10 Useful Programs for Your PC 2008

I have just published an article titled '10 Useful Programs for Your PC 2008'. Due to the success of my previous article, which I have renamed '10 Useful Programs for Your PC 2007' on EzineArticles.com, I have decided to write a new one this year.

The new list includes some programs from last year, which are still essential to me, like Mozilla Firefox and LimeWire. New programs which make it onto the list include Google Chrome, YouTube Downloader, Smart Defrag (a 'smart', i.e. self-learning, defragmentation tool), TuneUp Utilities 2009 (utilities for optimising your PC), Filezilla (FTP program) and PrimoPDF (Word-to-PDF conversion). All the programs which are suggested are still freeware or I suggest using the 'free version' of a paid program. There is one exception, which is the trial of TuneUp Utilities, but I felt that it was so good that even the trial deserves to be downloaded.

Click here to access '10 Useful Programs for Your PC 2008'.

Retiring from Cadets

This year, I have retired from cadets. I finished my "career" as a Corporal in 3 Platoon of Alpha Company. I have decided that I wanted to do something different and we have a large percentage of cadets continuing on this year. I have switched to a service known as "chess club", as part of administration for social services.

Scotch College Annual Tattoo 2008

The 2008 Scotch College Annual Tattoo was held on the 7th of November, 2008. The parade started at approximately 8:30pm and lasting about 1.5 hours. During this parade, the cadets, military band and, pipes and drums crew salute a General of the Australian Army. This year, the parade was done in the rain, showing that the cadet unit won't even let downpour stop them. It is a tradition to "freeball" during the parade.

The RSM leading this parade was Regimental Sergeant Major Ricky Hanson and the CUO of the Unit was Cadet Under Officer Nathan Su. The General saluted was General Peter Gration AC OBE (1987).

Transition to HostGator

I have recently purchased a HostGator plan, and the website is currently being transferred to their servers. This explains some of the strange phenomena (strange template, and missing links and images) occurring on the website.



I moved from Yahoo! GeoCities Pro to HostGator because HostGator's plans were cheaper (Yahoo! had recently increased their price for additional benefits) and they were very generous with their disk space, transfer limit and other aspects.

Firefox 3 is now out!

Mozilla Firefox 3 was released on June 17, 2008. Updates include a sleek new design and lightning-fast web-paged loading. Firefox 3 uses version 1.9 of the Gecko layout engine for displaying web pages. The new version fixes many bugs, improves standard compliance, and implements new web APIs.



Click here to see the Mozilla Firefox 3 Wikipedia page.
Click here to see Mozilla's release notes for Mozilla Firefox 3.
Click here to download Mozilla Firefox 3 from Download.com.

2008 SCACU Annual Camp

The 2008 Scotch College Army Cadet Unit Annual Camp went underway from the 12-17th of September (the Advance Party went to Puckapunyal on the 10th). It was an enjoyable camp where there were lots of interesting activities. I arrived on the evening of the 13th as I had state chess finals that morning-afternoon.

The days were split up like this (for Alpha company):
12th - Arrival and setting up camp
13th - Abseiling
14th - Boating
15th - Ranged shooting
16th - NavEx and Confidence course
17th - Packup, renaturalisation and departure

GeniusProphecy.com Website Changes

Under advice from the owner of 2CreateAWebsite.com, there could be some subdomain changes to GeniusProphecy.com.



I asked whether it would "negatively affect my website's ranking in the search engines if it covers a broad range of subjects", and the reply was that "I think it does affect it negatively. And not so much because you have a variety of topics but because engines now focus so much on quality of inbound links... I think having multiple topics devalues your site and makes it look like you're trying to do too much."

"And as far as rankings I do believe Google would rank you lower for chess related keywords compared to someone who's site is entirely devoted to chess.

If you think about it, popular sites are all focused around one niche. And the ones that aren't (Yahoo, MSN, CNN, etc.) are all heavily popular, branded sites that we all know we couldn't compete with because we don't have the brand awareness.

Niche sites are always best."

But instead of deleting all my content about different topics, I figured that I should put my individual niches into subdomains (which Google treats as a completely different website), each focusing on their own topic, to avoid this "negativity" when a website covers a broad range of topics, as well as to avoid deleting the content I tried so hard to make on this "range of topics".

Some examples of subdomains
http://chess.geniusprophecy.com/
http://runescape.geniusprophecy.com/
http://rubikscube.geniusprophecy.com/

Easy Internet Security - Keep your computer secure

I have created a new guide on how to keep your computer secure on the internet. It's a basic guide to help get beginners around the common terms and the protection issues. Click here to go to Easy Internet Security - Keep your computer secure.

Australian Chess News Launched!

The Australian Chess section of this blog has branched to become its own blog. At Australian Chess News, you will find updates on Australian chess, specifically regarding results.

Labels corrected

The labels on this blog have been corrected. I have labeled every post on this blog with one of these labels:

personal
cadets
chess (includes international chess)
Australian chess
websites

Previously, I did not know how labels worked. But now I have read about them, and I have made a few corrections. The vast majority of labels on this blog are useless and only lead to one or two posts, but it would take too long to remove them all. The labels above are the ones to use in order to distinguish posts about different subjects.

