I use Google Apps here on kginter.net, and it works great, really takes the hassle out of setting up email accounts. The Google Mail app which is basically Gmail with an @kginter.net and is really the best bit. If you already own a domain then you can get Google Apps for free, or for a small fee Google will throw in a domain too. Along with Google Mail, Apps also includes Google Talk, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites and Start Page.

You can try-out Release candidate by downloading from the Mozilla website. However I suggest using the Firefox 3 RC1 Portable Edition, as it won’t overwrite your existing Firefox install and your Add-ons won’t get messed up.

I’ve had a go with the latest beta release and I have to say it’s all rather impressive. The new look is quite nice but depends on which Operating System, as it’s designed to blend in with the OS interface. The password reminder is no longer an annoying pop-up, it now appears across the top of a page much like the plug-in alert. The new bookmarking features (including very nifty smart bookmarks) and the smart location bar make browsing a breeze.

Firefox isn’t over-the-top on the user interface, social networking features don’t come as standard and it wasn’t built by Microsoft. All these add up to an extremely efficient and light weight application which rarely causes a crash. Unless you try and view Flash video but apparently that problem’s been sorted.

At the moment there isn’t a definitive date for the launch of Firefox3, but it should sometime in June.

The first is a new news homepage dedicated to the news in the west of Northern Ireland. The other is for BBC Radio Foyle which has a nice new design following in the new style BBC homepage.

Oddly the BBC’s ‘west’ seems seems to include the north coast towns of Coleraine and even Ballycastle. Although in all fairness, both are west of Belfast.

To add insult to injury when I told the lady that we were on the TPS and that they should not be calling our number she said it was okay because someone else in the house had given them permission which was given when they called last night!

When it comes down to it there are a few reasons for not choosing TalkTalk:

• Loss of Caller ID (you have to pay for it with TalkTalk)
• Loss of unlimited broadband (really unlimited)
• Loss of a Static IP address (extremely important)
• Not to mention getting all the bother their customers seem to have…

You see the savings simply don’t match what I would loose if I (or some unsuspecting family member) signed up for their less than satisfactory service. Another important point is I don’t do business with companies which contact me this whether via phone, post spam email.

The law is perfectly clear when it comes to “unsolicited calls for direct marketing purposes“:

A person shall neither use, nor instigate the use of, a public electronic communications service for the purposes of making unsolicited calls for direct marketing purposes where -

(a) the called line is that of a subscriber who has previously notified the caller that such calls should not for the time being be made on that line; or

(b) the number allocated to a subscriber in respect of the called line is one listed in the register kept under regulation 26.

The register kept under regulation 26 is the Telephone Preference Service. All credit to them the number of cold, unsolicited and direct marketing calls to our house has reduced dramatically and I highly recommended it and the Mail Preference Service which is slightly less effective, and you’ll still get your monthly SPAR\VG\Vivo newsletter.

Anyone out there in Touché Land should checkout bebo.com/homeof2j for all the latest. Before then I have the last few weeks at Slemish College and a Placement Report which is slowly coming together.

Then that’s it, two (more like three) months before final year of Uni starts again at the September. I’ve included a list of popular summer activities which I hope to get through over the coming months.

• Barry’s
• Beach
• Blog (more regularly)
• Camping
• Dog Walking
• Film Production
• Tourist Stuff (thank you COM439 Unit 1)
• Zoo
• etc.

If you can think of any other interesting ideas for the summer then, leave a message* after the beep.

Beep

* Especially if you have an OpenID which should now work.

There’s only a limited supply left, and blowing up the half Middle East hasn’t helped. Petrol prices are only going up. I found this useful website on while on a general Google. Petrol Prices.com is a free website which contains price data for over 10,000 UK petrol stations.

You can either use the quick search and get the five cheapest petrol stations within a five miles, or sign up and get unlimited data for up to 20 miles from your home.

www.petrolprices.com

For continuity sake I might be tempted to use the Keithblog2 template for a while. WordPress is working well, except it would seem my version is already out of date - never had that bother on Blogger.