Family - harbour crossing

Just realised that I'm way behind on posting pictures of the family so time for another family photo binge!

Way back in February (as I said, I'm way behind on posting pictures of the family!), back when the weather in HK was still cold and people were still wearing sweaters, we took the kids out to TST for a boat ride. Granted, the boat ride was only to HK Island, but hey, the kids enjoyed themselves!

And I have pictures to prove it! Look at that grin!

After we got to Central, we hung around the harbour area and watched people fish. While some may have called it relaxing, I think Gordon was just happy to be out of the house.

A rare contemplative moment captured on camera.

And on the way back, I finally manage to get some proof that I am along for these trips!

"Help, help - I'm being attacked!"

Browser wars

Woot! It looks like wysiwyg editing is back on Blogger!

Anyway, as I mentioned last post, I recently installed Chrome on my PC. Up till then, I had been using Internet Explorer - something which you might not have known or guessed unless you had seen the stats on wikipedia which mentions that approximately 90% of people in China use IE. Wow.

Recently, I had a friend who expressed surprise, and not a little disgust, to hear that I was using IE. What I told him at the time was that I couldn't be bothered downloading a new browser just for the sake of switching. Furthermore, I'd always heard that some websites are only optimised to work with IE which means that even if I installed a new browser, I would still have to keep IE around just in case. Admittedly, this is based on just hearsay as I don't have any actual experience of this.

And then Microsoft released their latest version of IE. Which meant I had to download a new browser anyway. At this point, I also started to question whether it was really the case anymore that some websites only worked with IE.

So with that seed of doubt in my mind, I also downloaded and installed Chrome. And overall, I have to say that I like it. I don't know if this is a problem with the latest release of IE but the new version of IE doesn't look particularly great in terms of its color scheme whereas Chrome actually looks quite nice. In terms of functionality, both seem fairly close although I haven't started to play around with any add-ons yet so I'm not sure how big an impact that would have. And more importantly (from a functionality point of view), I have yet to encounter any website that didn't render properly in Chrome.

Another criteria people often use to compare browsers is speed. However, I don't have any tools to measure this myself so have to rely on other websites which seem to indicate that Chrome is faster than IE.

In short, this blog post brought to you via Google (Blogger and Chrome).

I hate html code

I don't know if I told you this before but I hate html coding. Or, if I'm being a bit more precise, I hate having to deal with html coding on my blog. Why am I complaining about html coding on my blog now despite having used blogger for several years?

Well, recently, something changed.

In the past, whenever I created a blog entry in Blogger, it was always super easy. I would login to Blogger and click the New Post button. At that point, I get a big textbox and I would just type in whatever I wanted to say into that textbox. Blogger also supported basic text formatting so I could easily get to a new paragraph by simply hitting Enter twice. The html coding was still there in the background but I could just ignore it and do my own thing.

And then, over the weekend, I popped online to prepare my gaming post when - quelle horreur! Last Thursday's post was just a wall of incomprehensible text with zero formatting! Somehow, all of the text formatting had been lost after posting. I edited the post to put back in the paragraph breaks but quickly realised that none of the text formatting was being kept. In the end, I had to go into Edit Html mode so that I could manually enter in line breaks using html code which was a huge pain in the ass!

The annoying thing is that I don't know why this has happened or what I can do to correct it. I recently installed Chrome on my PC (giving it a test run which I'll talk about in future) and I can't help but wonder if that has anything to do with this. If so, considering that both tools are by Google, what a frak-up.

In any event, I hope that this is just a short term issue. If I have to frak around with html coding every time I make a blog post in future, then, well...