Category: Net: General

As sort of mentioned in a previous entry, I was going to blog about Reindeer – and here it is 🙂

Now, if you wanted to count the number of inflatable reindeer you had, would you first inflate the vinyl critters, fill a hallway with them and then take a photo of them and have people on the internet count them for you?. Or do the intelligent thing and count them before you blow them up?

And do you know the names of all of Santa’s reindeer? Well, according to Clement Clarke Moore’s 1822 poem/story “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas/The Night Before Christmas”, the reindeer were called Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner, and Blitzen. The “most famous reindeer of all”, Rudolph, didn’t get added to Santa’s listed until the 1939 song “Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer”.

Oh, if you wanted to write to Santa – the Royal Mail have helpfully provided his address as: Santa Claus, REINDEERLAND, SAN TA1.

It’s beginning to feel like Christmas is nearly here already!

I’ve recently come across Gigology, a page with a collection of 39 images (hence slightly bandwidth heavy) of wide-eyed cats and dogs.

Personally, I think the pictures are quite and adorable (see I have got a soft side 🙂 ), but I can’t seem to find much about the artist (Gig) on the internet which is a bit disappointing (only real information I could find is on the front page of that site).

Oh well, at least they aren’t satanic kittens from hell that Pete Abrams seems so obsessed about (but with lines such as “Don’t go to sleep or the kittens will eat you” you can forgive him 🙂 )

I’ve recently come across the very handy Internet Explorer utility IESpell. Basically, you install it, reload IE and from then on you can right click and go ‘Check Spelling’ on any text-field you like (handy for blogs, editing on ODP or anything which requires good spelling). Highly recommended for any one running Internet Explorer (I’m running v6) – does Mozzila, Netscape or Opera have a similar function though? However, any good spell checker can’t prevent stupidity (“as soon as you make something idiot proof, a bigger idiot comes along”), so it is still possible to write things like this:

I have a spelling chequer
It came with my PC
It plainly marks for my revue
miss takes I cannot see
I’ve run this poem threw it
I’m shore your pleased two no
its letter perfect in its weigh
my chequer tolled me sew.

I run Windows 2000 Professional as a desktop PC (my server runs Debian Linux: using the best tools for the best job IMHO). But one thing I do like about Linux is the ‘auto-complete’ function (start typing a path, hit tab, and the path is filled in for you), but Win 2k doesn’t support it. Or does it?. Yep – once these simple instructons have been followed:

1. Go Start->Run->’regedit’ (this starts the registry editor: so be careful!)
2. Go to “My computer”->”HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE”->”SOFTWARE”->”Microsoft”->”Command Processor”
3. Change the Command Processor key “CompletionChar” to ’09’ (it doesn’t matter if you have it in decimal or hexidecimal, as since the value is below decimal 10, it’s the same in both). 09 is the ASCII code of the TAB key (and that takes me back to my BBC programming days *sigh*)
4. Exit regedit

Next time you are at the command line (Start->Run->cmd) try typing something like “cd Doc” and hitting TAB, it’ll change to ‘cd “Documents and Settings“‘ for you. Yipee!