strappin on the feed bag

I had a couple of people mention to me that phrostuff was loading pretty slow for them in IE. I took a look and I must say, there was quite a bit of lag. I did some testing with CURL and discovered there didn't seem to be any lag in retrieving the HTML, but IE seemed to be chunking pretty hard trying to parse it.

I did some fiddling and discovered this was due to my massive blogroll widget which I recently upgraded from a javascript based version to the official Blogger widget which allows the blogs I list to receive some link-lovin-google-juice for my patronage.

If you're interested in following some of the feeds I read regularly, the most recently updated 25 will always be visible in the sidebar and you can see the rest by scrolling to the bottom and hitting Show All. Feel free to feed away and by all means subscribe to the good ones. You do have an RSS reader right? Well you've got a gmail account don't you!? Then you've already got a free reader right here, so quit surfing in the dark ages ya damned luddite!

ollie ollie ogcin free

My buddy Nic (aka ogcin) relaunched both his personal blog and his Toronto Raptors site TheRapSheet last week. I think he got an itch he needed to scratch when he discovered that former voice of the Raptors Chuck Swisky (now calling/writing for the Bulls) was following him on twitter.

I'm not much of a sports fan but Nic invited me out to a Raptors game earlier this year and I had a surprisingly good time so I'm starting to pay a bit more attention to this world of "basketball" people keep talking about.

So if your a Raps fan point your browser yonder, it's good and it's free!

edit: While you're there wish him a happy birthday, that dude is OLD tomorrow!

we call it english

When I first watched the compelling Lift08 talk by Holm Friebe and Philipp Albers last year I was quite hopeful. I thought; Here's a couple guys plugging a book they published (in Deutsch) two years ago at a conference that's getting them a lot of international press, there's bound to be an English translation soon!

Not so.

Admittedly if I'd known it was going to take this long I'm sure I could have learned quite a lot of German in the fifteen odd months since I heard about these guys, so poo-poo on me for lack of effort. But Lift09 has come and gone with the gents of the Zentrale Intelligenz Agentur appearing again and I still can't seem to find a copy of das buch in englischer Sprache. Can anyone point me in the right direction or should I be dragging my lazy ass down to the Learning Annex in lederhosen?

Bah, anyway you should watch their talk. Maybe if they get more hits from this side of the pond some clever multilingual person will get to work enlightening our grubby North American minds with some forward thinking ideas on the nature of work.

outside of a pub back home

I spent the weekend back home with ma' but Saturday night as the fam was turning in for bed I decided to head out and meet some friends from school for a few pints and some catching up. What follows is a conversation that happened outside the pub while my friend finished his smoke and some dude walked up to us ...

Some guy: "Hey guys, think I could grab a cigarette?"

My friend: Hands him a smoke.

Some guy: Proceeds to search his pockets for a light without success.

My friend: Rolls his eyes.

Some guy: "Erm ... think I could get a light too?"

My friend (handing him a lighter): "So you want a lip and a lung to smoke it with too pal?"

Me: rofl.

zombies are awesome but ...

An actual MSN conversation between a friend and I at work today. I'll let you be the judge.

My, Friend [11:54 AM]:so if a girl was dressed in a
zombie costume....and yo uhad to pick between her and the computer.......who
would win rob?

Salmond, Rob [11:54 AM]:lol

Salmond, Rob [11:55 AM]:How fast is the computer?
:)

My, Friend [11:55 AM]:Dude......so
wrong.....