Gotta get down on Sunday

1. Take a train to tiny speck of a station.
2. Trek through the Sussex country-side on roads without sidewalks.
3. Step back into the late 18th/early 19th century of railways.
4. Hop aboard a choo-choo train.
5. Stare at guy in dirty overalls shovelling coal into the firebox of ancient steam locomotive.
6. Inhale coal gas fumes in moving train.
7. Gawk at adverts for companies, brands and products long since extinct.
8. Take shortcut across a meadow that turns out to be grazing lands.
9. Watch woolly and shorn sheep gambol.
10. Marvel that gambolling doesn't just happen in books.
11. Wade through a slushy path to a delightful little patch of green.
12. Curse at rain for threatening to deprive a day of its cricket.
    
13. Rejoice at the senior citizen players deciding to play anyway.
    
14. Rejoice even more at the clouds relenting and deciding to let the sun through.
    
15. Get picture taken with one of the finest commentators of all time.
    
16. Laze through a cricket match with a pint of bright Sussex ale.
17. Laugh at random commentator who keeps quietly asking spectators and players the names of the batsmen and bowlers.
18. Shoot the breeze about cricket obscuridae with genuine lovers of the game.
19. Run back through aforementioned meadow to catch taxi and train back home.
20. Feel like a character out of a chilled out Enid Blyton novel.
21. Crash.

Best. Sunday. Ever.

Showing the URL protocol in the Firefox address bar

A fair amount of people seem to be using Firefox Aurora.

Unfortunately, the latest Aurora 7.0a2 build (as of tonight - 12th July, 2011) has enabled a 'feature' as part of the Firefox team's efforts to copy Google Chrome's efforts at being different: they have gone and disabled showing the "http://" (the protocol) part of the URL.

I was dreading the day this would come to my beloved Firefox - but fortunately, Firefox retains the ability to make quick, under-the-hood changes using about:config.

Here's how you go about ensuring your URL bar isn't screwed around with:

1. Go to about:config
2. Find the value called browser.urlbar.trimURLs
3. Double-click and toggle it's value to false

And that's that!

Suspicious Gmail IMAP Activity

Quick note for future reference: if your Gmail activity window shows frequent IMAP access from the United States IP 67.220.123.24, don't panic (as I did initially).

It's just your Nokia phone polling Gmail for new mails. That IP resolves to em.outgoing4.messaging.nokia.com.

Just FYI. And FMI.