bitful

Here are the websites I bookmarked into my del.icio.us account over the past seven days:

• Unitasker Wednesday: GoateeSaver
  'Tired of the constant struggle every morning trying to get your goatee to look perfect? [...] Just slide [GoateeSaver] over your mouth and shave to get the perfect look that women will admire and men will respect.'
• Firefox: Enable Chrome's Best Features in Firefox
  'many of Chrome's best features are already available in Firefox 3, proving yet again the power of extensibility.'
• Querying DBpedia - bobdc.blog
  Using SPARQL to extract 'a list of things written by Bart on the school blackboard at the beginning of a collection of Simpsons episodes'.
• Image Metrics : Performance-Driven Facial Animation Solutions for the Digital World
  '…quickly and efficiently converts measurements of the face into animation [...] to any digitally-created character for your video game, visual effects of CG feature film project'.
• Google Chrome vulnerable to carpet-bombing flaw | Zero Day | ZDNet.com
  Google Chrome uses an old version of WebKit that has since been patched by Apple.
• Google Chrome comic book
  A comic by Scott McCloud that was initially only sent to journalists and bloggers explaining the features of and motivations for the new browser but was leaked online prior to launch.

1. Google is not the first search engine in Russia, China, South Korea and the Czech Republic.
2. Dogs drink via a 'reverse slurp'.
3. You can tweak the AwesomeBar's suggestion algorithm in Firefox 3, and rank some items higher than others, for instance bookmarks higher than history.
4. The faux swear word 'frak' used extensively in Battlestar Galactica was originally spelled 'frack', then changed to a four-letter word by producers of the current show.
5. The Pro version of Instapaper (one of my favourite free iPhone apps) lets you scroll up and down a page by tilting the device. I have not tried it and cannot decide whether it is a gimmick, or worth the extra USD 9.99?
6. The ken and barbie gene in the Drosophila fly takes its name from the fact that its mutations cause genitalia to be malformed (most often they remain inside the body).
7. There is a 'Master Password' option in Firefox that auto-fills all saved passwords but asks for an additional master password the first time you access a website in a Firefox session.

You know I like to log things about me, right?

Then do you think I would miss the opportunity to record a daily summary of my activities and get pretty charts to boot?

Of course not.

So now you can find out how I am doing and feeling, how little I sleep, if I stick to my rule 'no alcohol on school nights' and if I am still caffeine-free by checking out my Morale-O-Meter:

I have been using Google Chrome (open source web browser developed by Google) for the last few hours, and my initial overall impressions are very positive.

It does not appear to be significantly faster than Firefox 3 or Safari, but that is acceptable for the first iteration of a Beta product.

I appreciate enormously the streamlined look without menus, with just three icons, very limited options and the tabs at the very top. It looks like they took a page from Apple's book of interaction design, and it feels very much like a Google product.

And I absolutely adore the Omnibox, the all-in-one address bar and search bar, in particular its Tab-to-Search feature: just type amazon (or youtube, or any other website name that offers a search functionality) into the address bar, then 'tab', then keywords and you are searching within the site, with auto-suggestions popping up underneath your search as results come up.

If you want to read a full review, which very interestingly compares Chrome to Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 (in which, surprisingly, IE does not come out badly at all), try First Test of Google’s New Browser.

And if you are one of the many people who are worried about Google collecting more and more data about your life, I recommend Preventing paranoia: when does Google Chrome talk to Google.com?

Other useful links:

• download Google Chrome;
• read about Google Chrome on Wikipedia;
• read the Google Chrome comic book.

Given that

• it takes thirty days to install a new habit
• I suffer from a lack of a bedtime routine, and
• you increase your chances of success when you are publicly accountable,

from today I am going to do the following every night:

• take out contact lenses
• brush teeth
• clean gums with interdental brushes
• put on bruxism mouthguard
• lay out clothes for next day
• pack gym bag
• switch off computer

and post the progress on Joe's Goals (the web equivalent of Benjamin Franklin's 13 personal goals):

And if you are wondering why there is so much oral care in my routine, well, you would do it too if you had spent a fortune at a gum specialist over the last year.

Here are the websites I bookmarked into my del.icio.us account over the past seven days:

• Gmaps Pedometer
  A hack that uses Google's mapping application to help record distances traveled and calories burned during a running or walking workout.
• delicious blog | using delicious on your iphone
  Drag bookmarklet to Safari toolbar on desktop, sync bookmarks to iPhone, use bookmark to post to delicious from iPhone as I am doing this very moment.
• Semantic Web 2.0: the Ubiquity plugin for Firefox
  The Ubiquity plugin for Firefox makes it possible for users to type in standard language commands to retrieve information from the Internet or to interact with web applications. (Things such as "email this to bill", "translate this into german" or "calculate".)
• Microsoft breaks IE8 interoperability promise | The Register
  Now that Internet Explorer IE8 beta 2 is released, we know that many, if not most, pages viewed in IE8 will not be shown in standards mode by default.
• Share Your del.icio.us Links With WordPress | The Reader Appreciation Project
  A step-by-step tutorial on integrating your del.icio.us links with your WordPress (2.2 and up) installation.
• TV.com: Heroes' fourth volume named
  Series creator Tim Kring lets slip the title of the next chapter of NBC's sci-fi hit, and it signals interesting times for our super friends.
• Windows Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 Fact Sheet: An overview of the features and benefits of Microsoft Windows Internet Explorer 8.
  It feels like I am enjoying most of the 'new' features with Firefox 3 already. It is particularly pleasing to see that IE will finally support CSS 2.1 (about bloody time). Web slices sound promising too.
• Creative Commons Licenses - Creative Commons
  The following describes each of the six main licenses offered when you choose to publish your work with a Creative Commons license.
• Choose a CC License form
  Answer three questions and find out which Creative Commons license is best suited for your work.
• Morale-O-Meter
  'Keep track of, and share, your morale, health, sleep, alcohol consumption, and caffeine consumption. Compare your day with the days of others. Customize a free graph of your morale trends to put on your own site.'

