Blog

Today, Google released version 3 of their Chrome browser.

Over the past few months, i’ve gradually switched over to chrome on my netbook and now use it exclusively for web browsing. It’s fast, it’s simple, it’s clutter free – perfect for browsing on the move.

photo credit: 阿國

At home on my desktop, Firefox is still king and it will stay that way until Google or anyone else can match Firefox’s huge arsenal of add-ons and plugins. Anyway, Chrome 3 is LIGHTENING quick and that’s bad news for other browsers.

Speed has basically driven me away from using Firefox on my netbook – with Chrome 3′s further improvements in speed, i’ll definitely not be switching back to Firefox anytime soon on my netbook.

Chrome 3 also sees the introduction of more HTML 5 compatibility – not that that’s any good to anyone for another couple of years (or decades if IE6 is anything to go by). They’ve also added a few nice, handy features and check out their blog post today for more info…

Although processing power and RAM etc… are always getting better, faster and more efficient, speed is something that has to be improved constantly… we shouldn’t have to wait for computers to do their stuff – if we want information, it should be available and on our screens in a nano second (well, that should always be the aim even if it is beyond us right now).

Sleep is something i look forward to, yet never seem to get enough of. I could down tools and go to bed now, but i’ve said before that night time is when i feel i’m at my most creative. So if i went to sleep now, i feel i’d be missing out or ‘wasting’ that creative time.

photo credit: dolescum

My girlfriend is the complete opposite – she hates ‘wasting’ the day away by getting up late, but that actually benefits me because it means i’m up early 7 days a week from now until May and in a routine. Up at 6.50am Mon-Friday. Sleep around 1am.

At weekends, up at around 10am, bed at around 1am. So i get more sleep at weekends, even though i’m still shattered getting up. If i were left to sleep and wake naturally, i’d probably go to bed at around 4am and wake up at around 1pm. I don’t see anything wrong with that, provided it doesn’t impact on my ability to think or work.

Reading the wikipedia page on sleep is fascinating. It says between 7-9 hours sleep is optimum. Anything under that is linked with health problems & double the risk of death from heart problems. But so too is anything over that.

It also mentions our biological clock and how (in an ideal world) we’d basically sleep when it gets dark, get up when it gets bright. Of course that’s not reality for most people. Especially in winter months as it would mean we should sleep more in winter than summer.

A sort of ‘get rich quick’ scheme (in sleeping terms) is called Polyphasic sleep. That basically says you can sleep for as little as 2 hours per day, but it has to be at multiple times – each nap can last no longer than about 45 minutes. So if you train yourself to sleep for 6 x 30 minute naps every few hours throughout the 24 hour day, it’s as good as an 8 hour ‘block’ of sleep (despite the fact it only adds up to 3 hours).

So in a nutshell, if you follow those rules, you can gain more time in your day without losing energy or feeling tired. The biggest problem with sleep though is not your sleeping patterns… it’s other people’s.

Doorbells, phones, work, school, college, shop opening hours… until we live in a world that’s open 24/7 for everything, our sleep patterns are still largely dictated by business opening hours in my opinion. So when it boils down to it, the time we sleep and rise at is all down to money. All down to working, selling or buying whether we like it or not.

I’ve had a few people ask me recently about doing guest posts on this blog. At face value, it seems like a good idea – i get to put my feet up while other people do the work for me and provide content. Believe me, that sounds good

photo credit: DeAtH_JoCkEy

But then i must ask myself what good is a personal blog if other people are writing the content? I’m proud to say i’ve written every single one of my 1,467 (now 1,468) blog posts here on smemon.com and i think i’d be going backwards if i were to allow guest posts on this blog.

Yes it might increase traffic, yes it may even increase quality, plus it would allow me to relax a bit more, but in the long run i think it would damage the blog’s character and style plus leave me wondering what the future holds for smemon.com….

As a reader of many blogs, guest posts don’t put me off a blog, but i always get frustrated when i think ‘x’ has written a post, only to find out that some random stranger has instead… that random stranger might be a better writer or provide more useful content, but at the end of the day i visit x’s blog to read what ‘x’ has to say!

If this blog was a more general / faceless tech blog i’d be open to guest posts, but for a personal blog – i just don’t think it’s wise.

Windows 7 is out in 39 days. It’s been hyped up to no end by most people in the know, so we can all be sure it’s going to be a much better success story than Windows Vista. If you have windows vista, the only reason you own it is because you got it for ‘free’ when buying a new PC.

Given the fact Vista came out in early 2007 , there’s a good chance you’ve bought a desktop or laptop in that time, so you most likely have some sort of experience with Vista. The vast majority of schools and businesses still use XP, but 7 should be the windows XP ‘killer’.

Or will it? Now that businesses are strapped for cash, open source is looking better by the day and with linux distributions getting cleaner interfaces by the day and even google getting stuck in to open source operating systems, windows 7 is an extremely important operating system for Microsoft. Get it wrong, and they’re in big trouble and risk losing their grip on the OS market… so there’s a lot hanging on windows 7 for Microsoft and that’s probably why it will turn out to be such a great success…

Anyway, for me, windows 7 means the switch from 32 bit to 64 bit computing. It means another 1 gig of RAM and a faster, smoother all round experience. So i’ve already got October 22nd penciled in on my calendar as it’s a pretty move for me.

It’ll probably take me a full day or two to back up everything, wipe my harddrive, reinstall all my applications and tweak things around until everything is where i want it to be and performing how i like it. Ultimately, it means i can work faster and smarter which is always a good thing.

Last month i said i had plans for theleavingcert.com and that it was bursting with potential. Last month, i quickly threw together a new design using a template and some modifications.

But that’s not good enough and i know it. I must sit down, go through it and optimise every single aspect of it. I’ve no doubt we can nail this niche and all it takes is hard work. So i’ll be doing my best this week to dedicate some time to the site and really try to fine tune it.

It’s hammering just about every related site in google for major search times like ‘leaving cert’, ‘leaving cert tips’ etc… and raking in traffic for fun. In fact over 90% of traffic comes from google. 90% of 3000 unqiue visits in the last 30 days = 2700 visits / month = 90 per day.

If this was a business and i could get 90 targeted customers per day to the site just through google alone, i’d be making them money and paying for my own salary too depending on the business. So it’s important that i don’t just waste this traffic and let the site die.

Twitter, Facebook & constant content is, in a nutshell, the recipe for success but of course it’s one thing knowing how to do something… it’s another actually DOING it. Doing it is made harder when you’re not getting paid, not getting thanked and you’re pushed for time… but i won’t accept excuses from myself this week.