Recently, Del.icio.us advertised free goodies for anyone that sent in a stamped addressed envelope. So since I had a few spare US stamps lying around, I sent them a stamp and an envelope as I always love free stuff! This morning, it arrived!

My Executive Assistant, Scrat, offered to pose with one of the stickers and one of the bookmarks. When he isn't chasing nuts in Ice Age movies, Scrat helps me out at home. He's very good at answering the phone and making tea.

It may sound so obvious, given how long we've had email, but you'd be amazed at how people still don't know what the "bcc" stands for in emails.

When you enter the recipient's email address in the "To:" column, there is also a column for "cc" and "bcc". "cc" is "carbon copy" and is basically just for passing on a copy of the email to someone else. However, "cc" won't hide the actual email address and will be visible to anyone who receives and / or opens the email. I know, you probably know all of this already but as I said, you'd be amazed how many people don't know.

Now "bcc" is much better (in my opinion) because it cloaks the email addresses, making them invisible to everyone except the person that sent the email in the first place. All the other recipients see is the person's name but NOT the email address. Now this is good because if you are sending an email to a large group of people, you have no idea who will receive that email afterwards. Chain emails such as jokes get forwarded to a lot of people so who's to know who will receive that email next week or next month? One of them might be a spammer or might be someone who knows a spammer. Suddenly that huge list of visible email contacts are wide open for a spammer to harvest and abuse. The "bcc" feature stops all that.

So......keep the "to" and "cc" fields blank and place ALL the email addresses in the "bcc" column. That way, none of the email addresses are visible for someone to read and abuse

On the subject of email, I read an excellent article today in the Wall Street Journal about taming your inbox. Well worth a read.

As someone with manic depression, I can certify that the one and only "cure" is a good dose of Bono medication. Who the hell needs Zoloft when you have something like "Walk On"?

Get your guitar and start playing like there is no tomorrow......

You're packing a suitcase for a place none of us has been
A place that has to be believed to be seen
You could have flown away
A singing bird in an open cage
Who will only fly, only fly for freedom

To lighten the mood (after having to give my Skype rules), I want to play a German song which was made a few years back by comedian Elmar Brandt called "The Tax Song". It prompted the then-German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder to totally freak out and call Brandt a "parasite". I personally think the song is just great.

As more and more of my writing gets published on the web, and my website URL gets spread around, more and more people are finding my Skype username and ask to be added to my contact list. This is becoming more and more common, and although I welcome all visitors and all conversations, there simply isn't the time in the day to chat to everyone and give them the time they deserve. Skype is a delicate balancing act to follow in that you want contacts & conversation but on the other hand, you have to subtly and diplomatically say to them sometimes that you need to go, that you have work to do, that it's nothing personal.....inevitably some people get upset such as the countless Chinese people wanting free English lessons for example.

So here are my Skype rules for your edification (and perhaps amusement). Perhaps other Skype users can identify with some of these. It's a pity things have come to this but there you go. That's the nature of the internet for you.

1. Before getting in touch, check my status message. If it says AWAY or NOT AVAILABLE then that means I am away from the computer and therefore unable to respond to your many messages asking "WHERE ARE YOU? WHY DON'T YOU ANSWER ME? YOU'RE SO ANTI-SOCIAL!". Hey, if I'm at Aldi buying my food shopping, how am I supposed to answer my Skype calls and chats? ESP? If I am sitting on the toilet reading the newspaper, am I supposed to get an internet connection set up in the bathroom so you don't have to wait? Status messages are there for a reason!!

2. By the same token, "DO NOT DISTURB" means I am in a situation where I can't answer because I have to concentrate on something or I have visitors or I am on the phone. That means Skype will hold all my messages until I indicate I am back. Again, don't start ranting because I don't answer you within 10 seconds.

3. If I am offline, then I am probably in bed and again unable to answer you. I really have to sleep at night. Don't take it personally.

4. If I am slow to respond or I have to go, again please don't take it personally. I do have other things to do. I have work and personal projects / obligations. Plus family and friends. Plus I do like to go outside every once in a while. If I suddenly go, I'll be back later. Count on it.

