For the record, I hate captchas. No doubt this has something to do with being a cranky, impatient bitch.
And, for the record, the captcha that eBay gave me today pretty much seems to confirm this:
Now the real question is: should I be offended?
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I’ve always found the Windows Recycling Bin prompt that asks “Are you sure you want to empty these X objects?” to be rather irritating. So much so, in fact, that I seem to have developed a reflex that leads me to immediately click “Yes” without thinking.
Which, frankly, leads to some seriously impressive cussing every time I realize I just erased a file or folder I shouldn’t have… like my entire music library. (No, I hadn’t realized that I’d sent it to the Recycle Bin. I thought I was just moving the thing.)
When you’ve spent hundreds of dollars on music downloads and find they’re all gone in the click of a mouse button, you’ve got two choices: suffer a cardiac arrest, or use a Handy Recovery, a sanity-saving program that restores deleted files or folders, even those dumped from the recycling bin.
The program can even restore files damaged by viruses and disk errors, along with files stored on deleted partitions. Since it uses a browser interface similar to Windows Explorer, there’s no risk of recovering things you don’t really want: you see the deleted files along with your regular ones, then select which you want to restore.
You can even filter them by file name, mask, date or size if you have a hard drive as bulging with excess files as mine is. Don’t have time to go through them all at that moment? No problem: you can create an optical disk image and save it for later review and file recovery.
No, the program’s not free (although there’s a 30-day trial download), but frankly the $39 cost is a fraction of what I would have spent re-purchasing my songs from Amazon and Wal-Mart. And, considering the peace of mind it gives me to know that my hair-trigger mouse clicks don’t really mean my files are gone forever, well, that’s priceless.
I don’t get to listen to the radio much these days, mostly because my son thinks that audio equipment was invented for the sole purpose of playing Kidz Bop. Now, rather than endure that mind-numbing musical travesty, I simply leave the stereo unplugged and make excuses about why it’s not working.
But I do miss it. I’m one of those strange people who actually prefer radio to CDs, particularly radio programming from smaller stations. There’s something about listening to a DJ’s song selection that’s analogous to blogging: you get to know a bit about the person by the tunes they choose to play.
Like when a disc jockey plays a slew of depressing songs because they just got dumped. But, seriously, what kind of list of depressing songs doesn’t include Crowds by Bauhaus? (I wouldn’t listen to that at work, folks.)
Her: “I sent you an email earlier with a cute Valentine’s Day picture. Why didn’t you respond?”
Me: “I don’t remember seeing an email from you today. Hold on, let me check…”
Her: “I know I sent it.”
Me: “Oh, I see the problem. My A-V program moved your email into quarantine. That file you sent is infected.”
Her: “No it’s not. I got it from a friend of mine.”
Me: “Uh-huh. Well, I re-scanned it and it says it’s got a Trojan in it. So I can’t open it.”
Her: “So, your A-V’s wrong.”
Me: “I don’t think so. So, what’re you doing today?”
Her: “Not much. Trying to figure out why my computer’s so slow today and keeps losing its internet connection.”
Seriously, do you ever get the impression that some people must actually have to work hard to maintain the state of ignorance which seems to come so naturally to them?
Over the weekend I got tired of running into problems accessing Gmail, not to mention how cluttered my email archives were beginning to feel. So I finally took the plunge and upgraded from Outlook 2002 to Outlook 2007.
And I can’t stand it so far.
Oh, sure, I know there are all sorts of nifty features and I like the idea behind running my email, calendar and RSS feeds all from one screen. But, frankly, I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing and, to make matters worse, there are so many pretty, colorful buttons and icons on the screen that I’m afraid to click any of them to find out what, exactly, their purpose is.
Hence the blog silence. I spent the entire morning downloading old stuff from my Gmail account and saving stuff into organized archives. Then I spent the first part of the afternoon setting up various rules to process the mail I receive on my 15 email accounts and make it a bit more manageable.
