this weekend

Photos to be included in this post later

This weekend I’ve spent massive amounts of work on the IET SA&NT website (about 25 hours), which is currently still located at [link no longer exists] until we spend money. I just finished writing a 3 page document which should help convince people that money should be allocated towards running the website on a professional server.

Friday I had an IET YMS committee dinner and drinks night. It was great to hang out with them and get to know them better. I think that may have been what motivated me to do lots of the website work. I then went to Pia’s 21st with Morv at the Havelock.

Sat Morv and I went for a hike up Winter Trail in Cleland, and up Summer Trail which I’d never done before. This was after us having a very late start to the day getting out of bed, and my car breaking down on Waterfall Gully Rd, at 90 degrees to the road in a ditch when I was turning around. Thanks to the elderly man who helped me push it out the ditch! :) The walk was great. We then had dinner and saw Pirates of the Carribean 2 with Paul, Jame, Dan, Erin, Damien and Bronwyn. It was a pretty funny movie but I fell asleep due to Friday nights activities. Morv and I then went into town to meet up with her friend Lisa (who’s also my friend). We dragged her out of there from her boyfriend and her boyfriend’s friends, and went to the Blue Note cocktail bar. I had a free cocktail upon entry (they have a free cocktail for everyone on entry between 10pm and 11pm), a bowl of organic chips, and then a Chocolate Sax cocktail. Unbelievably tasty, and made me very merry! :)

Sunday (tonight) I went around to Morv’s house for afternoon tea and spoke to their family friend Tony about engineering stuff for the entire afternoon. It was really interesting to talk to him, and I look forward to telling him via the grapevine how I go in my first few weeks at ETSA which I start on Wednesday.

mozilla firefox for web browsing

Firefox. There it is. Yes, it does everything Internet Explorer does. No, there are no drawbacks. Yes, it is true that it has difficulty displaying some web pages, but only those that use commands specific to IE – but why would you be browsing pages like those, anyway!?

These are all the ‘add-ons‘ that I currently use with Firefox:

  • Auto Copy
  • ChatZilla
  • CustomizeGoogle
  • DictionarySearch
  • FlastGot
  • Forecastfox
  • Gmail Notifier
  • Highlight Focus
  • IE View (just in case!)
  • Tabbrowser Preferences
  • Talkback
  • Web Developer

But don’t take my word for how good Firefox is, find out for yourself! I guarantee you won’t regret it. Also check out an old post about Mozilla Thunderbird.

syncback for synchronising & backing up data

Syncback (the freeware edition – massive thanks to pp, aka ‘dopod’ for this one!) is first on this list for a reason. Everyone needs a good backup solution they can depend on. Don’t be like me losing my entire computer two Christmas’s ago when my RAM died whilst re-partitioning. Don’t be like my cousin Christie who lost all her year 12 work when her hard drive died, with no backup.

At home, I have a dedicated seperate hard drive now, purely for backing up, which I have happen all automatically at the click of a button, thanks to this awesome software. I then hide the portable hard drive somewhere else in the house in case we get robbed by burglars, and they want to steal my computer along with this nice shiny hard drive sitting right next to it. Even better still, take your portable hard drive and store it at a friends or relatives house several kilometres away, in case of natural disasters – but remember to back it up AT LEAST once a month!