My 1GB OCZ Ultra-Slim USB Flash Drive has died! Well I think it has. I’m having trouble writing data to it - even after a reformat, so I guess that’s it. The lifespan of the drive was 14 months. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. For €31 you’d think it would have lasted a little longer.

So I guess that means it’s time to get a new one. I could buy the same one again (this time for €17) or upgrade to the 2GB one (for €24). I’m not sure what I want Because I mainly use it with my car stereo, I like the ultra-slim one. It’s small and unobstrusive. But if I go for another ultra-slim one, will it suffer the same faith? Should I go for something a bit more sturdy? I’m still undecided :-/

Opinions are welcome (and needed)

Update

Some how the flash drive has miraculously repaired itself or so it seems! I’m able to write to it again

But I think something it still screwy with it because it’s only a 1GB flash drive, yet according to Windows it has a capacity of 4GB :-/

My car passed it’s NCT on Monday. Yay!

Although I have to admit, it was only after a re-test. It failed the full test a few weeks back, because the carbon emissions were too high

That required me having to spend nearly €400 to get a new sensor put into the car. I know! €400 just for a sensor and the labour cost to have it installed. Ridiculous, but necessary at the same time.

Having passed the NCT will help when it comes time to sell it, which, if I get my way won’t be that far down the line.

I’m hoping to get a nice BMW 316 or 318 fairly soon. Fingers crossed

A few weeks ago I gave my opinion on Big Brother 8, where I said I hoped it would be taken off the air. Unfortunately that didn’t happen. Instead the next best thing did

Channel 4 will not screen Celebrity Big Brother next year, as part of a major programming shake-up designed to refresh the network and reaffirm its public service broadcasting credentials. Celebrity Big Brother has been one of the channel’s biggest-rating shows in recent years and has become a regular fixture of the winter schedule. But Channel 4 said today that it would be rested in 2008.

Source.

For the last several months my Firefox homepage was set to iGoogle, which had 15-20 RSS feeds being shown through the Google Reader gadget (for want of a better word), as well as some seperate feeds being displayed on their own.

I was happy with it. It did the job. But, the thing about it that bothered me, was the process of adding, deleting, editing, or renaming feeds, but I persisted. Each time I needed to run one of these tasks I had to go through the Google Reader site itself. That meant having to wait for the site to load, clicking through to ‘Manage Subscriptions’, making the necessary changes, clicking ‘Back to Google Reader’ (to make sure the changes were submitted correctly) and then going back to my homepage.

That wasn’t too bad when I only had 15-20 feeds to work with, but once I started adding more and more feeds, it became a real problem. I needed a new way of managing my feeds.

I had known about Netvibes for months and had visited the site on more than one occasion, but never felt the need for the service. I did now. Once I visited the site and had a play around with it for a while, I was hooked!

The level of flexability is fantastic. I’m not going to mention all the things I like about it because it would take too long

What I will mention are the two or three things which I’m not that keen on.

1. The tooltip/balloons that appear when you hover over a title - I have a disliking towards things that pops up without my prior consent. Maybe the pop-up ads of old are to blame for that
2. The relatively slow load time - I guess this is to be expected when you have 10 tabs containing two or more feeds (and one that contains nearly 50 feeds).
3. The splash page - which I’m guessing will be taken down after this version is out of beta.

That said, I’m pretty sure Netvibes is going to remain my homepage for a long time to come.

If you need a good way of managing your RSS feeds, I really suggest you try it for yourself.

Spam, or junk mail, now accounts for over 85% of all email traffic in Ireland. The figures are based on the monitoring of more than 13 million email messages, sent to over 1000 domains, during the month of July.

I can totally believe that stat, because I would say that roughly 85% of the emails I receive are spam.

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