chrome vs internet explorer

I’ve been using Google Chrome since it first appeared, cool engineering  comic and all. I practically stopped using Internet Explorer at all. Chrome had all these cool things like tabs, and later came the extensions, and web apps, and so on.

But all these extra things were its undoing for me. Whenever I needed to check something on the Internet for work, I’d see the little gmail extension icon with its delicious unread email counter, vying for my attention. Sure, I could disable the extension but what would be the point of that? Disabling those extensions that were there to make my life easier made me wonder what I was getting out of Chrome at all.

My company is another factor. Most of our internal Internet sites, just don’t work very well with Chrome. I even went so far as to install an Internet Explorer extension into Chrome so it could render selected pages in ie. And when I click a link on one of our portals or a sharepoint site, to open a document, Chrome never did the right thing. So, for those sites, I manually switched over to Internet Explorer.

And there’s more. I like using Windows Live. Might not be very trendy but their programs have come on leaps and bounds in the last few years. And I use Office 2010 (the best), and liked that I could link documents up to my Skydrive site. And whilst I could edit my Office documents in the Chrome browser, if I ever needed to do anything more complex in the full Office suite, Chrome didn’t support opening a web document into my local program. So, I was still stuck in the position of not being able to give up Internet Explorer.

Let’s not get started on synchronising bookmarks between the two browsers. If I was going to use both Chrome and Internet Explorer, I would have to keep the bookmarks between the two programs in sync with each other – some how. It’s not straight-forward, and not something you’d want to do on a regular basis.

So I came up with a solution. Microsoft helped make up my mind by releasing Internet Explorer 9.

I stopped using Chrome.

It was a bit weird at first. I felt like I was letting an old friend down. I’d watched Chrome grow up. But, the conflict between using two browsers just wasn’t worth it. So I surrendered. But surrendered to Microsoft (never thought I’d do that).

And I love Internet Explorer 9. It links in beautifully with Windows 7. Looks good, and It’s fast.

No more conflict.

simple running update

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I was taking a different approach to running. This time it was going to be more about cultivating a running habit than building up to longer distances or faster times.

So three weeks on and how are things going? I’m pleased to report that I’ve been running every morning since I made the commitment. That means for the last three and a bit weeks, I’ve got up at shortly after 5am, to go for a run. I haven’t taken any music, or attempted to track any of my runs. And it’s been pretty good.

I know that things would have been more difficult if the weather hadn’t been so great, yet there have been mornings when it’s been raining, and I’ve still managed to get out of bed. Leaving the gadgets at home has speeded my getting out of the house.I find that I don’t miss the music, and to be honest, it was becoming an extra chore to find something I actually felt comfortable running to. Those ten to twenty minutes each morning, are a good time for me to ponder on what lies ahead for me that day. It’s probably as close to meditation as I’m ever going to get.

If I continue this until Tuesday, that’s a whole month I’ve been doing this. I’d wish myself luck, but right now, I don’t feel I need to. I know that I can keep this up.

living simply in a caravan

I’ve just come back from a holiday with the family in a caravan and it was a reminder of the things that are important in my life. It was a 38 x 12 foot static caravan so not exactly small but considerably smaller than my house. Travelling all the way to the east coast with a four year old and a baby restricted what room there was for the things I might want to take on holiday. A lot of the car was packed with stuff for the baby: Pram, travel cot, high chair, nappies etc. We needed to take food and towels so that took up another chunk of space. So even with an estate car and a roofbox, we found ourselves pretty crammed in for our journey.

But we spent a great week in the caravan and it got me thinking a little about some of the things I think I need but could probably do without.

• Sky TV – Great for entertaining my four-year old. Great for watching stuff when we want, but really, do we need so many channels?
• Xbox 360 – I hardly play this but it’s good for the occasional movie.
• Nintendo DS – Haven’t played this for months.
• My DVD collection – Don’t think I’d miss this – apart from my Doctor Who DVDs.
• My books – I’ve recently got a Kindle so my paper books are pretty much redundant. They still take up a whole load of room though.

It was interesting to see how my four-year old daughter coped without her boxes and boxes of toys. We restricted her to a small bag of toys, and she didn’t complain about not leaving the rest of the stuff at home. This makes me pretty tempted to start reducing the amount of toys she’s got in the house.

Out of my possessions, it was clear that my laptop and my Kindle were very important to me and I used both every day we were away. And although the lack of Internet was good at first as it let me focus on some creative writing, it’s definitely something I can’t live without in the longer term.This isn’t because I want to stay connected – I couldn’t care less about twitter updates or facebook updates. I want to have access to my blog and be able to access creative writing websites.

If the holiday makes me make any changes to how we live now that we’re back home, I’ll let you know via the blog.