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Life continues to be super busy here, which was the source of the delay for October’s update - apologies to those who noticed…

Got offered a Freebie the other day, in exchange for a review - which was kinda cool. I was tempted until I had to provide my home address for delivery (it was a large object) at which point I graciously declined. Am I too cynical? What would you do?

I thought upgrading to a 22″ monitor was pretty indulgent, but hey - a girl puts in so many hours in front of the damn monitor, may as well make it a biggish one, right?

Well, I splurged on a second one. Yes, I now have twins - two ViewSonic VA2226w’s scored for less than $300 each. Maybe I’m a bit behind and and all the cool kids have dual monitors, but I’ve got to tell you it is simply Awesome!

My six year old surmised that I could now do twice the work. I said that I hoped I could do the same about of work twice as quickly. Well, not quite, but it has made such a huge difference! Think of every time you minimise an application or flick between tabs/applications. Need to reference something, while writing something else. Copying and pasting. It makes it so simple.

I think everyone is sick of hearing me rave about it. It’s not at all confusing. Just. Simply. Awesome.

If you can justify the indulgence, convince your boss…. whatever - just do it! I doubt you’d ever go back.

So hey, there’s a financial crisis happening - go figure! I’m so not in touch. With anything. But the world keeps turning, even if you’re not watching.

Like when I happened to (flukishly) drive to the shops one Saturday a few weeks ago because I was out of sugar (a girl’s gotta have her coffee right?), and happened to notice a shite load of cars out the front of the local school, along with those A frame banner thingys. I thought, “hmmm, this reminds me of election day”. So I pulled up & moseyed over with my 6 year old and sure enough it was an election. For something. Local council maybe? I dutifully took every “how to vote for this person you’ve never heard of” flyer, got my name crossed off & walked to a booth.

I showed the flyers to my daughter (more interested in the process that I was) and asked her who she thought I should vote for. She looked at me somewhat perplexed and said “I don’t think it should be up to me to decide”. Damn, kid’s right. I said to her “I’m just kidding” (as I closed my eyes and picked one). Yeah, apathy personified. Do you think “I seriously had no idea there was an election” would be a valid excuse for not voting?

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My parents visited the other day (or maybe week, I lose track) and my mum commented on all the cards hanging over the slats of my Venetian blinds. “Are you getting Christmas cards already?” she asked. “No mum, I replied those are from the last 2 years”. Guess I should think about taking them down, sometime.

It’s a bit like taking stuff out of your pantry that has expired more than 2 years ago recently. And hey! Did you know some body lotion has an expiry date? Yeah, I learned that one the hard way. Noticed I had a few dry spots on my leg so I applied some stuff on my legs & hopped into bed. A few minutes later my legs were stinging, so I went back into the bathroom and checked out the pump pack. Damn stuff expired in 2004. Holy cow! I’ve moved house since then & carted it with me. I guess you gather I’m not much for beauty products either.

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Ah, don’t you love technology? Sometimes I lose my printer connection. It usually rights itself after I reboot, but who has time to reboot during the day, and shut down the 64 multiple tabs and applications that accumulate? So for about 3 days running my printer wouldn’t print. I got around it, but eventually I needed to print. So I figure I have to reinstall my printer - spent 10 minutes looking for the driver disk, figured I’d just download the driver, realised I’d already done that some months ago, and just before I was about to reinstall I do a cursory check of all the connections. [quote Gordon Ramsay]! The printer was turned off! Feeling rather sheepish and admitting to my “blonde moment” I told a colleague. Who also sheepishly confessed that they had in fact turned the printer off (because all the lights were flashing). D’oh.

Have you had a “blonde moment” lately?

No change on my domain, but I am noticing PageRank on posts from earlier this month indicating there has in fact been an update.

How’s your green bar? I’m a little surprised Google hasn’t released a toolbar for Chrome yet.

The Inquisitr
CopyWrite
The Inspiration Room Daily
Down to Earth
Hoyden About Town
Housewife Hiccups
Three Ring Circus
Save…Save…Save

(Note: The Inspiration Room™ Daily is the renamed Duncans TV, which was at number 10 last month).

