ilovecode

As most of you know, my family and I are in Belgium now. Our house is pretty cool, but the people who lived here before us were obviously living in the stone ages. They don’t have the house wired for a phone, much less the Internet. So while we wait for the monarch-run telephone company to get off their butts and come wire us (Sep 4.mark your calendar!), I needed to get online!

I arrived here Saturday morning and by Saturday afternoon, I started twitching. I knew I wouldn’t last long, but without knowing French and without having Internet, I had no idea how I was going to find some place to connect! Monday, Drew went to work and I told him he needed to find me a place with wifi or a hotspot…and fast. Otherwise he might as well lock me in a rubber room. Now, I’m not just being selfish. I have client to think of too!

So he gets a list of some wi-fi places and our mission Monday afternoon is to find these places. Well, with laptop in tow, we get in our tiny little car. Once we get into downtown Mons (the city closest to us), he starts up the laptop and opens the Wireless Network Configuration and continually presses refresh. This really looks like something out of some James Bond movie. People here drive crazy in general (big generalization I know), and I’m swerving in and out of traffic, pulling over to test connections we find, back into traffic, around the loop, up the hills, down again, through the train station, etc. We do manage to find several secure and several unsecure networks, but I can’t connect to even the unsecure ones. i’m assuming I am too far away or they are filtering by MAC address. Damn them! Don’t they know I need to get online. So we end up at the train station where there is supposed to be a connection there. Turns out it is a hotspot and it costs 25 Euro for a day, 70 for a week or 100 for a month. I decide I will come back later that evening.

The last place on our list is some cafeteria called the Lunch Garden. We decide to go there for dinner and if i can connect–cool, if not, I will go to the train station after dinner and hang out for a couple of hours. We get into the parking lot of the lunch garden and find out it has the same hotspot service as the train station. This is good because I was willing to shell out the 100 Euro anyway, and this place is clean, has food, and is closer and easy to get to. Just a 5 min trip down the highway. My first time online was Monday evening and I paid for just an hour initially. My computer was running horribly and it kept freezing. That night I came home and cleaned things up and went back Tuesday evening for two hours or so. Tuesday was great. I had to download some more stuff and then I went from there. I will try and go every evening if I can get away with it!

Microsoft just released a new tool that allows you to publish blog posts from your desktop to your blog. It was designed for the Windows Live Spaces, but also works for other blogging services such as Wordpress.

I’m testing it out on this post. My initial reaction is that so far so good. It doesn’t have 1000 different buttons for me to push and it is very intuitive. Perhaps MS has finally started to learn that sometimes simple is better. When I switch to code view, the code is clean and seems organized thus far. I’ll keep trying it out and if my opinion changes…I’ll let you know!

Once I think I’ve caught up with the spammers, I experience their latest techniques. They are quoting my blog on their blogs which causes a comment on this one. Grrrrrrrrr

Yesterday, I was looking at the incoming referrers for one of my sites and saw the link: http://www.google.com/reader/view

Naturally, I went to check it out. Apparently Google has it’s own Reader so I figured I’d give it a shot. I know in a previous post I mentioned that I don’t use an RSS Reader because if the blog is THAT good, I will remember it. Well, in my old age and chaos that is my mind, I’m forgetting everything..I mean everything. So, I’m going to give it a shot now!

Anyone else used it?

Today I realized that there were quite a few blogs that I go to and enjoy reading. I don’t have a bloglist anymore because it just got so damn long and how could I really choose my 10 favorites to list. So, I decided what I would try to do is, each week I will talk about a blog I really enjoy reading. I was trying to think of some catchy name for this weekly occurence, but I couldn’t come up with a good one. Maybe Favorite Fellows or Bitchin’ Blogs or something but I haven’t come up with one I really liked. So for now I will call it “Blogs Across the World”. If you have any suggestions please tell me. Also if you think your blog is THAT good, let me know and I will check it out.

So let’s see how I do with making this a weekly thing. Wish me luck!