A few weeks ago we invited over some friends we went to Sitges with three years in a row, and we cooked a selection of tapas.

The dinner proved to be a success, firstly because of the lovely ladies and lads we invited, whom we do not see as often as we would like to, but also because of the selection of food.

We found out that tapas can be a very good choice for a Friday night dinner party (we had cooked some in advance, and only a little preparation was needed on the night when we came back from work) attended a varied mix of meateaters and vegetarians.

We served the following dishes and it was more than enough for a party of eight:

• Vodka flamed chorizo
• Spanish baked prawns
• Mozzarella peppers with chunky Italian dressing
• Feta and pepper tortilla
• Patatas bravas
• Manchego cheese triangles with quince preserve
• Tapenade
• Pork brochettes
• Spanish flan

All recipes (except the pork brochettes and the flan) are from bbc.co.uk, my favourite source for clear, relatively simple, tried and tested instructions to prepare good food.

We had some jugs of sangria de cava as aperitif, then wine with the tapas and dry fino Xérès with dessert.

It was really important that we got the sangria exactly as they do it at La Pinta, where we have lunch almost every day when we are in Sitges, and we used the following sangria de cava recipe contained in a selection of sangria recipes in PDF format:

• 1 bottle Spanish cava, chilled
• 1/4 cup white grape juice
• 2 tablespoons brandy
• 2 tablespoons simple syrup
• Ice cubes, for serving
• 1/2 cup sliced strawberries
• 8 mint leaves
• Stir cava, grape juice, brandy, and simple syrup together in a pitcher. Serve over ice, garnished with strawberries and mint

1. You can use the Firefox 3 toolbar search as a calculator: type your formula and the tooltip displays the result, no need to leave the page you are on. It works if the selected engine is google.com, not if it is google.co.uk. It probably also works in Firefox 2, possibly IE but I haven't look at it for years.
2. The iPhone headphones button also operates the iPod function as a remote control (play/pause/skip) when not placing calls.
3. The songwriter and lead vocalist in 30 Seconds to Mars is actor Jared Leto (Justin in My So-called Life, Fight Club, Alexander…)
4. Caffeine, theine, guaranine and mateine are all synonyms for the same chemical compound.
5. The youngest Academy Award winner for Best Actress (as of 2008) is Marlee Matlin for Children of a Lesser God (which incidentally was also her debut).
6. 'Random' smart playlists in iTunes do not refresh automagically. You either have to clear and repopulate them, or add some sorting criteria (e.g. 'not played in the last x days') and turn on 'Live updating' if you want them to constantly refresh.
7. When you are in Gmail, hitting the key where the question mark sits places the cursor in the search field.

It took Dr B. two and a half years to convince me to get a cleaner. Two and a half very long years during which I insisted that:

• the flat is small, there's two of us, it should not be necessary to find help
• the flat is uncluttered and quick to clean
• I could not afford it

So Dr B. suggested he paid for the cleaner himself, provided that I carry on doing all the chores I have been regularly doing on my own anyway, such as

• do the laundry
• fold and put away clothes
• load/unload the dishwasher
• shop for groceries and cleaning products
• tidy up and generally put stuff away

while he makes an effort to limit his dust footprint as much as he can.

The cleaner started last Friday, and apart from a couple of misunderstandings (she ironed one of my t-shirts, which goes against one of my core beliefs, and forgot to set the alarm on the way out) we are over the moon with her.

So now I've got a recurrent task in Remember The Milk to remind me to tidy up, wash Dr B.'s shirts and generally ensure that everything is ready for Super Stella to spread her magic on our abode every Friday.

We love it. And I am grateful I have got a very fair deal.

With my three to four gym sessions a week (weight training, abs and a little cardio work) I thought I was fit - until I went for a run with colleagues early last year and was out of breath after a few minutes. So I took up running.

So then I thought I was fit, with my three to four gym sessions and a couple of runs a week - until I played rounders in June and realised I could not sprint as my legs would just jam. So I started high-intensity interval training and added one weights session a week just doing legs weights workouts.

And yesterday I thought I was really really fit, and I played gay rounders again (same rules as proper rounders, but played with so much more style) and yes I could run fast, and stop, and run faster to the next base, and stop, then run even faster all round the pitch - until this morning when I felt a sharp pain at the top of the front of my thighs that makes walking difficult, and crossing my legs virtually impossible unless I lift one leg with both hands. Absolutely nothing broken or pulled, just sore muscles that I had no idea existed.

Compared to the two injuries we had yesterday (my team's captain a player from another team both went for fourth base, met in a mid-air collision and both split their faces open) I was very lucky.

And my team won - by all means not thanks to me, whose greatest achievement yesterday was to manage to bat and hit the ball - twice!