There was a quote from an Australian on the radio today that, to me, epitomises their more easy going attitude to life than ours in England.

There has been a crocodile stolen from a wildlife park in Australia. In the UK, we would have a boring description of the audacity of the people who stole the crocodile, followed by information not to go near it if you happen to find it in your pond or wherever. In Australia, the quote went something like this:

I decided to remove the brown for a while. I’d like to go to something a lot simpler, similar to the current layout, but I don’t think it’s quite there yet. Might have to kill off the screenshots and maybe even the chatbox.

I’ve come across a site called SiteAdvisor which is the product of a research effort at MIT. It aims to provide a protection from sites that contain spyware and/or are known to send spam emails. This is done by means of a browser plugin — available for both Firefox and IE — which has a green/amber/red safety indicator to inform you about the safety of a site. It tells you both about sites that you visit directly, and it will categorise Google and Yahoo search results, allowing you to avoid the dodgy sites.

**Summary for the lazy:** 2005 wasn't a great year for interesting new music, but there were a few gems in there. I also found out that some artists I'd heard of, but never listened to, are very good.

Also of note is that I seem to have become a grumpy old man in my early 20s.

The Good

Being people who are relatively new, in that they may not have first appeared in 2005, whom I first heard of this year

I applied to be part of the Fluendo beta of binary-only (as I understand it) GStreamer plugins for closed/proprietary media formats. I know that you can use copies of the Win32 codec dlls with GStreamer and other media players on Linux to be able to play closed formats; many people do, but I’ve never bothered to. This is mostly because it seems like a hack to use the binaries from a different platform.