After 9 straight losses, the Bulldogs have pulled off a brilliant victory against the Kangaroos at Telstra Dome to give Matthew Croft and Simon Garlick a winning send off for the last match of their careers.

The doggies built a decent lead in the 1^st half, scoring five unanswered goals in the 1^st quarter. However at the start of the 3^rd, they did their usual fall-away-while-ahead trick, letting the Kangaroos get to within 2 points after leading by 19. But this time they pulled back, kicking 8 in a row to seal the match.

Garlick & Croft providided a large part of the recovery

Garlick started a run of eight straight goals, slamming one through from a metre out after receiving a handball from a quick thinking Brad Johnson. Croft, the other swansong player of the evening, kicked three in four minutes in the middle of the Dogs’ streak; snapping one through and marking strongly in the goal-square on three other occasions.

It was 18 minutes of pure joy for the long-suffering Bulldogs supporters, who have endured a couple of difficult seasons with the team at the bottom of the ladder and miles from those preliminary finals of the 1990s.

The only trouble is that this sort of intensity & pressure seems to have come from wanting to give Garlick & Croft a good send off, when this should be the standard for the whole season.

Always good, gracenotworks.com has two new articles up:

The URGENT call of God
Seeking answers to their spiritual questions, people often listen to science, philosophy, the stars, politics - but what about the loving voice of God?

Face-to-face with the Lord
Thousands of years ago, a guy named Isaiah came face-to-face with God - and his response still holds meaning for us today.

The Gmail notifier is without a doubt one of the most useful Firefox extensions to date. It’s so simple, it puts a small icon on the status bar, and it can be set to check your Gmail account every x minutes. When you have new mail, this then pops up a message, which is very similar to the ‘Downloads complete’ message. You can then click on the icon to open up your Gmail inbox.

This adds the one feature to Gmail that it was missing: the ability to check your mail in the background so you don’t have to keep the page open all the time.

Note to Google Labs: Build this feature into the Google Toolbar.

Also, there is a mail client program in development on SourceFourge called GmailerXP (as pointed out to me by Joel). While it’s currently only in Alpha development stage, it has promise. You can follow the news on the project using the RSS Feed, and if you’re interested, they’re looking for developers to help.

Mozilla has released security updates for the Mozilla Suite, Firefox & Thunderbird, as per this post on Mozillazine. This is not a new feature release, only a security bug fix. These bugs, the oldest of which is only just more than a month old, have all been fixed by this patch. Just over a month in the wild and Mozilla has pluged all the known security holes (actually, only one is more than a month old, the rest are only a few weeks).

There’s a certain other browser/email development team who could learn from this.