Now, I just found out that Outlook imported my feeds without keeping them in their separate folders (i.e., “Monday’s reading”, “Tuesday’s reading”, etc.). I am not about to put up with that.
So… anyone know how to delete 400+ feeds all at once from Outlook 2007?
If your life is anything like mine, you probably find yourself sitting down to your computer in the morning and trying to race through email while browsing your feeds and maybe — just maybe — thinking up something to write about on your own blog. In that precious hour or so, you don’t always have time to read the things that capture your interest, but despite your best intentions of revisiting the blog or website you somehow always forget to do so.
That’s why I love the Read it Later addon for Firefox. One click on the browser bar is all it takes to add something to your queue to revisit later, when you’ve got time. Later, when you’ve got a few free moments, you simply click on another button to read something from your list. (That same click removes it from your queue, so you don’t need to worry about the reading list getting unmanageable.)
But what if you don’t have Firefox?
Steve Reubel just pointed me to a free website that pretty much does the same thing as that add-on: InstaPaper. Register and drag their button to your browser bar, then click on it when you’re browsing to add things to your reading list. When you’ve got the time, return to their website and read the “newspaper” you’ve created for yourself.
Sweet!
Although I was finally up and about yesterday morning, I elected to spend the day updating my computer, running AV and spyware scans, defragging the hard drive… and playing Anno 1503
Little did I know I was setting myself up for a heap load of problems, thanks to the RealPlayer updates. Why the problem? Because, as it turns out, I’d previously installed the RealPlayer 10.5 update installs advertising software on the sly. Now, I’m one of those weird people who actually read the EULA rather closely, and there was NO mention in it that RealPlayer’s “message center” would turn my laptop into an ad-delivery service whether I wanted that to happen or not.
Next thing I knew, my laptop had slowed to a crawl and I wound up having problems loading more than a handful of websites at a time. For someone who typically opens 3 dozen tabs at once, while also running a desktop blogging client and a feed reader, being reduced to 5 or 6 tabs and nothing else absolutely hamstrings my productivity. Also, it pisses me off.
So I updated to RealPlayer 11 thinking it would solve my problems. But did it? No, no it did not.
Turns out, RealPlayer 11 also installs the Rhapsody music engine… without warning that it does so. So why is that a problem? Well, because Rhapsody has been running malicious banner ads, so I naturally want to stay as far away from them as I wish I could stay from my mother-in-law.
Not that I’d have known Rhapsody was on my computer, mind you. RealPlayer didn’t actually tell me it was installing it (they’ve since changed that, I hear). I only learned about it because checking my Add/Remove Programs in Control Panel is part of my process when updating and disinfecting my computer.
So, I removed RealPlayer and then — here’s the kicker — had to remove Rhapsody separately. Then I had the pleasure of removing all of the spyware RealPlayer had installed on my laptop.
What the heck, I figured, while I’m removing things… so RealPlayer’s gone now, too. And meanwhile, StopBadware.org has labeled RealPlayer as “badware” for these practices, leading millions of other folks to take the same actions that I have.
Considering that StopBadware.org is largely funded by Google, I’d say that’s a Google Spank that RealPlayer not only deserves but ought to pay attention to if it hopes to stay in business.
Steve Jobs unveiled the sexiest thing to hit computing in his Macworld keynote address on Tuesday: the ultra-thin Apple MacBook Air
How thin is it? Computerworld Magazine says it feels like holding a stack of paper plates in your hand, yet it still has a full-size keyboard, the same 13.3 inch screen used in the Macbook series, and processors which — although not top-of-the-line — are equivalent to the Macbook Pro series of two years ago.
I wants one, people. Truly, I do.
Oh, I don’t have any good reason to buy one. My Toshiba is only two years old and still works like a trooper, particularly now that I’ve replaced the power cord and stocked up on spare laptop batteries.
