Google seems to be fixed. Party poopers. There have been twitter reports of it being fixed earlier and then being broken again, not sure if it’s fixed for good this time.

But what could possibly have broken google on the first place? I have put together some modest theories:

- an alien invasion with all forces targeted on the Google headquarters.
- a rebellion of all bloggers around the world who feel cheated in their ongoing Page Rank war.
- PayPerPost, Google’s arch nemesis, was hiding an army of hacker ninjas all along.
- a giant volcano exploded, sending it’s ocean of lava onto the Google servers.

Whoever or whatever it was, they seem to have failed.

Twitted is flooded with this Google Malware Waening thing.

Last night HHRay helped me reformat my computer – not the EEE, the Vostro. We decided that it was time for this when I tried playing Guild Wars and got weird display errors – on my second attempt I got the dreaded blue screen of death.

So we reinstall Vista and start ‘er up for the first time. And get the blue screen again! HHRay first suspected that it might be my RAM – the second possibility was that the computer was overheating. The fan hasn’t been cleaned since I got it (I know, I need to be more responsible). 

We start picking apart the laptop (which took ages with all the screws and clips) and indeed: the RAM stick is partially out and the fan is completely clogged! We patch it up and start her up again and yay – runs like a charm! Some photos from the surgery:

It’s junk pickup time in my neighborhood and HHRay, his bother, and I went scavenging. HHRay is an expert scavenger, but not me. We took Keeda and the ordeal was very exciting – mmmm garbage. HHRay’s brother and I made way too much noise and when I found a box full of goodies I couldn’t contain my excitement. Old floppy disks and CDs – a full box of them. I can’t wait to look through them, if a person put them out the front of their house it can’t be anything that they’re afraid of other people seeing – what could possibly be stored on a floppy disk nowadays, I wonder? They must be old. It’s like looking back in time. I have to go back and get the rest later.

HHRay took a photo of me in all the excitement.

I’m at ur park, stealing ur interwebz. 

Seriously – I am at the park near my house with Keeda and my shiny Asus EEE 1000H. I can’t believe how much more comfy this one is than the old model, I love it! Anyway, I found two unsecured networks in the area and decided to go for it. Do I feel guilty? I probably should, but no. I’m tempted to say that if people value their internet connection they should secure it. But that would be like saying if women value their money they shouldn’t go out wearing nice expensive dresses to flaunt it. And that makes no sense.

So I’ve been playing my preordered version of Spore since the third  -  well, more like I only got to play it for one day so far, but I’m already up to the tribe stage and lovin’ it. That’s not to say the game is perfect, but let’s just say hours literally flew by without me noticing. I decided to go for the point and click method to learn instead of reading game guides and missed out on a lot of things because of this (the importance of your pack, for example).

Anyway, I played all the way until the Tribal stage without even noticing the time – I already can’t wait to get home and play with my tribe of Lizopians!

Well, I was going to wake up in the middle of the night to be one of the first to download Google Chrome, Goole’s brand spanking new web browser, but that didn’t happen. I woke up at about the right time, sleepy and blurry-eyed, and decided that I shouldn’t get up with the excuse that the optometrist will need my full attention today, not that of some sleepy-eyed Chrome Zombie. 

But now that I’m awake and all ready to go to the nearby shopping centre to see what exactly is wrong with my Pirate Eye (it’s pretty creepy, as we speak I can ’see’ it pulsing in and out – from blurry to sharp, back to blurry and back to sharp), I’m ready to download Google Chrome. In fact, I am using this nifty piece of work right now.

They promised us that pages would load faster – and they do! I’m not getting my hopes up, maybe it’s my boyfriend’s internet connection (which wasn’t nearly this fast before and cuts me out a lot), but boy do things load fast.

Google has also boasted about the productivity of their tabs – each tab is a brand new process so if you close one tab, you’ll completely free up whatever chunk of memory the site on that tab was using up.

As far as I can see, aesthetically web sites work. There are no weird CSS errors unless they’re hidden from sight and I get to open everything with unbelievable speed. Then again, when I say this is only my first impression of the browser, I mean that this is only my first impression of the browser.

When you open Google Chrome, you are put on a default start page that tells you your most visited sites and bookmarks, with mini-screenshots of these sites. Opening a tab is easy – Ctrl+T and off you go (I’m a tab hog). Each new tab instantly takes you back to this default start page. This can be changed in the settings, of course.

You know what? I don’t even feel like finishing this. I keep wanting to go and browse as many websites with huge loading times as I can just to marvel at how fast they’re displayed!

The only thing that I noticed from this first impression of Google Chrome is the problem with editing things on the fly, in WYSIWYG editors. This will get quite annoying for a lot of people.

I never really appreciated the middle mouse button and mouse wheel until now. It’s true that you don’t know how much you’ll miss something until it’s taken away – now that my middle mouse button’s functionality has been taken away, I feel like I lost an arm (alright that might be an exaggeration). Image – holy middle mouse wheel.

Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta randomly installed over Firefox 2 as I was opening it up. I must have clicked ‘yes’ somewhere as I noticed dialog boxes popping up and just accepted them all, I was in a rush (not smart, I know).

At first I was like ‘wtf’, but now I’m thoroughlly enjoying this new Firefox. Not only does it have a fresh new look, but it has tons of awesome new features which I am enjoying stumbling across as I use it.

1) The top menu bar – back and forward buttons, reload, URL bar, etc. look so cool.
2) Also, when you enter your URL it now displays your most recent websites instantly, organized nicely in a drop down list. It looks way better than the last version of a simple list of URLs popping up – I’m seeing website names and everything.
3) The download manager can actually pause/resume downloads now.
4) There’s an awesome new sliding effect when you open a new tab. I’m opening bunches of tabs just to play with it!
5) There have also been CSS improvements and other goodies for web developers implemented into Firefox 3.

I’m sure there’s tons more that I haven’t seen yet. This is like a treasure hunt.

I pre-ordered Spore today and my life is now officially complete. Well, I guess it will be when I actually get the game. September 7th will be the best day of my life, until Guild Wars 2 comes out – then that will be the best day of my life hands down.

I’m getting that happy tingly feeling already.

Also, my PHP and mySQL learnings have been put on hold for a couple of days due to doing temp work. After 2 days of living and breathing PHP and databases, I can’t wait to get back into it this weekend.