First Friday Five

Thought I’d do my first ever Friday five….on a Saturday. My answers are funny (at least to me) so here goes….

1. How much time do you spend online each day?
The home computer is connected 24/7, I check my email when I get up and check news sites and blogs updated in blogrolling before going to work. I then use the internet for most of the day at work, I eat tea and then I’ll check email, blog check, program or just randomly surf….so probably at least 12 hours a day I’m actively using the internet.

2. What is your browser homepage set to?
Which browser? 🙂 Mostly about:blank That way it loads the quickest. As my browsers are constantly opening and shutting I don’t want to wait for the home page to load each time. Having said that most of the time I use the address bar to actually type the url or search query in to launch the browser so it never goes to the home page in the first place.

3. Do you use any instant messaging programs? Very occasionally I’ll use Miranda but I have accounts on yahoo,aol,icq and msn. In fact I have a 6 digit icq number which is pretty rare!

4. Where was your first webpage located?
On a floppy :-). The first accessible page was (and still is) Wabbit’s Warren . This was in 1995 when they were still geocities and everyone wondered how on earth they were going to be profitable giving away free web space. I had to decide on a theme for the site, as in those days pages were grouped by neighbourhoods ie Hollywood for entertainment. I was big into Petra at the time so that influenced my neighbourhood. Note the painstakingly created grey background, auto refresh to a different page, animated wabbit logo (hand created) and imagemap for the various pages. The scary thing is that people still sign my guestbook!

5. How long have you had your current website?
Which website? Absoblogginlutely.net is the latest and the main site that I update and has been running for about 4 months I think. This is the third location for my blog as I’ve moved hosting providers (and urls)

Another NewYork story

Amy Langfield has a really interesting story about her experience getting stuck in the underground in NewYork and the long wait to get home. Fortunately she was only 2 blocks away from her house. It’s still a pretty scary story and insight into how it would be getting stuck. She is a journalist so the writing is of a very good standard (with loads of interesting links too)

Symantec CE server password

I’ve also had symantec’s console have its password changed in the past and Kevin’s details the changes. All you do is change HKLM\SOFTWARE\INTEL\LANDesk\VirusProtect6\CurrentVersion\ConsolePassword to 1084A085DC6BD2D755D4D6A7726 and then use the password symantec
(I’ve repeated it here so I have a local archive in case Kev’s page ever disappears.)

Panama Hatties & Google

Last Friday we went to Panama Hattys with a couple of friends and had a really good night. Booking is essential, but you then basically have the table for the night – They seat you in a nice lounge whilst they cook your food then move you to the table when your food is ready. Finally when we finished they were in no hurry to get us out the restaurant and we must have been there a good hour after eating before they came over and asked if we wanted the bill.
I was going to blog about it earlier but hadn’t found the url for it. Searching in google for panama hatties cheshire of use, but searching for Panama Hattys Cheshire finds relevant hits on the first page. The weird thing is that the home page of panamahatties.co.uk and panamahattys.co.uk actually work but are not in google. Normally having the search term in the url brings the page up pretty close to the top of the search results. (The pages actually point to the same site though.)
Problem is this page will probably be at the top of google in a week or two 🙂

Installing a hardware firewall.

I wouldn’t have thought that organising an adsl modem to work in conjunction with a hardware firewall would be that difficult. But I’ve been receiving conflicting advise over what routers/functionality needs to be installed. All I need is an router/modem that is effectively invisible to the firewall so it thinks it is connected to the internet and can get on with its filtering,vpn’s and protection. However I am being ignored by BT, the company we are probably going to buy Broadband from (yet another reason to not use them – if they are this bad when we *want* to spend some money with them I hate to think what they will be like when we have a problem), our existing firewall support won’t help unless we buy one particular make of router and get broadband from one particular supplier, and the firewall company won’t help as they say its the resellers problem – so back to square one…..Almost makes me want to go to dialup modem! The fact that we can’t order broadband until the physical line is installed and live also makes a mockery of the whole broadband ordering process.