2008 Australian Junior Lightning Championship U18

I recently went to Sydney to see my dad. While there, I also competed in the 2008 Australian Junior Lightning Championship. I came 2nd overall and claimed the under 16 title.

Here are the results:

2008 Australian Junior Lightning Championship U18 - Round 11

Standings

Place Name                    Feder Loc  Score Progr. Buch.

1   Ikeda, Junta            ACT   2065 11      66.0  78.5
2   Lin, Zhigen Wilson      VIC   1635 9       51.0  75.0
3-5  Harris, Benjamin        NSW   1949 8       51.0  80.0
   Illingworth, Max        NSW   2247 8       49.0  82.0
   Schon, Eugene           VIC   1626 8       48.0  72.0
6   Cohn, Jason             NSW   1443 7.5     43.5  65.0
7-14  Antolis, Cedric         VIC   1491 7       50.0  77.5
   Yu, Derek               VIC   1718 7       48.0  77.0
   Dyer, Alastair          TAS   1661 7       46.5  73.0
   Wu, Edwin               NSW   1589 7       45.0  74.5
   Wallis, Christopher     VIC   1885 7       43.0  72.0
   Kong, Adrian            NSW   1554 7       43.0  65.5
   Yu, Sally               VIC   1422 7       41.0  66.5
   Guo, Emma               ACT   1510 7       38.0  63.0
15-19 Nakauchi, Gene          QLD   1506 6.5     48.5  78.5
   Choong, Yita            WA    1972 6.5     42.0  71.0
   Yuan, Yi                ACT   1697 6.5     39.0  66.5
   Ng, Deborah             NSW   1480 6.5     38.0  61.0
   Papantoniou, John       NSW   1535 6.5     38.0  60.0
20-29 Jule, Sebastian         QLD   997  6       41.5  68.0
   Yuen, Jonathan          NSW   1830 6       41.0  68.0
   Brown, Andrew           ACT   1690 6       39.0  61.0
   Gearing, Michael        QLD   1458 6       38.0  71.0
   Cameron, Alistair       SA    1145 6       36.0  68.5
   Wei, Robin              QLD        6       35.0  62.0
   Tan, Justin             VIC   1006 6       33.0  60.0
   Encel, Benjamin         NSW   1147 6       32.0  57.0
   Chibnall, Alana         ACT   1173 6       30.0  61.5
   Beilby, Kieton          QLD   941  6       30.0  53.0
30-36 Grigg, Sam              QLD   1435 5.5     40.0  70.0
   Shi, Dawen              NSW   1275 5.5     37.0  65.5
   Morris, Gill            NSW   1205 5.5     36.0  66.0
   Diemer, Tim             NSW   749  5.5     33.5  63.5
   Muller, Jonas           QLD   1422 5.5     32.5  61.0
   Briant, James           TAS   1169 5.5     31.5  60.0
   Coy, Rupert             NSW   799  5.5     25.5  50.0
37-45 Chau, Adrian            NSW   1379 5       35.5  64.0
   Gray, Daniel            NSW   1421 5       34.0  57.0
   Bonch-Osmolovskiy, Ilya NSW   982  5       29.0  59.0
   Searle, Zachary         SA    1368 5       29.0  57.0
   Deen-Cowell, Nicholas   NSW   1074 5       28.0  58.0
   Setiabudi, Allen        ACT   983  5       27.5  60.5
   Anderson, Kaidon        QLD   816  5       26.0  51.5
   Boni, Christopher       WA    1378 5       25.0  46.0
   Saroha, Chirag          WA    1081 5       22.0  48.0
46-51 Van Rys, Hayden         NSW        4.5     33.5  66.0
   Jack, Curtis            QLD   868  4.5     31.0  61.0
   Tan, Kevin              NSW   1073 4.5     29.0  58.5
   O'Flynn, Alexander      QLD   1178 4.5     27.5  57.0
   Hoey, Penelope          NSW   1062 4.5     27.0  51.5
   Hendrey, Kevin          TAS   1192 4.5     24.0  52.0
52-57 Tsang, Matthew          NSW   761  4       24.0  54.5
   McCrow, Callum          ACT   474  4       24.0  50.0
   Peck, Robbie            QLD   769  4       22.0  50.5
   Ang, Stephanie          VIC   762  4       22.0  50.5
   Leung, Stephanie        NSW   848  4       22.0  49.0
   Lakshman, Vinay         VIC   381  4       16.0  40.0
58-59 Webb-Liddle, Miranda    VIC   705  3.5     19.0  46.5
   Knapp, Katrina          SA    1005 3.5     19.0  41.0
60-61 Gilchrist, Marc         NSW   417  3       16.0  46.5
   Thornley, Max           VIC   138  3       15.0  43.0
62   Yum, Winnie             QLD   286  2       10.0  44.0
63   Atherton, John          QLD   712  1.5     11.0  42.5
64   Davis, Kieran           TAS   968  1        4.0  42.5

You can see a crosstable of the event by going to the NSWJCL website.
The main event is currently underway. You can see the pairings on the Draw and Results page of the official Australian Juniors website.