I have been recently playing around with Google Maps and I have been very impressed with the results. The maps are very clear and concise and the satellite views are really amazing. For a lark, I brought up my parents' street on the satellite view and I could see their roof, the back garden, the car in the driveway and much more!

Here is a map of the area where I live. As you can see, very detailed and precise. Now choose "satellite" and zoom in. The detail is amazing.

Welcome to the end of privacy as we know it. Now even when you scratch your ass in your back garden, it appears on the internet.

No sooner had I appeared on 25 peeps then I was gone again. I got this email this morning from the 25peeps team :

Oh nos! Your peep linking to http://www.betterthantherapy.net has been pushed off 25peeps.com.

It was online for about 12 hours and generated 14 juicy clicks to your site. Maybe you managed to enter the hall of fame?

Now, don't be sad. Just go to www.25peeps.com and try again. You can add your peep as often as you want. Maybe if you try a different picture, you'll get more clicks. Also, remember that you can also push your peep up the roster by refering others to the site, so don't forget to put a referal link on your website. Go for it!


Put up a different picture? What, do I need to flash my ass to stay on the site longer?

The blog seems to have ended up on the 25peeps website. I remember vaguely about applying quite a while ago and I had given up ever hearing anything about it. But today I got an email saying I was in and lo and behold when I went to the page, my photo was up!

I wonder if this will actually translate into any actual website visitors? If you're a visitor from 25peeps, please leave a comment and let me know you were here.

I've been sitting here for the past few weeks wondering why my Firefox browser was slowing down so much and why it took so long to start up. I mean, Internet Explorer was going faster and when that happens then you know something is really up! But then a friend pointed out to me all the Firefox extensions I have installed. I mean, it's only 30 or so extensions, nothing to get worked up about. But he looked me in the eye and said "you want Firefox to be fast again? Then choose your best ten extensions or less and get rid of the rest!". He went on to explain that the more extensions that are installed, the longer it takes Firefox to load them all then fire up the browser. It kind of made sense when he said it that way. I suddenly felt silly having all these gizmos and gadgets built into the browser.

So I had to ditch a lot of the extensions but truth be told, most of them were crap anyway. I installed a lot of them because I was curious about them but after the initial try-out, I never used them again. So deleting a lot of them was easier than I thought.

Now I have ten or so extensions and Firefox is faster. So the moral of this story is - don't go crazy with extensions otherwise Microsoft Internet Explorer will overtake you and laugh at you on the way past. And you don't want that.

I am very uptight at the moment. It's bloody freezing and the writers block is making it damn near impossible to concentrate on writing anything apart from emails! It doesn't help of course that my fingers are so cold and numb that I can't type properly......I am really FREEZING! I am currently wearing three layers of clothes and a scarf and all the windows are closed and it still doesn't make any difference!! My grandparents are going on a Rhine cruise tomorrow and I have told them to pack their thermal underwear and hot water bottle because they're sure as hell going to need it!

Now mix in the cold weather and the writers block with my current workload and my health and you will start to see why I am really on edge....

Summer is too hot, autumn and winter is too cold.....I just can't win.

I am personally no fan of British Airways and the latest fuss to hit the airline has not done anything to improve their image in my eyes.

One of their employees, who worked at a BA check-in desk was forced to take unpaid leave because she refused to cover up her Christian crucifix which she was wearing around her neck.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/6052608.stm

BA policy is apparently that such items CAN be worn but they must be concealed underneath the uniform. This lady in question refused to cover it up and she was therefore sent home.

Now she plans to sue British Airways for religious discrimination. BA meanwhile seems to be unapologetic which has really pissed me off.

I am not religious at all but I do have the highest respect for those with religious beliefs and who live by those beliefs. It is this kind of multi-religious society that makes us what we are and BA has no right to bully this woman into doing the company's bidding.

BA's public reputation has always been a little shaky in the past decade or so, since their famous clash with Sir Richard Branson's airline, Virgin Atlantic. Branson sued BA for libel in the early 1990's and won. During the libel hearing, it was discovered that BA had mounted a dirty tricks campaign against Virgin, smearing Virgin's reputation, phoning up Virgin customers posing as Virgin staff and getting the customers to transfer their flights to BA and so on. The whole saga is detailed in length in Branson's autobiography "Losing my Virginity" (well worth a read).

And now this. What's next I wonder? As for me, I'll be continuing to fly with Lufthansa and Ryanair. It's cheaper plus you don't get stabbed in the back when you enter the plane.

Just over a year since I promised to do it, I have finally written the Auctionbytes search plug-in for the Firefox browser. I plan to submit the plugin to "Mycroft" which is Mozilla's central website for search plug-ins. But I have also put the plug-in on my website for people to download.

Just right-click on the following link and save to your hard-drive :

http://camelotonline.net/creations/auctionbytessearchplugin.zip

Unzip the folder then place both small files in the "search plugins" folder of your Mozilla Firefox browser which is located either in a hard-drive folder called "Program Files" or "Programmes". Then re-start Firefox and drop down the menu of search engines in your top right hand corner. Auctionbytes should now be there.

Firefox users can use the plug-in to directly search the Auctionbytes archives. I have tested it thoroughly and it seems to work perfectly.

My first search plug-in! My ego is swelling to gigantic proportions right now. I am not a natural at this kind of thing - in fact it has taken almost a year of cursing and tempers to get this far. But I am hoping that now I have managed to do number one that the next ones will be much faster. I have the template so now I can alter it for other websites.

I read with a lot of irritation today that Darrell Anderson of the US Army, who fled to Canada instead of going to Iraq, surrendered today in Kentucky to US military authorities.

I'm irritated because what gives Anderson, and others like him, the right to say that the war in Iraq is illegal? This is becoming quite the trend these days - cherrypicking your wars and complaining when things get too tough to handle.

Don't get me wrong - I am no fan of the war in Iraq and I am definately no fan of George W Bush. But then again, I am not in the US military so I am free to voice these opinions. Anderson is not free to voice these opinions - he joined the army to pay for college - is he really trying to say that when signing up, it never crossed his mind for a minute that he would have to go to war? Did he think that the military was just all about walking around in a uniform, impressing the hell out of the girls, get a medal then go home to college, courtesy of the US Army? If so, he is highly naive.

Soldiers do NOT have the right to pick and choose which wars they fight in. Soldiers obey orders. They don't think about those orders, they don't ask for time to consider the orders. They obey them - immediately and without question. That's the chain of command at work and without the chain of command in an army, you would have total anarchy and loss of discipline. OK, of course soldiers are allowed to have private opinions - that's all part of being human - but private opinions should be exactly that - private. As in, you don't tell anyone.

If they want to be in the privileged position of deciding US foreign policy and deciding which conflicts are justified and which ones are not, then they should begin the process of finishing their military obligations then resigning from the army, then run for political office and become a member of Congress or President of the United States. But while they are a soldier of the US military, being paid by the US military and wearing the uniform of the US military then they should obey all orders from their superior officers. Not run off to Canada then start whining that they had to work for their college tuition fees.

Bear in mind that he deserted his unit and in wartime, the military penalty for desertion is execution by firing squad. Maybe he should bear that in mind before he makes any more press conferences about why he ran off.