About the only problem I’m having with it these days (besides not being able to play several computer games) are some scratches on the screen. But the cost of laptop screen repair is significantly lower than buying a Apple MacBook Air
That doesn’t stop me from wanting one, though.
Which is why I’ve been spending the evening trying to think of ways to convince VH that, if something were to go wrong with my Toshiba, we should just get a MBA rather than send my machine in to a quick laptop repair center.
So far, my list looks like this:
Yeah, I got nothing.
Researchers at Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina were able to control a robot in Japan using a monkey’s brain. That’s right, a monkey’s brain in which they’d implanted electrodes that communicated in real-time with a robot over 7,000 miles away.
“They can walk in complete synchronization,” said Dr. Miguel Nicolelis, who also is the Anne W. Deane Professor of Neuroscience at Duke. “The most stunning finding is that when we stopped the treadmill and the monkey ceased to move its legs, it was able to sustain the locomotion of the robot for a few minutes — just by thinking — using only the visual feedback of the robot in Japan.”
Neat, huh? But is it news?
I mean, ever since Bush-Cheney got reelected there have been plenty of people wondering if the reverse procedure’s been in effect for a while.
Jimmy Wales, the man behind Wikipedia, has just launched a search engine that allows users to rate results, theoretically improving over time the quality of information returned.
In an interview, he said that his aim was “to build a completely freely licensed, open-source search engine” that would be far more transparent than Google and other existing services, which keep their algorithms for ranking search results a secret.
The search engine, Wikia, went live today and will be initially using its own ranking algorithm, with results refined by user ratings. The search engine can be used by anyone but, at least for the time being, only users willing to disclose their identities will be permitted to rank results. Wales expects it will take two years or more before Wikia is competitive with giants like Google and Yahoo!.
Two years? If the news about this gets out to all of those folks who’ve been waiting for a viable alternative to Google, I’d be surprised if it didn’t take half that time.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the day that I’ve been waiting for has finally arrived. As I paged through sales fliers this morning, I saw that Wal-Mart is offering an unbunbdled Wii console (in store only) for $294.
I’d write about how excited I am, but right now I need to jump in the shower and get down there before they sell out.
Whee!!!
UPDATE: Three little words guaranteed to break a girl’s heart: Out Of Stock. Oh, well, maybe next sale.
Despite an increasing number of companies adopting high-tech anti-spam measures, and the government’s CAN-SPAM act, spam remains on the rise.
I think it’s hardly any coincidence that the same time span has seen an increase in worldwide internet use which has now reached 1.24 billion users.
Whether we’re talking on- or offline it’s like “Paper Collar Joe” Bessimer said, “there’s a sucker born every minute… and two to take ‘em”. In other words, even the most technologically savvy anti-spam service is only as good as its customers.
If you’ve been a net user for any significant period of time you know it’s become something of a year-end tradition to predict the death of email. Why, just four years ago PC Magazine — which just announced that spam has reached unprecedented heights — was predicting the impending death of email.
Now it’s Slate Magazine’s turn to claim that email is about to become obsolete thanks to the younger generation’s preference for IMs and SMS or even Web 2.0 applications like Twitter and Utterz.
Email, its wannabe mourners say, is for old people. It’s not cool. It will soon will exist only in the memories of the middle-aged and a handful of email archiving servers.
Then again, the folks about whom they’re writing — mostly teens and early 20-somethings — have yet to be inducted into Corporate America. There they’ll quickly find that employers are banning cell phone use on the job, leaving people who rely on SMS for communication high and dry. Likewise, IMs require software installation, and most employers have policies prohibiting users from installing such programs (although there are ways around them).
So what does that leave us with?
You guessed it: email. It’s everywhere, accessible in many cases from everywhere, and everyone has it.
And, as long as there is email there will be spam. So if spam’s on the rise it’s because email use is on the rise.
So let the folks at Slate and PC Magazine claim that email is obsolete if they want. I’ll believe they mean it when they no longer offer the “email this” button at the bottom of their articles. Until then, I say the rumors of its demise are greatly exaggerated.
