Jun 03 2010

Step By Step New Hotmail Account Guide

Category: PersonalChrisM @ 12:41 am

If you are Roger (Dad’s next door neighbour), this post if for YOU! If you aren’t him, and are just reading this blog post because it is on the front page, feel free to keep reading if you need a step by step guide to starting a new Hotmail account. If I was in Evesham right now, I’d probably try and convince Roger that a GMail address might be a better idea, but that would take too long using Dad as a message relayer :)

Anyway, onto the guide.

1) Turn on the PC. Start your preferred internet browser (likely to be Internet Explorer, Firefox or Chrome)

Start Your Internet Browser

Start Your Internet Browser

2) Enter www.hotmail.co.uk in the address bar, and press Return or Enter on the keyboard

Enter The Address

Enter The Address

 
Press Return Or Enter (Thanks Wikimedia)

Press Return Or Enter

3) Click the Sign Up button located in the lower left of the screen
(Hoping a screen shot isn’t necessary here :) )

4) Decide whether you want a @hotmail.co.uk or a @live.co.uk address. It makes NO differences, other than personal preference. If hotmail is your choice, proceed to step 5. If you want live.co.uk, click the first drop down box and click on live.co.uk

5) Pick an address you want to use. It makes sense to choose something that is difficult to mis-spell, easy to remember, and finally, something someone else will not have already registered. Bad choice examples: amateurastrologer@hotmail.co.uk , committed_drunkenness@live.co.uk , john.smith@hotmail.co.uk . All of those are either easy for other people to spell incorrectly, or will most likely have been registered already.

6) Enter your chosen e-mail address in the first text entry box. Click the check availability button. Swear loudly as you discover someone else already has the exact address you want. If it isn’t free, Microsoft will ask for your name and some relevant interests and suggest available e-mail addresses you might like. Either follow their steps, or click on the little X in the Windows Live ID advanced search box and type in a new e-mail address. Again click the check availability button. Repeat these step until you are informed that your chosen address is available. (If possible, try not to select an alternative address they offer that has a number on the end. Again, easy for other people to mis-type/remember it).

7) Select a password that you want to use to sign into this e-mail account. If possible, choose something you do NOT use anywhere else online. It needs to be six characters long, and if you use a mixture of lower and UPPER case letters, numbers and special characters (£${ etc. etc.) it will be harder for other people to guess your password and hack in. It will also make it more difficult for you to remember, so try and find a balance :) Type this same password into the retype password box.

8) If you have now selected an e-mail address and password that Microsoft isn’t complaining about WRITE THEM DOWN NOW. TWICE. Keep each piece of paper in a different room, so if you ever forget your address or password, and can’t find the 1st piece of paper with the details recorded on, you have a second chance.

9) If you already have a different e-mail address that you can still access, enter it in the Alternate e-mail address box. This is the address that Microsoft will use if you ever ask to reset your password if you’ve forgotten it (and lost both pieces of paper). If you don’t already have an e-mail account, click the “Or choose a security question for password reset” link. If you clicked the link, select a question you won’t ever forget the answer to, and enter that answer in the Secret Answer box.

10) Fill in the rest of the boxes down to Birth Year with your relevant information.

Fill In Other Boxes. ZIP=Post Code

Fill In Other Boxes. ZIP=Post Code

11) In the text box below Birth Year, you need to type the eight characters shown in the image just above it. This is Microsoft’s attempt to make sure you are a real human asking for an e-mail address. They apparently had problems with hamsters and motorbikes pretending to be humanoid and asking for addresses. Or it could have been people using automatic systems for spamming. I can never remember which.

Capcha Code

Capcha Code

12) Untick the “Send me e-mail with promotional … ….” box. Double check all the boxes on the page are correctly filled in.

13) Click I accept. If all information has been entered correctly, you will now be logged into your e-mail account. The first time you send an e-mail, you may be asked to enter another eight letters from a strange looking image. Again, another anti-spam step.

14) In the future, visit hotmail.co.uk, and if you see your e-mail account on the right hand side, click sign in. Then enter your password, and click sign in. If you are on a different computer or internet browser, you will also need to enter your e-mail address.

15) Ideally, repeat steps 1-13 and create a second e-mail address that you will use when signing up for other accounts online. Why? Your first e-mail address is for friends, family and people who you trust to send you real e-mails. The second account you create can be given to anyone/any company online. This way, if these companies spam you, it won’t interfere with your personal e-mail account, and if the spam ever gets too bad, you can just create a new second account, and not have to tell all your friends to use a new e-mail address.

