A little after 5am Friday morning last week when I arose somewhat dazed from bed and made final preparations for a trip to Prague. My sister is getting married in July and my future brother-in-law was kind enough to invite me along to his stag night.

We arrived at the airport for our 7am flight to London Gatwick and I was introduced to two of the guys, Glen H and Michael Knight… Within minutes local airline Aurigny had announced an hour delay to our flight because of fog. Fog is a regular problem here and when it occurs planes are not allowed to land, despite the landing guidance systems in place, for reasons best known to the airport. There are few flights out from Guernsey and even fewer destinations means being fogged equals missing your connecting flight and there goes your holiday. Fog coming back means sitting or sleeping at Gatwick and explaining your absence to friends, family, or boss.

Living in Guernsey requires you develop a thick skin with regards to availability of goods and services. Many a time you can find a great deal on-line only to find they won’t ship here or if they do they want to charge you £50 to get it here. And get used to phoning and emailing companies for your VAT back every time you order (such as for Amazon and Apple).

One such annoyance is the inability to use short-code text messages such as 604664 for Google SMS as well as the silly UK TV voting systems.

I want faster DSL…. 512KB just isn’t cutting it, I used to enjoy 2MB in Jersey… Let’s examine the pricing shall we…

Yes you could argue the C&W Gsy has better contention ratios but the fact is they don’t even offer a home service for anything above 512KB.

We checked in as two small groups to avoid the disproportionate delay with checking in larger groups and headed off to the airport shops for breakfast and retail therapy.

Somebody once told me that there is no rationalization for checking in hours ahead and it is merely a ploy for you to spend money while you wait. Those in government cite security concerns but the fact is you can drive through most of the borders of Europe with only a cursory glance and minimal security checks.

Every year I head out skiing with some snowboarding pals for some high-adrenaline thrills coupled with binge drinking. It’s not always a pleasant combination and this year I took my fifteen year old brother with me so my drinking took a back seat.

Not every day was eventful so here’s the first part, the London experience!

If you’ve been using Firefox for a while you might like to look at some of these tips and tricks to get more from your web browser. If you’re not using Firefox to find out what all the hoopla is about.

Firefox, like most applications, is compiled without optimizations for specific processors. Some third parties such as Moox make processor-specific optimized builds available for download.

For a while now I’ve been looking for some art to liven up the walls of my new flat and now that all the furniture has been acquired I’ve run out of excuses.

I trotted round a few local galleries and shops to little avail. As you might well imagine living on a small island you don’t really get much of a choice in anything let alone art. Once more, I found myself on the Internet looking for things to buy and was about to give up when GrinGod pointed me to DeviantArt.

Currently “hot news” is the fact that Firefox, Mozilla and Safari browsers have been demonstrated as susceptible to a new form of phishing attack.

Basically all these browsers support International Domain Names (IDN) that let you use the full Unicode set of foreign characters and symbols, and some of these foreign characters while technically different from the Latin ones look identical. In the case demonstrated they have used the Arabic aa to replace a Latin aa in “PayPal” to get another site. This isn’t really anything new, even the original RFC commented on how this would be a problem and the IETF issued guidelines that would have limited their scope if only Verisign actually implemented them. (Specifically the guideline for preventing mixing of languages within a domain name would reduce the scope for attack considerably).

I’m sure you’ve read all about Apple’s latest Mac Mini, a stripped-down machine for those wanting to try Mac OS X (according to Steve Jobs in his recent keynote). It also appears to be a good way to get mum-and-dad off your back with it’s practically non-existent rate of viruses and spyware. It even makes a reasonable server being that it comes with Apache, a firewall and can share your Internet connection — even wirelessly.

It’s already been pointed out that the Mac Mini is based on PowerBook technology however there appears to be one significant change (apart from the obvious transition from laptop to desktop) and that’s the graphics processor.

One of the less-touted features of Windows XP is it’s ability to theme the user interface. Not to be confused with Windows 98 Plus pack’s themes, this support includes ‘Visual Styles’ which allows the actual appearance of the windows, buttons and various controls to take on a whole new look providing the application has been marked as being compatible with themes using a manifest (most recent applications have).

This concept is not a new idea having been seen in everything from Amiga OS (MUI) to Linux (Gnome and KDE) but it’s a good addition. WindowBlinds has been letting users do this for years on everything from Windows 98 to XP/2003 and Kaleidoscope before that on the original Mac OS (Apple also had some lovely themes in MacOS 8 Copland but pulled them before release). Max OS X users get similar functionality with ShapeShifter and some wonderful themes.