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While I’ve been a Thunderbird user for ages already, it has taken me ages to get used a bit to the ‘minimalist’ way of quoting or replying in Thunderbird.

For those who haven’t noticed, instead of the detailed information Outlook shows you when you decide to reply or forward an e-mail, Thunderbird by default only gives ‘<name> wrote:’, not even a date or e-mail address.

However, while browsing the web I came across a blogpost by ‘nerd.‘ who links to the interesting homepage of the ‘ChangeQuote’ extension forThunderbird (up to 2.0 right now). For some reason the extension isn’t listed on the Mozilla website, hopefully enough people will be able to track it this way though.

When I look back at this year, or at least as far as it has come for now, I can say without hesitating it’s been quite a year for me. All the way back in January I started blogging, for money, that is, and a lot has changed for me ever since.

In the beginning I wasn’t so sure whether to admit I was receiving a compensation, as it simply didn’t seem ‘right’ at that time. However, soon my PageRank boosted from 0 to 4, and PPP started to require disclosure, so I simply had to change.

Back in those days it was great, I could easily post twice a day, often opportunities of more than 7,5 dollar each for less than 150 words; not even half an hour work. The results of that were clear, my income has skyrocketed; from a scholar without work to a blogging one with a great hobby that brought in money!

This went on for quite a while, until about my birthday in October, when Google decided selling links was bad and had to be punished - no Google, you’re not some kind of cop! After that, my, and many others blogs lost their PageRank completely.

While losing the PR doesn’t seem like a big issue, it basically is when you blog for money. The reason is simple, nearly all advertisers require a certain PR for bloggers to be able to write for them. The conclusion? No PageRank equals no opportunities and thus no money.

Ever since I’ve found it hard to switch over from blogging an hour a day or so to not blogging at all - which also explains why my blog is pretty empty since October this year. From now on I’m trying to pick up the blogging again to see if I can also just motivate myself to post my thoughts without financial backing of it, time will tell if I can!

Who hasn’t heard ‘Make sure you backup all your important data frequently, you never know when it might come in handy!’ before? Not too many people I guess. Nonetheless, I’m very sure even less people actually have made backups of their documents, photos or other important data in the past month…

Personally I’m worthless as well with that, it’s too much work, and it doesn’t quite give any satisfaction - not until your computer has crashed or you deleted that one important document you’ve been working on for days, and you actually did backup…

A solution for this might come from iDrive.com, a company offering a service for online backups through their software. The drawback is of course it’ll cost you some, but nonetheless it actually will help you to keep making backups, thanks to their built-in scheduling options!

Really, there isn’t. Despite what a lot of people seem to have been hoping, it doesn’t seem like Google has any plans to make one either on the long term.

According to Valleywag, the highest guys at Google even denied it, to quote them:

I overheard a rep from Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics manufacturer, chatting up a vice president at Google. Now, I know this particular executive is utterly guileless; she wouldn’t lie. And when the Foxconn rep tried to pitch her on getting a contract to make the Googlephone, she replied, flat-out, “We’re not making a Googlephone.”

I guess we’ll just have to live with the iPhone for now… Too bad I guess, some more competition in the field of ‘internet-capable mobile phones’ wouldn’t hurt I suppose, right now Apple seems to be pretty much alone there; the user experiences of Nokia and the Blackberries don’t even some to come close…

It’s almost impossible, but it seems that some people haven’t read or heard about MMORPG currency trading-sites… Personally I read about it nearly daily, thanks to the huge loads of comment spam, and the load of advertisements for these companies in ads on websites.

Anyway, what these companies basically do, is trade ‘real life’ money, such as euros and dollars, for stuff inside games, such as the ever popular Warcraft gold, for the popular MMORPG; World of Warcraft.

Often these companies are ran by an American or European headquarter, and an amount of employees located in China or India, simply because their wages are low, very low. This might not be too handy when you’re looking for someone speaking your native language, to ease up the contact.

Beside that, these ‘gold farmers’, as they tend to be called, as they simply repeat things in-game to ‘harvest’ gold, do not have a very positive reputation, in terms of not speaking the language, and sometimes even as not meeting the deals made.

This company, with the name GameGoods, claims to be different though; they’re entirely ran in Europe, which should sound relaxing to a lot of people, in fact, they only seem to accept British pounds, you wont find it anything more European…