5. Anyone wanting free English lessons shouldn't contact me. As a professional English tutor, why should I shoot myself in the foot by giving away my services for free? Would you expect a plumber to fix your washing machine for free or a lawyer to defend you for free? There isn't any difference with an English tutor! If you want paid Skype English lessons then fantastic! But don't expect a 2 hour phone call for free. I just won't do it (unless you're a good pal of mine).

6. If requesting to be added to my contact list, please explain who you are, where you heard of me and why you want to be added to my contact list. Until you do that, I don't know if you are a lovely or a loonie. I don't understand people who send anonymous authorisation requests! Am I supposed to rub my crystal ball and suddenly be presented with your life history?

7. If leaving messages on my voicemail, please keep the message succinct - name, contact number and reason for calling. Please don't start reading War & Peace over the line. Any message that lasts longer than 2 minutes gets deleted at the 120 second mark.

8. I won't accept file transfers via Skype unless a) I know you and trust you or b) you tell me what the file is first and why I should accept it.

9. All my Skype calls are recorded in MP3 format and all my chats are logged permanently. So remember that before you start cursing me and giving me a hard time because you disagree with something I wrote. All MP3 calls and logged chats are admissable as evidence in court! I have a very thick skin (you have to be as a writer) but I won't accept outright abuse, death threats (yes, I've had quite a few in my time) and threats to come round to my house "for a little visit". When that starts, I start logging IP addresses and collating the evidence for the police. And I do press charges if necessary.

10. Don't try to scam me on Skype as I've heard it all before and I have a great, well-developed BS detector. You'd be amazed (or perhaps not) at how many "Nigerian princes" and "jailed dissidents" get in touch wanting me to get their money out of the country in return for a "fee". The "jailed dissidents" still haven't been able to answer how they can Skype me from inside prison!


So that's about it.

I've been pounding away the past few days at Project Gutenberg, getting books proofread, so much so that I am now in the top 800 proofreaders (which I'm very proud of). The last book was a real pain in the ass as the index was completely wrecked and I had to rebuild it from scratch - all 12 pages of it. The OCR scanner/ reader is basically a very good tool that does a highly accurate job of scanning the pages and turning them into typeable (is that a word??) text but nevertheless, it IS fallible. If the print quality is very bad, the OCR scanner makes an educated guess and half the time, it cacks it up. So that's where a proofreader like me comes in and corrects it manually. Extremely interesting work but also extremely detail-oriented and you have to be a real nit-picker.

People often ask me how I gain enjoyment out of a voluntary job like this and I always reply that I believe in the ideals and aims of PG, plus you can't really cherry-pick what you want to do and not want to do. You either do the whole job properly or don't bother doing it at all. Indexes, contents, bibliographies and footnotes may not exactly be the sexiest parts of a book but they are still part of the book nonetheless. They can't be excluded just because they are a pain in the ass to check.

Saying that though, I am hoping to find a good mystery novel to do next, something light on the mind. I was doing some Edgar Wallace recently which was extremely fun. So perhaps a murder mystery, detective story or even a western would be a good change of pace.

I only have myself to blame for this. I know full well that getting into an online debate is a bad move as I tend to get pretty passionate about my viewpoint and I love to argue until the cows come home (just ask my girlfriend and my mother!). Just point me towards an argument and I'll be right in there arguing my case and defending my corner. I once considered running for a seat in the British parliament when I was living in Scotland because politics and debating are two of my passions. But I tend to avoid arguments (especially online ones) because, as the Pringles advert goes, "once I pop, I just can't stop". Even when I tell myself to stop and bow out gracefully, I am back moments later to swing the next verbal punch. I'm like a drunk that doesn't know when to shut up and give up....

So it was today that I got myself into an online verbal tussle on the news blog "Obscure Store and Reading Room". Normally I just lurk there, behave myself and read the other comments but a story today just couldn't keep me silent so I gave my opinion. Then an angry black man called Allen weighed in and from there on in, it was all hell broken loose.

