The Greatest?
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"A stroll through any Belgian city is a feast for the eyes with the country's impressive architecture and intricate stonework. But while travelers will find it hard to avoid the historical influence of religion, there's another type of trinity worthy of a pilgrimage: beer, chocolate and cheese.

And the greatest of these is beer."

OK, this is basically a meaningless quote from one of those fluff pieces that shows up on my ISP's home page masquerading as real news. The only reason I included it was I needed a quick quote to test a new extension I've installed.

I've been experimenting with extensions for my Firefox browser. I've added a bookmarks link checker; helpful because I collect bookmarks like navel lint, and a thing that allows easy movement through the visited links heirarchy and clears the address bar with a touch of the button. Little things I like, but aren't that critical. The one that really impresses me so far is a thing called Quick Note.

One of the very few things I don't like about the Blog software I use on this site is that when you start a blog entry, it date and time stamps the entry from the time you start typing. For people who do a lot of linking without a lot of commentary, this probably isn't a problem. But I'm one of those people who may start writing, get off on a tangent, think of a couple of things I need to link to and have to go do some more research before I can finish. It may be 2 or 3 hours before I post the material. Or I may find some things I want to link to, but am not ready to actually write the post. But if I were to copy the text and the link into Blog, it would be time stamped for when I did the copying. For some reason, it really bothers me that the time stamp shows when I started and not when I posted the article. So, when I find something I want to link to, I end up copying the text and then copying the URL and later I open Blog and do the post.

Quick Note can be set to open as a tab in the browser and can also be set to automatically record the URL of wherever it is you copied the text from. For me, that is a really cool tool and I thought I would share it with the one or two of you out there who use Firefox.

by Cziltang 
Posted: Saturday, March 20 2004 02:25:33 PM

Blurking?
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Samizdata now has a glossary of blogging terms. I don't know when they added it to the site, but I never noticed it before. According to this glossary, given that I don't generally leave comments on other web sites, I am a blurker. Apparently I am not a barking moonbat, although that may be merely a matter of opinion.

On a more serious note, they also posted this article with a positive slant on our presence in Iraq, which is relatively more common in blogs, but not seen often in the mainstream media. In a similar, but more pointed vein, Steven Green at Vodka Pundit talks about the perception of strength.

by Cziltang 
Posted: Friday, March 19 2004 04:42:22 PM

If it were only true
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Someone recently suggested that perhaps I had stopped writing with any frequency because I actually have a life. Oh, that it were true. I may get a chance to talk about it in the next few days, but the short version is that we have just completed a massive reorganization at work and the whole thing has gone wonky on me. Not that it matters. Its just that in the midst of all this I've got some things I really want to talk about, but can't get down on paper or on the screen.

by Cziltang 
Posted: Wednesday, March 17 2004 01:00:00 AM