Sarah Stokely (ex LifeHacker) dropped me a note a couple of weeks ago to tell me that Crikey! now have a blogs section, which might be of interest. Sarah is the website editor.

Thanks to the people who email me to let me know that their blog may be eligible for the list. It certainly helps keep the list complete, since I don’t have the time I once did to blog hunt.

I continue to get a lot of emails about products, websites and offers, as well as requests for lists of certain categories of Australian Blogs. Unfortunately, I’m simply not able to respond or comply with many requests, however much I’d like to. Categorisation of the blogs is something I’d love to do, but again, just don’t have time.

Anyone noticing any PageRank movements in the last few days? Not time for a PR update, surely? I thought that was a month away.

Until next month, or maybe something random in between…

Over the last few days, I’ve noticed a lot of spam is coming with read receipts. OK, so spam’s a part of life - but unnecessary read receipts are just a pain in the proverbial. And, mostly, they are now showing “unsubscribe” links. What’s with that? Some new requirement for spammers? Like I’m sure I’ll magically be off the email list if I click unsubscribe - because spammers are so ethical. Right.

Love to know if CMD, 635 Massachusetts Ave., NW, Washington, DC 20001-3753 really exist?

Anyone else getting these?

(p.s. I wrote this yesterday, and I did venture to click on the unsubscribe link today. Predictably I got a “not found” response).

Perhaps if I’d known that I wasn’t going to have more than one consecutive day off in the next 1,000 days, I might have stayed the full week!

But, in the words of Maritka - I no complain…. much

Maybe it’s a cultural thing?

Eeek, I shudder to think how many posts there are about Google Chrome - not game to venture into my feed reader. Might as well add my 2c worth…

After Firefox (version 2.0.0.16) crashed for the third (or forth) time today, I though meh, I’ll give Chrome a go. After a few unsuccessful attempts to download here (not the most auspicious start), I was finally successful at the initial link. I guess I should mention here that Google Chrome is a new internet browser, like Internet Explorer and FireFox (n.b. Mum, it’s a simple download and install < 2 minutes & you’ll have it up and running).

I like Chrome! I confess that I haven’t done a lot, but it’s fast. And so far, everything seems to look like it should. I spend a lot of time using an application called SalesForce. FireFox is painfully slow for this site, and the mail merge function is simply not supported in Firefox (or Google Chrome, of course). So I’m forced to use IE because it’s quicker on this app and it does what I need it to do. I must say that Chrome is SO much quicker than either browser - it’s blissful.

It’s interesting to note that SalesForce, logged the browser as being “Safari 3.2″. I have a heavy suspicion that even Google Analytics doesn’t acknowledge the browse, yet, as no visits are being attributed to it (although I have noticed a spike in “Safari” visitors today on my blog stats).

I like to use dLook as being a pretty good indicator of browser usage. It’s not an overly tech savvy demographic (unlike this blog, which obviously has a skewed audience), and is probably more representative of the general population than Obits.

I’m truly surprised at the percentages of people who still use Internet Explorer. For dLook, it’s around 78% (36% of which, still use IE 6). For this blog, it’s just under 60%. It will be very interesting to see what sort of market penetration Google Chrome can achieve?

It’s funny that (I perceive) there has been a real trend towards people using search engines (like Google) as a de facto address bar (i.e. they will type in the domain name INTO the Google search box), and yet this browser is a move BACK to using the address bar (albeit in a slightly different fashion). I reckon they are very generous asking which search engine you would like to use for your default search. I actually went looking for the Google toolbar to add! Old habits die hard, as they say.

What do you like/not like about Chrome?

Online Marketing Banter
Souvlaki for the Soul
PoeARTica
Kin’s Home of Slightly Cracked Dreams
picklebums

Nice to see some familiar blogs amongst them - welcome to James, Peter, Kim (again), Kin and Kate!

For the 3rd month running there is a new number one blog, and the top 10 has had a bit of a shake up…