Blog

Let me start by telling you a story.

Merck KGaA (EMD Chemicals in the United States and Canada) is a German-based chemical and pharmaceutical company. Merck was founded in Darmstadt, Germany, in 1668. Following World War I, Merck lost possession of its foreign sites, including the Merck & Co. subsidiary in the United States. Today, the US company, Merck & Co. Inc., is a global company, with no links to their German origins.

Merck & Co. had (I believe this is no longer the case) links with Huntington Life Sciences, where animal research experiments take place. Not surprisingly, therefore, they attracted the attention of animal rights activists.

Now, if you were THAT passionate about something, you’d think that a modicum of research would be in order. Which leaves me baffled as to why the aforementioned animals rights people regularly (or they certainly did until recently) picket outside the UK offices of Merck KGaA with placards about Huntington. They even smashed the windows of one of their other offices.

Maybe I took this personally because my wife was working for Merck KGaA at the time and I regularly had to drive past them when dropping her off (and then hearing stories of intimidation they’d receive during the day).

I would, humbly, suggest that surely the basics such as this are the first steps to be taken seriously. Until then, you just seem like idiots.

My manager has returned from a trip to the US. As is obligatory he’s brought something back for us – a couple of bags of Hershey’s chocolate. And one of these has their own version of KitKat in it (licensed from Nestle).

If proof is ever needed that Americans don’t know how to make decent chocolate, this was the perfect example. It’s an abomination.

And Orio’s are devils biscuits too. Quite why Kraft ever thought they’d be popular in a country that knows a good biscuit…

I thought I’d check out my site stats to see how Google Chrome is doing (now that I know Google Analytics can track it separately) since it was launched on the 2nd.

The least techy of my sites is BMTG, which garners just 1.67% of users from Chrome. Next up, Copy+ is 3.55%. This site is 5.66%. Not fantastic, but not too shoddy.

Other things that came out in this that Firefox is the most popular browser for this site (it’s IE on the others), Chrome usually has similar percentages to Safari (considering Safari is available on both Windows and Mac, I guess that doesn’t look too good for Safari). Opera is usually languishing in 5th place.

So, Chrome isn’t doing too badly, considering it’s shortcomings. But it is fast and simple, which is what many people want. Having said that, the more tech the site is the more visitors appear to use it. Which in my mind doesn’t go – Chrome is a very un-tech browser.

I guess you just have to be geeky to try something else out and not stick with what you know – many of the visitors were probably doing what I did last week and was just giving the browser a test drive. Time will tell – I’ll try the same again in a few months and see if those percentages remain.

These days I try and keep my toe out of politics – particularly if it’s the politics of another country. However, when that country is the US and anybody voted into a position of power will therefore have a big influence on the rest of the world, then I’m interested.

Sarah Palin I worry about.

A “Hockey Mom” she may be, but she’s also a strong Christian, is pro-gun and anti-abortion (quite how those last two go together I don’t know).

Her Christian views means that she wants to promote creationism and, as a Mayor, even approached her library to ask how she might go about having books banned – details here from an article in Time Magazine:

[Former Wasilla mayor] Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. “She asked the library how she could go about banning books,” he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. “The librarian was aghast.” The librarian, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn’t be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire her for not giving “full support” to the mayor.

Mary Ellen Baker resigned from her library director job in 1999.

Palin also voted against having a bigger library built, but did raise taxes to pay for a new sports hall which even now is “in the red”.

And, although without any backing of the source of the information, there’s even a worrying list of which books she wanted to ban.

But, let’s move onto a different subject. Oil and the environment. Her husband works for BP and has stated many times that she does not believe Global Warming is man made and that “the jury is out”. No it’s not.

She has pushed to have a natural gas-pipe line from Alaska’s North Shore and even wants to drill in Alaska’s protected Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (something she mentioned in her speech last night). She collected $13,000 from lobbyists who represent oil and gas industries in her campaigns, including donations from employees of BP, Exxon Mobil, Anadarko Petroleum, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Shell.

There is a site named “Sarah Plain is Dangerous” (and from what I’ve read about her, I agree) which has more information. It’s not dribbling lunacy, but has source information on information it provides.

Besides, her daughter is called Bristol. Who in their right mind would do that?

Well, it couldn’t get much worse. I came home to….. a broken wireless modem/router. Noooooo.

It was dead. And a new power supply on it didn’t revive it either.

So I bundled it into a bag and took it to a nearby small computer shop. Thankfully they sold a modem with the same type of power supply so tried that on the modem… dead. They tested my power supply… dead. It was plugged into a surge protected socket and everything else is okay, so we can only assume that one of these (the router or the power supply) took the other one out as well.

Not wanting to be without the internet for too long I bought a replacement there and then. I daren’t look at how much cheaper it would have been buying off of the internet. But, hey, it’s quick and hassle free – if it doesn’t work, it’s easy to take back.

Now, the router I DID have was a Netgear DG834GT, which has Super-G, giving better speed and range with compatible receivers. Such a receiver is in my daughters computer. However, Super-G only works if you’re transmitting on a particular channel – I had to change mine recently because of interference from somebody else on the same channel, so I no longer use the Super-G facility. So faced, at the computer shop, with the Super-G and standard version of this router, I plumped for the later.

I now have a Netgear DG834G – version 4, which includes ADSL2 compatibility.

It was set up REALLY easily – my router name and password is set the same but I’ve put a stronger password on the admin panel. All of this meant that everything wireless around the house burst into life without me having to change anything on them.

Naturally, something went wrong. I took the opportunity, as I was just setting it up, to flash the router firmware to the latest level. It was going through as a strip adapter that I was using (shoddy bit of kit) shorted and tripped the power off. Potentially, the router was knackered already. However, it looks like it had gone through by the time the power went off as the firmware level is correct and it’s all working fine.

One thing I did learn from this…. make a note of my ADSL username and password. I hadn’t and it was buried deep in my Gmails. Thankfully I could use my phone to access and search my mail account. But, now, it’s noted.