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May 19 2010

You’re Spellen Cud Of Bean Bettr

Category: Fashion,Interesting,Language,WordPressChrisM @ 3:12 pm

It is true, if you write online for personal reasons (hopefully you make the extra effort if your published work is for a company), your spelling could have been better, and quite possibly your grammar could be improved as well. I’m definitely not immune to either issue. That said, if I see kids ties, I do know there is most likely an apostrophe homeless this afternoon!
Help is at hand, as although Firefox has a spell checking facility built in, the grammar side isn’t covered. After The Deadline is available as either a Firefox and Chrome add on or a bookmarklet you could use in Internet Explorer. When activated, it can check for grammatical mistakes, and even remind you whether you’ve checked your text over, before hitting publish!
I’ve just checked, and it is also available as a plugin for WordPress and a few other systems.

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Nov 19 2007

Burping For Real This Time

Category: PersonalChrisM @ 10:44 am

If you were sincerely upset by the misleading title of the Oz Equals Land Of Toxic Emissions? post, go and check out this site on burps and farts.
OK, so it is not the most mature of content for web sites to focus on, for sure, but if someone, somewhere wants to find information on something, you can almost guarantee a webmaster has already compiled just such a site, LMAO.
Sadly, I could not get the videos (such as Britney Spears belching) to work at all in either Internet Explorer of Firefox, but the audio files make up for that. If you find this all immature and not to your taste, just skip on to the next post.

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Sep 20 2007

A Prime Example Of My Stubbornness…

Category: PersonalChrisM @ 2:43 am

The previous post took around 30 minutes to write, mainly because I was also doing a few other things at the same time. Having written the post, I hit the Publish button, and moved onto to clear down the work required on a few dozen other FireFox tabs, intending to return to the WordPress tab a little later.
For some reason I checked back on it before that. Lucky really – the post was lost, with a 406 error, I believe. Some issue with a suitable request not being issued or found… Anyway, simply returning back to the previous page just presented me with an EMPTY post page, with all my work missing. OK, so I’ve had similar problems before, clicked forward, and then F5ed, and the data has been re-posted correctly. So I tried this approach, unfortunately the same error returned. Before looking into this much further, I opened up Internet Explorer, and checked I could publish a test post there. (Didn’t want to do this within FireFox in case I cleared some sort of internal cache, and therefore lose all hope of recovering the work.) This new test post appeared fine.
I now had a choice, spend perhaps 10 minutes re-writing a post, as I still had the basic outline in my head, or… decide the PC was trying to annoy me on purpose, and rise to the challenge & beat the issue into submission.
Friends will not be greatly surprised to hear that I took the second route – and some twenty minutes later, recovered a version of the text, by sniffing the outgoing packets that were sent whenever I hit F5. Unfortunately the software I had installed to do this was rather rudimentary, with no filtering options, and as I had a lot of other pages loading and data being sent, it took a while to track down the right packets to analyse. Once I had searched for, and replaced, the silly codes (ASCII escape codes??), I had the post back again. OK, so it would have been simpler to just retype the thing, rather than start sniffing network packets, but it had been a while, and you can never tell when it might be useful :)

Then before this post was finished, we had a power cut. Luckily we have already replaced the last UPS we had, so I had enough time to hibernate the PC. The power came back 5 minutes later, the PC booted up, then decided it wanted to hibernate before it had finished booting. It hung for 5 minutes, before I hit restart. T.F. for FireFox’s ability to restore sessions when it senses your PC has become fubarred :) Even our washing machine didn’t lose its programming, which was lucky, as I am doing some last minute washing, drying and ironing to get ready for Amsterdam and Britain. I’d already been delayed on that front by a few hours when our hot water went all orange again! Then Kara decided it was time to rid the shirt I am wearing of those evil adornments – buttons.

However, none of the above is going to bug me, I’m on my way to get severely relaxed, meet friends and family after a break of some 9 months, so I shall take it all in without getting too stressed. Oh, and Steve, a good friend from my Uni days back at Bournemouth has just got in contact through Facebook, my beautiful wife has just kissed me before going to bed, and I may even be in bed myself before dawns breaks, so the world could be in such a worse state for me right now :)

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Aug 24 2007

CNN Report On Nuclear Hangover In Kazakhstan

Category: In The Media,KazakhstanChrisM @ 6:43 pm

I watched an interesting short news item on the problems facing the area in Kazakhstan that was used by the USSR to test nuclear weapons. I was actually quite surprised at the tone used by people in the area, as I would have thought that they would feel more cautious talking to a foreign reporter about things like this. Anyway, catch it over at Yahoo News.
I just rechecked the video, and for some reason it is now playing at 50% of the intended height. This was in FireFox, I checked the same link in Internet Explorer 7, and didn’t have the same problem… If you have issues with the video, try switching browsers.