Big news for iPod Nano
Not that I’ll be upgrading my iPod to one that plays video. I’ve been renting and buying movies and TV shows to my computer
Maybe that’s why I’m not in a hurry to go digital despite the mandatory broadcasting change in 2009. In this day and age, I see no reason to be tied to a TV set, much less a sofa, anymore. Not when I can take what I want to hear, watch or read with me wherever I go.
I’m having a hell of a time finding a decent statistics tracking program to use for all four sites. Sitemeter is all right, and I use it here at EV, but after losing the password for Queen of Snark I haven’t been able to retrieve it no matter how many times I’ve requested them to send the dang thing to me. (And, yes, I checked my spam folder: it’s not there, either.)
Does anyone know of a good way to track hits, visitors, page views, referrers, search engine queries and other data that’s only relevant to someone who, hypothetically speaking, needs to get her ego stroked now and again?
Don’t bother suggesting Google’s Webmaster tools. Last time I signed up with them all of my sites took a HUGE spanking, including EV. (Seriously, 4,120 incoming links and all I have is a PR3? Puh-leeze. And why does Yahoo! show 104 times more? Hmmm….??? Might be because of Satan?)
Of course, MyBlogLog has some neat tools, but at $25 per year per blog that’s a rather hefty outlay, IMVO.
So… free site tracking statistic suggestions are welcome.
Anyone??? Anyone??? Beuhler?????
Let’s face it: technology changed your life and mine. Were it not for the power of computers, you wouldn’t be reading this nor would I be writing it. Hopefully, both of our lives have been enriched. I know that mine has: in the almost 5 years I’ve now spent blogging, and the 16+ years before that during which I owned a computer, I don’t think I’d be nearly as happy, intellectually fulfilled or world-curious as I now am.
I can remember the day I got my first computer, a big honkin’ thing that ran off dual 8 1/2 inch floppy disks, with no hard drive and only 64 k of memory. It was almost the size of my studio apartment’s mini-fridge, and it kept my place nice and warm… even in summertime. That didn’t stop me. Oh, no. I had a 300 baud modem and a handful of BBS telephone numbers, and after connecting with my first one I knew there was a big, wide world to explore.
Imagine, then, how the world will change once every child can be just as connected as we are. Once a little girl in Sacramento is able to go online to chat with her friend in Somalia to discover that, despite their different religions or cultures or skin color, they’ve got something in common: they’re still little girls whose hearts contain all the unblemished desire to Grow Up And Be Somebody.
Imagine if that pierced and tat-covered teenage boy living in Mission, Kansas finds out that he’s going through the same alienation as his counterpart in Makin, Kiribati. How much time and angst can be spared in their lives if they discover what we’ve already learned: that deep down, we are none of us that much different from each other, no matter how special our Mommies tell us we are?
Get them online, folks. That’s the best way to win hearts and minds. And right now you can make that happen for a child in developing nation while helping a child nearby out, too.
The One Laptop Per Child initiative has extended its offer to provide a free laptop for every one that you buy. These machines are utterly ingenious and designed to withstand all the grief that a child or a child’s climate can dish out. They have rubberized keyboards, amazing hinges which enable them to be converted from laptop to tablet to gaming pad and they’re Linux-based. Oh, and they’re only $400.
That’s right: from now until December 31 you can buy one laptop and give one at the same time for $400 (USD). Or just simply give for $200.
Want to bring peace to the earth and goodwill to mankind? Get the world online so we can all learn that geographical boundaries only matter to those who read maps and polls.
Have you received a nasty little message from your WordPress blog telling you that, rather than being the master (or mistress) of your own domain, you’ve been blacklisted and can’t even log in? You’re not alone. My blogs all greeted me with the same message this morning.
Apparently the problem is due to the BadBehavior plugin’s query of a third-party blacklist site which has been returning false positive results for all IP addresses. No doubt there are a LOT of angry bloggers right now.
