Shandy's Blog

Well another Saturday evening in Colombo. We started off by calling in at the Mango Tree. I shouldn't be suprised. The web link we had said it opened at 18:30. We got a Bajaj from our apartment and arrived at 18:40. It was not open. This is Sri Lanka. Time has no meaning. Millenium Park, the local bowling alley opens at 10:30 on a Sunday morning according to the sign in the window. Arse. It opens any time between 10:30 (allegedly) and 12:00. Some other time I'll winge on about the complete ineptitude of anywhere in Sri Lanka opening on time ;-) Anyway, back to the Mango Tree, or rather the Hilton Apartments (JAIC to those with long memories) where we went for a drink whilst we decided where to go to eat in the evening. I decided to give the Mango Tree and second chance and we arrived back there about 20:00. It was open! Hurrah! Bizarrely we found Pete & Carol at the bar and Jill, Catherine & friends already eating at one of the tables. Nothing like a quiet evening out for two in Colombo. Anyway both our meals were excellent. As good as anything we could get in the UK. And the bill was beyond belief. 1700 rupees (around £9.00) for popadoms, two main courses, rice, 2 parathas & 2 lion lagers. Storming :-D. And the prices on the menu were the actual prices including service charge, not the usual prices you see excluding service charge & this disgraceful variable government tax that you never find out until you pay the bill. Consequently I had no problem leaving a decent (in my opinion admittedly) tip for the excellent service. We shall definitely be going ot the Mango Tree again. On the way out we caught up with the latest gossip from Pete & Carol and then joined Catherine, Jill & freinds at the Continental for the fashion show. There we also met Rob, a Canadian who stil lives at Royal Park which we mercifully left in August (a story for another time) and caught up with the latest gossip from Royal Park from him. Anticipating an epic haggling battle with the Bajaj driver on the price o get us back to our apartment I left my wife to handle the negotiations (she is a past master who gets prices reduced far more than I can). Much to or amazement 200 rupees saw us back home. When you are on a roll you are on a roll!

Another relaxing Saturday passes in Colombo. After a morning of internet browsing, application updating and blog posting I could tell from my wife's demeanor that a break from the computer was in order ;-) Spent a happy couple of hours playing Sequence (a board come card game) out on our balcony and was marginally beaten by my wife :) Revenge will be mine next time though, honestly :-D A bottle of 3 coins Dark Irish has set me up for the evening and I fancy a good hot curry. A quick consultation with the Mrs revealed the Mango Tree was a good bet. I fancy a really spicy curry tonight but as I have found to my disappointment Sri Lanka curries tend to come in one state of hotness - the equivilent in the UK of medium to hot. They don't do mild and they don't do really hot. Now the Mango Tree is an Indian restaurant and they tend to offer a bit more variety. However, the Indian restaurants in Sri Lanka are confusing to an Englishman like me. I went for a Vindaloo once, at the Tandoor Indian restaurant. Now in the UK a Vindaloo is an experience rarely to be undertaken without a good few beers inside you for courage. Here it was about as hot as a bag of salt and vinegar crisps :( In fact the only really hot curry house I have found so far is the Queen's Cafe on Duplication Road. That does a pretty mean take away. However it doesn't half keep you more than regular for a few days afterwards so I tend to reserve meals there for when the wife is away for a couple of days afterwards ;-)

Anyway we'll catch a Bajaj there around 18:15 and see if they can accomodate us. If so I'll report on the Mango Tree tomorrow.

Meta Products Download Express is a download accelerator for both Microsoft Internet Explorer and Firebox. I have installed the add-in for both browsers. The installation was seemless and could be done when both browsers were open but you needed to close the browsers and re-open them to make use of Download Express's new features. Download Express certainly seemed to make a significant impact on the couple of files I downloading as a test. I was getting pretty much a 100% increase on download speeds. The dialog box you get during downloads is very informative and there is an icon in the system tray that shows a pie chart of the percentage of the file that has been downloaded. There is a comprehensive number of options that you can set. The one I liked was an ability to run your virus checking application on a downloaded file once it was downloaded. (You must already have an anti-virus application installed; one does not come with Download Express)

Download Express is free for non-commercial use. Another application that I will be using on a regular basis. 5/5 for this little gem :-D

Yeah I know. v1.0.2 was released in the misty depths of November last year but somehow I never quite got around to updating my 1.0.1 version of Omea Reader to v1.0.2. Omea Reader is a RSS Feed/Newsreader and Web Browser all rolled into one. I have to admit I have not got my head around the web browser module yet but I do use the RSS feed reader and newsgroup reader and have been pretty impressed. I had a read through the updates between versions and there was nothing in there to shake my world but I try and keep to the latest releases when I can so ...

Omea Reader is currently available for free until March 31st. You just need to request a license key.

Never one to miss out on passing bandwaggon I thought it was high time I checked out Firefox, Mozilla's IE Killer ;-) I can't claim to have been around at the birth of the internet; I got involved around 1996, just after Netscape v2 had been released and was an avid Netscape user until they released Netscape 4, Communicator - not ;-) At that point I switched to Microsoft's Internet Explorer (v4 I think) as it was obvious to me Netscape had handed the internet browsing market to MS on a plate with one awful release :( And I have used IE ever since, bar the odd flirtation with Opera, which never quite rang my bell.

Now don't get me wrong I am not some Microsoft flunky. However, I am a realist and like to think myself reasonable open minded, hell I even voted Labour in a UK election once - even if it was only a local election ;-) However, I use Microsoft products freely and without the predujice that seems to stain the open-source community. I use MS OSs and so find as a general rule their products run pretty well with the occasional exceptions. IE I have very few issues with at all. It does pretty much what I want it to, rarely crashes. So really I have no particular need to switch to another browser. So I'm only doing it just to see what all the fuss is about :)

• OK, I am a little impressed :-D I checked my out my main complaint about IE, the fact I can't place a separator in the bookmarks list and guess what - you can with firefox! OK, it's not much of a complaint about IE but it does get on my nerves occasionally.
• However, I do follow it with an immediate gripe. When I imported my existing bookmarks into firefox it forgot the order I stored them in and placed them in alphabetically order. Why? IE knows what order they are in, why not firefox?
• Next I logged onto my Outlook email browser at work - Yeah I know it's Saturday but I'm a sad git sometimes :( Another annoyance was that firefox doesn't display the same login pop-up box that things like MSN Messenger, IE does. In IE I get a login pop-up box with a drop down of logins XP has remembered. I just select which one I want and wop my password in and he presto I'm in. In firefox I had to remember my login and, god dammit, what's worse I had to type it in!
• Not a massive fan of tabs but its certainly nice to have the option of using them to store separate pages on. Opera used to have this facility too. So a thumbs up to firefox on this score too.
• I like the option in firefox to always download to a set location I can specify. IE seems to download to the last location it downloaded a file to by default. Maybe I have just never found the option to change this in IE though?

OK, not exactly the most thorough of tests but 30 minutes or so first impressions. So the million dollar question is - Will I be using firefox instead of IE? The answer is not black and white. It's a maybe, sometimes :-D I certainly won't be uninstalling firefox. I'll even keep a shortcut on the desktop and fire it up once in a while. So a partial victory for the firefox team. However IE is still the number one for me until I have more compelling reasons to move away from it.