow key, then start typing the first few letters of the song I want.

When I compare the iTunes method with the Quicksilver method, the iTunes method took 15 seconds while the Quicksilver method took no more than 6 seconds. Just imagine multiplying that over several dozen times a day (yes, I have picky song choices sometimes!). How’s that for great productivity?

I was chatting with my friend David on MSN yesterday, and I was walking him through installing some free software. I sent him the link in MSN, but he kept on complaining that he never received it. I sent him a screenshot of my conversation window to prove that I really did send the message, and he sent me a screenshot back to prove that he never received it. All of our other messages were sent fine, except for messages that contained that one link.

It turns out that Microsoft has been censoring certain phrases, specifically “download.php”, “gallery.php”, and “profile.php”. The URL that I sent to David contained “download.php”. If you do a quick search on Google for this string in the URL, you will quickly see that the grand majority of these URLs are completely harmless and are usually for free software. The reason that Microsoft is censoring these phrases, is:

According to communications director of MSN Sweden, Jessica Börjel, this is being done to protect users against exploits and worms spreading through the MSN Messenger service.

This censor is easily worked around with redirection services, though, and it often causes more problems than it solves since neither user in the conversation is notified that this phrase is blocked. Also, it’s interesting to note that Microsoft isn’t blocking download.asp and gallery.asp phrases, even though they have the potential to do the same amount of damage as malicious download.php and gallery.php scripts. (The programming language, ASP, used in .asp files is Microsoft’s technology, for those who don’t know.)

Oh, what headaches Microsoft causes, especially when I’ve lived in the Mac world for so long.