A racist? Me? I think not. I'm the most liberal minded person you could ever find. Yes, I do have some conservative views but definately not towards issues of discrimination and race. I think Allen has me mixed up with someone else.......

You can read the whole sorry fight here.

Today's song was one I originally heard when I watched Kevin Spacey's stunning performance of Bobby Darin in "Beyond the Sea". "Simple Song of Freedom" was one of the last songs Darin wrote before his premature death and is very politically motivated. Darin campaigned for Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy and after their assassinations came "Simple Song of Freedom" which is obviously aimed against supporters and instigators of the Vietnam war and against the military establishment in the US.

The song is still extremely relevant for today as we have Bush and the neo-cons making war in the Middle East and the media being manipulated by big business. It seems that 30 years on, Darin's message of "most of what you read is made of lies" is still very much with us and that politicians haven't really learnt any lessons since Vietnam.

For the first time that I can remember, Google went down for 10 minutes today (a little over a hour ago). Google.com and Google services such as Blogger, Gmail, Google Browser Sync all went offline.

Don't believe me? Here are some screenshots taken from my Opera browser :

At first, I thought someone had hacked into my Google account and changed the password as things began to slowly become inaccessible. Then Firefox started screwing up and I thought it was a Firefox problem. So I changed over to Opera and it was the same there. But after ten minutes, everything sluggishly started to come back.

Did anyone else experience this? Can anyone remember the last time Google went offline?

Have you ever considered that Google perhaps looks a little bare, like Mother Hubbard's cupboard? Well, with the use of a Stylish script, Firefox users can now change the background colour of the Google homepage. Not only do you get a new background colour but the Google logo also reflects back on itself!

The dark blue colour which I have chosen also makes the Google logo look a lot brighter and a lot more sharper.

The only drawback is that it doesn't seem to work on the Google IG personalised page.

I really like it - aesthetic candy for the eyes! But no doubt, knowing my restless nature, I'll change it back after a few days......

As well as writing for MakeUseOf.com, I have also now written a short piece for ReadWriteWeb, which is another of my favourite websites / blogs. I am hoping to persuade the editor to let me write some more pieces on Skype as that is one of my most favourite computer applications (when it is not crashing down around my ears!).

Here is the article in question.

So there I was minding my own business, organising and cleaning out the tags in my del.icio.us account when suddenly the service went down with an "error 999" page. That was 2 hours ago and it still isn't back. To my mind, this is the first time that del.icio.us has crashed like this. Or am I wrong?

First Skype and now del.icio.us? What the hell is going on with the internet this week?

I decided to finally give in and try out Second Life, which seems to be profiled and discussed in every magazine I pick up and read! I chose the moniker, Edmund Hultcrantz, downloaded the software and logged in.

But 30 minutes later, I was forced to stop because it appears my computer is not up to the huge task of running Second Life. The CPU usage was hitting a staggering 90%, the program was using a shocking 282,000k of CPU power and as a result, the screen would freeze, the program would slow down and it would generally be useless. We bought our 80GB computer in 2004 and that, in computer terms, makes it ancient.

So it looks like Edmund Hultcrantz needs to take a long leave of absence until the day comes when we buy a new computer which will have the power and the speed to run the game. But before logging out, I managed to take a screenshot of my character sitting in a chair.

The question is, will Second Life be around for much longer? Time magazine reports that the site is encountering more and more problems every day.

I was reading a very interesting post today about Google Talk and a previously unknown (at least to me) feature that allows you to set up group chats with multiple users. This has got me thinking about Google Talk in general.

I really like the Google Talk application but I only have three contacts on it. Not due to having no friends (!) but simply because I only know three people that use Google Talk for their instant messaging purposes. I think part of the problem is that Google does not really make much of an effort to publicise its chat program. I mean, it's there and it's freely available but Google's sparse main page ensures that there is no banner advertising urging people to use Google Talk. You can use it on Google Docs to collaborate on projects but do you see Google screaming from the rooftops about it?

