Using Google Chrome

My laptop is still going strong after a couple of years, but it is starting to get slower and slower, mainly when starting up. I am reluctant to buy a new one as this one has been so reliable. A reinstall of the Windows would help a lot, but I can’t bothered with that. I am happy to press the on switch, then just grab a coffee while it loads.

I have been using Firefox mostly, but found that it too can be slow and is a real memory hog. I still have IE6 installed and it loads faster than FF. Google of course have launched their own browser, Google Chrome and when I heard that it is faster than FF, I thought I would give it a try.

When I was having trouble with FF, I disabled all of the add-ons, as useful as they are. Chrome still loaded faster than FF with the extensions disabled. It has some nice features, like showing your most recently viewed sites when you open a new tab and being able to do searches right in the area where you usually type in your URLs. Suggestions are also displayed automatically and sometimes useful.

It does have a couple of glitches which I am sure Google will eventually get right, but overall I am happy with the experience, but I think it will be hard to move loyal users off IE and FF.

America goes to the polls

I am Australian, but a lot of my income now comes from the United States. Since I don’t live in Australia and most of my internet traffic comes from the U.S. I pay more attention to what is happening there. My income is always down during U.S. holiday periods. From Thanksgiving to Christmas, my earnings are pretty flat.

Whoever is in power in Australia matters little to me and either political party seems to have people with strong leadership skills. I also watch quite a bit of CNN and BBC news as they are widely available when I travel.

Tomorrow morning we should know the result of the U.S. presidential election. I am hoping for an Obama victory. I think America needs some serious change right now and I think he can bring it. McCain seems to be ok, but my worry is that if he wins, it won’t be much different from having Bush in power. Sarah Palin seems to be a political joke.

I want to see an end to the Iraq war. I think it is partly to blame for the economic crisis. American banks need to be reeled in and tighter lending laws put in place. More money needs to be spent on education and the environment and I hope we can see some big cuts in military spending.

My second hope is that if Obama can win, he can actually bring about the change he has talking about and we can see some action.

Wolf of Wall Street

I just finished reading the “The Wolf of Wall Street” by Jordan Belfort. It’s a good read and a book which is hard to put down. It is the story of Jordan Belfort’s rise in the stock market world and dramatic fall as he battles an addiction to drugs.

You won’t learn much about Wall Street or how he was able to make so much money, but he does have some great, but sad stories about the people in the industry and what he did while he was high on drugs. He was lucky not to have killed anyone and ended up only having to spend 22 months in prison.

It looks like a sequel will be out next year and the cover says that the book will be made into a movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio with Martin Scorsese directing it. I thought there were laws against convicted felons profiting from their crimes by writing books about their misdeeds.