It’s good to be back home
Wow, it's good to be back home for a month. So far I've just been catching up on sleep, e-mail and everything Souf Efriken that I've missed. And to discover first hand how well life has changed. I'd never have guessed that Mom would buy a mountain bike and that Dad's favourite DStv channels are MTV and VH1! I love it.
Side-note: The DStv website: What's with that pointless <title> cruft? What's with the weird layout issues in Firefox? Ugh Ugh.
So anyway, I plan to get outdoors as soon as the wind stops pumping. Then again, my kite needs a good dusting. I posted some casual B&W photos from yesterday. They're converted from raw sepia TIFFs, which I've never experimented with much before. The sharpness of the photos really suprise me.
Two comments concerning the subject of daily feedback I'm receiving via my contact form:
(a) I have no current affiliation with YDE. I realise that if you google for Young Designers Emporium, my portfolio page appears second. This doesn't mean you should e-mail me for advice on how to become one of their designers, if you can't follow the help on their own site.
Side-note: the YDE website doesn't have a <title>, so Google apparently uses the Meta Description tag in it's listing, which confoundingly reads: "Truworths is one of South Africa's leading fashion retailers, with a range of brands...". Smarty pants!
(b) I receive a number of questions from students and fellow designers/developers, which have got me thinking about compiling a kind-of manifesto based on my experiences in the field. It will be an ongoing and practical effort, from which I hope to learn more myself.
Three weeks ago I wrote about number/pattern recognition in the time. Substituting 12:34 for 11:11 has definately worked: I've seen 11:11 twice in the past day alone, first in my comment on Sponky Travels (Justine & Mark's travelog), and then again just moments ago in an IM conversation. Interesting stuff.
Lastly, I have a quick question which was also a mozillaZine Poll (view results) a while back:
What kind of home/start page do you have set in your browser?
You know, when you open your browser, what's the first site you see, if any? Please leave a comment to let me know, thanks.
UPDATE [09/02]: Jason of 37signals.com has asked the same question. Cool, 83 comments... althought it would be more useful to survey general public too and not just us technophiles.
- comments are closed
14 Comments
Google Localization was annoying me in Europe, where I had to keep clicking on the “Go to Google.com” footer link (http://www.google.com/ncr) to escape whatever language it’d defaulted to. That’s what you should do – a permanent cookie is set to remember this preference.
As for their auto-focus on the search input field, all search engines do it and I guess this is the only instance that it would be unwanted. It’s the same reason I don’t use Google as my start page, and load up my browser with about:blank. The integrated search box in Firefox is set to Google and I use that instead.
I used this one over months, but am getting sick of it now. Of course it’s the loading, but also the old design (all in black, hard to read, etc). Yeah laugh on me – sure I’m a nerd.
On the other side, I can’t imagine not having a maintained bookmark list where I find stuff. Bookmarks in browsers suck so far, no search, no neat features like browsing by usage, etc.
So in fact I’m just searching for the easiest most convenient solution. And I would rather spend my time in new projects or a new website, than building a new bookmark system.
I already thought having bookmarks as RSS, but dunno how such a system could work. Also a calendar. I love RSS these days, especially with Feeddemon. You get notified of everything important, you just subscribe to.
about:blank is good – we pay per MB, so it saves precious bandwidth!
Back in the day, I used to have my own startpage with links to the most used sites. But with my feedreader integrated into Firefox, there’s not much need for that anymore, therefore it’s been about:blank for almost a year now.
I’ve mainly been using the default Google search page currently as I found that I do more searching and it’s pointless loading up my personal website when opening a new browser window. Previously I was using about:blank before that when I was on a slow link to the .net via UUnet South Africa. I tend to find at one job I had a customised homepage with links which I was going to often which was useful at that stage when I was into hardcore PHP programming.
sounds like mostly everyone has the freedom to choose their landing pages… unlike dialing up with mweb. even if you set your homepage with either firefox or IE … it just gets diverted back to mweb. And the mweb page takes for EVER to laod – i hate that crap!
I use session saver in Firefox, so when I start in the mornings I get my previous day’s tabs … the speed might have something to do with the fat pipe I’m plugged into.
i have about:blank
i didn’t know you were here already damien. i wrote on my calendar that you’re only arriving tomorrow for some odd reason? do you still have the same cell number? i’ll call later…
about:blank – I inevitably get bored of any pages that appear EVERY time I launch my browser.
home & work is set to about:blank – i HATE it when you start up a browser and takes you somewhere you probably didn’t wanna go to, plus it’s annoying when, everytime you open another browser window, it takes you to a page you’re already at or already visited earlier – call it lazy it you wanna…
I have Ananova. Simple, easy to look at and useful to catch up on the news when I wake up and open my iBook. Lovely site, Damien. It’s interesting to read a fellow Londoner’s exploits, even if you haven’t had to live here FOREVER!
i’m to lazy to change it from the Mozilla Google start page :
http://start.mozilla.org/firefox?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official
08 February 2005
Digiguru11:59 pm
I have google.co.za set in my firefox by default I think. But I must tell you, starting up firefox and waiting for that page to load bothers me to no end. I constantly start typing in a URL and hit enter only to find half the URL is actually being typed in the Google box. This pains me so that I have considered switching to IE again.
Google too has been pissing on my battery with this localised Google setting which I can’t seem to change and hence no matter whether I choose to search the web or pages from South Africa, it now looks for local sites first. I’m trapped in this beautiful land, but I am a global warrior and find little use for South African information.
So why all this rambling, well I like to use Google … normally as it’s a bloody good home page to have considering I use Google for just about every serach I do online.