Well. Yesterdays Panorama was a real eye-opener with regard to the exploitation that goes on to provide Primark with cheap clothing.

Personally, I don’t shop there but I’m not one of those who agree with blaming customers. I truly don’t believe that most people would believe – nay expect – that this would happen with a big UK retailer. For Primark to say they didn’t realise themselves in unbelievable. Either they are rubbish and don’t bother checking up on their providers, or are simply lying.

However, I equally don’t think it is too much for consumers to expect that all cheap clothing is due to exploitation. In a world of mass, and automated manufacturer, with cheaper materials being and methods of manufacturer being created all the time, I don’t think it is wrong for people to buy cheap clothes and expect them to have a dubious history.

Having said that, if I was a Primark shopper I wouldn’t be now. Primark should not be engaged in this kind of thing and even saying that they’ve now sacked the relevant suppliers is really not good enough. Never-the-less the real eye-opener can be found on Facebook. Namely the Facebook group named “PRIMARK APPRECIATION SOCIETY“.

Some initial comments include (and these are not my spellings)…

the goverments say its illegal for under 14s to work but the clearly do not enforce it well enough and provide a better life for its children and this is were the problem seems to be, i also agree that the children in tonights documentary did not look ill and as unhappy as i expected before all the hype of the programme. i will still shop at primark like im sure a lot of people will, at the end of the day they must create millions of jobs that are essentail to peoples lives

I always knew that child labour was involved in the making of primark clothing and sorry but I will still shop there. Hey, I don’t have that much money either, so I’m afraid I’ll still be purchasing my ‘bargains’ there.

Child labour always has and always will be around…. Children making clothes in the bbc documentary looked quite happy and healthy… their are more pressing issues goin on the world that desrve our attention ie our yob culture, teen pregnancy, drug issues.

What can I say to that? I feel equally ashamed of my fellow countrymen. I can only hope these are a minority.

I’m off work today and managed to catch The Wright Stuff – always a good laugh. Today they were briefly talking about a Heinz Adverts that’s been pulled after 200 complaints because it had two men kissing in it. And by this I mean a quick peck, in what is a humorous advert (you can still see it on YouTube). They only had time for a few callers on this subject but, sure enough, they had someone ring who was offended by this advert in cast their 4 year old saw it. They stated categorically that they were not homophobic, but then admitted that they thought that an advert with a man and a woman kissing was acceptable, but not when it’s two men.

So you ARE homophobic then. She thought not, and I think a lot of people think the same way as her.

What both these stories have in common is how blinkered we have become as a society – where we are quite obviously not prepared to change our views, or meerly to accept what our views mean, no matter what logic is put in front of us.

Yep, enough of my critical plugins are now working on Firefox 3 that I installed it. Hurrah.

But, of course, this is me so thing went wrong.

First of all, it didn’t seem to find my bookmarks correctly, so I decided to get Foxmarks to simply download everything from it’s server. Oops. Now the smart bookmarks have gone.

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=668145

to get the ’smart’ bookmark folders back, open up about:config and set browser.places.smartBookmarksVersion to 0 then restart Firefox.

Next, I found that the Mozilla plug-ins site was not detecting my version of Firefox correctly.

http://support.mozilla.com/tiki-view_forum_thread.php?locale=en-US&forumId=1&comments_parentId=67725

Enter about:config in the Location bar

Type general.useragent in the “Filter”

Right-click each of the general.useragent preferences and choose “Reset” from the context menu.

For the time being, that appears to be it. Hmm.

Today my new phone turned up.

My provider rang me yesterday asking if I wanted to end my current contract early, and they’d send me a new phone. Well, offers like that I can’t refuse. Especially when they provide me with free internet access on it too.

So, I’ve moved from a Sony Ericsson K800i to the Nokia N95 8Gb, replete with Wi-fi connection and 5mp phone. Hmmm.

Now, if you get one of these, I’d recommend heading to play.com where they do a splendid leather case for it, along with car power cables and the like for just a few points – cheaper than you can get them on eBay.

One thing I have had problems with was my wi-fi connection at home. The connection keeps dropping out. Thankfully a quick Google found my answer, thanks to a forum post. It would appear this is – erm – side effect of having a Netgear modem. It can be worked around though.

Lastly if, like me, you use Google to organise your life I’d like to recommend GooSync, which enables you, free, to sync your Google Calendar with your phone (and not just the N95 – many others). For some cash (about £2 a month) you can get them to sync multiple calendars plus (crucially for me) your Google contacts.

The aforementioned problem with my router also affected GooSync working too – however, as the sync problem occurred first I didn’t initially know I had a much wider issue. However, GooSync have an excellent contact system, as well as forums. I’m always grateful when products such as these come with good support. In the end, though, I found out the above router fix before I got a response, but ended up posting the above to their forums as well (you never know, it may affect someone else too).

Ok, here’s a hypothetical situation. Let’s just say you’re a member of a non-profit, charitable group. Now let’s say that, although, not part of the management committee you have, for a number of years, assisted by writing and running their website and done most of their design work – printed media, and the like. You do it, not because you’ve been asked to, but because you like to help. Now, let’s also say that you’d stated in the past that you’d like to re-design the groups logo, which is looking a little old and tired. Let’s say you’d asked to do this on more than once occasion.

So how would you feel if they decided to do the logo, but didn’t ask you? Instead a committee member (admittedly, the one who should be responsible for such things) was doing it. And it wasn’t mentioned to you, and didn’t go through anyone’s mind that they should maybe speak to you about it. Oh, and a change of logo would have the biggest impact on the website, which you’re responsible for.

Well, when I put this exact situation to an internet forum, the vast majority of people agreed with the following statement that one user posted…

You’re doing this voluntarily out of the kindness of your heart. If that’s the case, I think there’s a simple solution, i.e. stop doing it. If you’re feeling unappreciated (and personally I think you have a fair point) take your time and skills elsewhere..

Hypothetically, of course

Firefox 3 was officially released last night. They were hoping to get 2 million downloads in 24 hours but within about 2 hours they seemed to have 2.5 million. Not bad going.

It also meant that getting hold of the download was difficult. Never-the-less I was able to and tried it out.

Now, I tried the Beta some time ago but didn’t use if “properly” (I rang it alongside my current version 2) because of the lack of compatible plugins. Because of the imminent launch yesterday of the final version, I was expecting this to be mainly resolved. I was wrong.

I have 23 add-ons. 2 are bundled with Firefox and Skype. Of the other 21, only 10 are currently compatible with Firefox 3, leaving 11 not.

So, I re-installed Firefox 2 again (although it didn’t initially work being installed over the top of FF 3, so I uninstalled it and then re-installed FF 2. That worked).

Once a reasonable number (plus those that I deem essential) are compatible, I’ll re-install. But until then…