Whereas in contrast, MSN and Yahoo both openly advertise their chat programs on their main pages and they have a much bigger user-base. They spend more time and energy promoting and pushing their chat programs and as a result, they have got further ahead in the instant messaging market.

I think it was a master-stroke by Google to integrate Google Talk into Gmail and to have Google Talk conversations stored in Gmail accounts as searchable messages. Notice how fast Yah00 copied this feature for Yahoo mail owners. But I prefer to use the standalone Talk application which has a nifty file-transfer capability, new mail notification (for Gmail accounts) and thumbnail photos of Gmail users who are on your contact list (assuming they have put a photo of themselves on their Gmail accounts). I also like the simple and sparse design (a famous Google trademark). Hell, they don't even have emoticons!

One thing has really irritated me though - I tried putting Google Talk onto Pidgin and it worked OK. But the problem was that everytime I emailed someone, their name would instantly appear on my Google Talk contact list (even if it was a newsletter that I had emailed to subscribe to)! So in the end, I had to uninstall GT from Pidgin and run GT separately. If you run the standalone GT program, you can choose to hide people who are not approved to be on your contact list. But if you attach GT to a Jabber chat client, then you will get everyone that you ever email popping up on your contact list. Rather annoying.

I've been following with very close interest Google's latest experiment. They are now offering people the chance to comment on stories in Google News (here is Techcrunch's story on it). I know this is not exactly breaking news but I am a few days behind with things and I am catching up! ;-)

My first thought is instinctively - has Google bitten off more than it can chew here?

As Techcrunch points out, this is not something that can be automated. The only people that can comment on stories are people connected with that story. So that means that Google staff (real people who have to be paid and looked after, not little anonymous GoogleBots in cyberspace) have to check each comment. They have to (somehow) verify that person's identity, verify (somehow) that they were indeed involved in the incident, check the comment for anything libellous and / or inflammatory and then post it. Can you imagine the amount of work that would involve? What would be the turnaround time for each comment? What if someone disputes that person was really involved? Does the comment get pulled? Does Google investigate further? Would the news story still be a valid news story by the time the comment got out of checking status or disputes? These are all valid questions and I would love to hear answers to them.

With a scheme like this, Google News has gone from being an effective news story aggregator to being little more than a glorified blog!

Don't get me wrong, credit goes to Google for giving people in a story the right to give their side of the story online. But the sheer logistics of the operation will probably ensure that this Google experiment will never get rid of its beta label.

In this situation, they have a grand vision but the vast resources required to carry it out effectively borders on sheer lunacy.

I know, I know, the blog has kind of tailed off in the past few weeks but I am right on top of fixing that. First I was ill and then I was totally focused on getting my book finished. I am writing a childrens story which has so far taken 8 months of my life and I only have 20,500 words to show for it. I figure that, with a really big push, I can get the first draft of 90,000 words finished by the end of October (at a rate of around 2000 words a day). I will then spend November and December editing it and getting some concept art prepared. Finally in January, I will start looking for a British agent and hopefully somebody will like the work enough to sign me up.

As usual though, I have doubts about the work but doesn't every beginning author? I was reading Philip Pullman's website the other day in which he summed it up perfectly :

Apologies for the lack of posts in the past week but I have been ill and not very productive. I've instead been spending my time catching up on my reading and also reading some blogs. I have also been working on my novel which I am determined to get finished for Christmas.

For a while now, I have been considering making my own Windows XP installation disk. Lifehacker mentioned it yesterday and it has always struck me as a good idea to have a disk with all our settings on it that I can just pop into the computer if we ever need to re-install everything (in the past 3 years, we have had to purge and re-format everything twice). But I lack the technical know-how to make such a disk and besides I need to locate our original XP disk first (I haven't seen it since ages!).

Having the original XP disk also means you can activate XP features which are normally deactivated. For example, I had absolutely no idea that you could send and receive faxes through XP. But to switch the feature on, you need to insert your XP disk into your hard-drive. Guess I'd better start looking for it. The attic is normally a good place to start.