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Aug 08 2007

Standards Were Needed…

Category: In The MediaChrisM @ 3:01 am

If you have any interest in the history of the internet, or more specifically the World Wide Web (unless you remember the days of bulletin boards and Compuserve, the two terms are probably synonymous), then an article I recently found may well be of interest to you. It details the battles fought over the need for standards in the days of early web sites and browsers. Check the Business Week link for the full run down, however it basically explains how Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Netscape browser were very incompatible at the beginning, which lead to the ridiculous situation of web sites having to be designed, hosted, and of course paid for, in duplicate. Although the comments indicate that some in this field believe Zeldman (the subject of the article) receives too much glory, the story behind the creation of standards is of interest. To me at least, hopefully others won’t fall asleep after the 1st page ;-P

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Jul 06 2007

Alex’s New Blog – Dryad Musings

Category: Friends,Kazakhstan,PersonalChrisM @ 4:47 pm

Alex has now setup her blog at her new domain – www.DryadMusings.com. When you get a moment, check it out, and if you happen to know anything about CSS, you could even leave her a message about sorting her Internet Explorer rendering issues.
You can find her post on the Birthday Celebrations in Astana , if you would like to find out a little bit more about what has been and will be happening to celebrate Astana’s 10 years as the capital of Kazakhstan and also the President’s birthday

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May 29 2007

Homepages EXACTLY How You Want Them

Category: PersonalChrisM @ 11:04 pm

Personally, I have about:blank as my homepage for both Internet Explorer and FireFox. Why? Two reasons, primarily because I only have a measly allowance of 700 Mb per month, and also because the application loads a little quicker when it only need to display a blank page at start up. (Has anyone else noticed IE7 still takes a silly amount of time to achieve this?)
However, if I was not data limited, I would have setup a personalized homepage over at NetVibes.com a while ago – you can either create an account there, and have your choices saved permanently, or if you prefer to experiment with it a little first, you can just rely on a cookie saving your preferences for a certain amount of time. (If you do settle on one design, do reg an account, else you risk losing your choices eventually)
Thanks to a postie over at the PPP forums for the heads up on this site, I’ve forgotten who you are, but if you leave a comment, I’ll gladly link to you :)

This post is NOT sponsored, I’ve just been meaning to write about it for a while, apologies for the delay…

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Oct 28 2006

Fixed Issue With IE6 Users Viewing This Site

Category: PersonalChrisM @ 5:11 pm

I’ve previously mentioned that if people use Internet Explorer 6 (rather than FireFox, or IE7) to view this site, they will not see what is intended. I’ve now discovered what caused the 2nd sidebar column to ‘slip’ down the page, below the bottom of the 1st sidebar. It was when a site with a long URL was listed in the ‘We’re Linked From…’ section on the right.
I’ve now removed the original widget, found the JavaScript code to use from www.wholinked.com , and inserted it in a King Text widget. Problem solved.
One day I’ll move onto why the default FireFox extension for viewing online videos (WMVs in this case) results in a loss of audio/video sync, whereas WMP or off-line viewing displays no such errors.
Also created a proper 404 page this week, as I noticed some sites were using incorrect URLs to link to entries on this site, and the original error page wasn’t very useful. To check it out, enter in this site’s name, then invent a page, for example, you could try www.chrismerriman.com/THISpageDOESnotEXIST.htm or www.chrismerriman.com/ABCDEFGH.php etc. etc.

[EDIT] And, thanks, but there is no need to leave a comment that the links don’t work, as requested in the error page – save it for links that are SUPPOSED to open real pages ;>

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Oct 26 2006

BBC World Report On the Borat film

Category: In The Media,Kazakhstan,Personal,VideosChrisM @ 11:02 am

This is a little video clip surrounding the London premiere of Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.

The audio isn’t perfect, as I had to raise the volume a little post-production, sorry. A reminder again, that FireFox users may experience a lack of audio/video synchronisation. Try viewing it in Internet Explorer for now.

Feel free to leave a note by clicking on the comments link below…

EDIT : If you find the first link to the video doesn’t work, please try This one instead. Thanks

EDIT2 : Wow, this page (well the alternative link for the vid) has suddenly eaten nearly all of my hosting bandwidth available for the rest of the month, so for now, it is the first link only. Leave a comment if people find problems with the first link, and I’ll try uploading it to youtube or something.

EDIT3 : Many months later I remembered to upload this to YouTube, so watch it all you like…

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