Life should be easy

I believe that the basic stuff should always be easy to do so that one can concentrate on advanced stuff. But look at even the basic stuff of life, you move around in night and you catch cold, you eat a little extra and you get fat. Just maintaining a healthy body is the toughest task of the world. Add to it the little hobbies you want to pursue and see how much effort one has to put in each.
I remember at one of those corporate sessions, I was asked what I would I change if I was god. I said, I would give people the ability to pursue what they want, freed from all the unwanted responsibilities of their life.
Most people don't even know what they want to pursue in life and which way their life is going. But I don't blame them. The complexity of life is not easy to handle.

Spot the messenger

I absolutely hate MSN messenger, and I use it only because of friends and office colleagues. I am just waiting for the day when msn and yahoo collaboration is complete so that I wouldn't have to use the stupid msn messenger.
Why do I hate it so much? As an example, today when I booted my PC, I saw this:

But I hadn't launched the messenger yet. How come I got logged on to msn without my knowing? Clicking on the popup, I got:


Trying spotting the messenger now in the taskbar/system tray. There is no icon of messenger. I didn't launch it. But still I am logged onto msn, the chat window is open. Knowing the looks (and checking the version), I know its Windows Messenger 4.7 that comes pre-installed with XP. The question is, first, why doesn't this Windows Messenger gets uninstalled when I installed MSN messenger 7.0? Why does MS windows keeps 2 copies of the same program. Second, if it will not uninstall automatically, why its there a manual way of uninstalling it. I have tried using "Add/Remove Windows Component" and what not, but the fact is, it will not uninstall itself, it will log you on without your knowing as soon as you get connected to internet thereby wasting your bandwidth and invading your privacy, and it will make you and your PC susceptible to chat and advertisement attacks.

This is the exact reason why I hate it (and why I haven't upgraded to msn messenger 7.5). So I found this great tool to remove Windows Messenger (though it still have msn messenger 7.0 installed due to friends/colleagues) .

BTW, http://messenger.msn.com doesn't work on firefox due to poor conformity to web standards.

Firefox 1.5 review

Okay, I installed Firefox 1.5, looks good and most of my extensions worked as well. And the ones that don't work, it is showing them as disabled so that I don't lose track of them. There is also an find update option on each extension so that if a future release of the extension is compatible with it, it would be downloaded and installed. I also found this useful link to tweak Gcache extension to work with it.

First impressions, I didn't find much difference between the older version and this. The options screen has changed and it has this really cool setting of "Force links that open windows to open in new tabs". I always find it annoying when clicking on a link opens up a new Firefox window. I liked the way opera had everything contained in itself. Now firefox supports the same feature.

Other than this there is nothing tangible that I can point out, and I still have to figure out some of the extensions stuff, but the web surfing just seems cooler ;-)

Update: Jus tnoticed that upgrading made it lose the search engines that I added. Also, there is no direct way of deleting those search engines (there is an extension though, but I am feeling lazy to google right now)