The solution is simple, and takes only two minutes: download the latest version of BadBehavior and FTP it to your WordPress install.
Lori Drew, the meddling Mom who cyber bullied a teen into committing suicide now has her own Wikipedia page.
Drew and her family, meanwhile, have become the target of cyber-bullying themselves, with internet sites calling for vigilante justice (video)* since Missouri prosecutors won’t be filing charges against Drew.
There is, however, an investigation into a blog that chronicled the entire situation leading up to and including Megan’s death. The horrifying title? “Megan Had It Coming“. The title of the first entry? “I’m Lori Drew,” a long attempt to claim that Megan Meiers had actually cyber-bullied Drew’s daughter to the point where the author felt obligated to step in:
That’s when I decided I would have to teach Megan a lesson and give her a taste of her own medicine.
I decided that I would shut down the Josh account, and not be nice about it. Megan’s feelings be damned, and to hell with her consequence! I was going to protect my daughter no matter what. So I sent the break up e-mail to Megan saying that Josh didn’t want to be friends because Megan was very cruel to her friends. Naturally, Megan freaked, and I tried to keep the messages short and sweet. As a last resort bargaining chip, I figured that if she really loved Josh then maybe he could pressure her into stopping her lies. But it didn’t work, and the situation devolved lightning fast.
The sheriff’s office is investigating the blog to find out whether Lori Drew was actually the author, a move which Megan’s own family welcomes.
Meanwhile, news reports now say that Drew was not the one who wrote the final message that prompted 13 year-old Megan Meiers to commit suicide. In the new American tradition, Drew had outsourced that task to a temporary employee* who’s been under psychiatric treatment in connection with Megan’s death. Drew’s attorney claims she had “absolutely, 100 percent” no involvement in the cruel messages or even the creation of the MySpace page through which Megan met “Josh”, and was unaware of them until after Megan’s death.
This, of course, contradicts Drew’s own prior statements to prosecutors along with those of witnesses to whom she confided the details of her scheme, but I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that Lori Drew is once again trying to toy with reality. After all, she’s proven herself to be deadly good at that game.
(* Thanks to Venomite Tom for emailing me the links.)
I’d mentioned in the comments the other day that my laptop cord was starting to do strange things. Friday morning, it just got stranger: first the thing sizzled, then there was a huge snap, a puff of smoke and a shower of sparks. Naturally, I yanked the thing out of my laptop and the wall (yes, in that order: I do have my priorities).
No biggie, I figured. I’d just find a replacement cord.
The morning consisted of calling every computer and electronics store in a 30-mile radius and being told by series of gum smacking mouth breathers that, no, they don’t have it in stock; I’d have to order it from the manufacturer. But did I believe them? Oh, no. I thought I knew better, so I made a trek to a half-dozen stores where I found out, sure enough, the mouth breathers were right.
Toshiba Direct wanted $90 for the cord, and an additional $35 for overnight shipping. Too pricey for my blood. So I searched and found another store offering a replacement cord for a mere $40, with $15 overnight shipping. Much better.
Silly me: I forgot that as far as businesses are concerned, “overnight shipping” doesn’t include the weekend so I’ve been without my laptop for 72. Seventy-two!
Thank goodness the FedEx guy started his route in my town. I’ve never been so happy to see a stranger on my doorstep at 9:30 in the morning.
UPDATE: New laptop cord is defective. It cuts in and out & isn’t charging the battery. New one from Toshiba’s on the way and the bad one is on its way back to that other company. My laptop’s almost out of juice, though, so blogging will have to wait until tomorrow.
Back when I bought my Toshiba Satellite laptop, I was both excited and concerned about the ability to upgrade to Vista for an unbelievably low cost. At the time I figured I had enough of a challenge ahead of me just getting used to a new machine — removing all of the bloatware that manufacturers inevitably fob off on consumers, installing the programs that I can’t live without, tweaking it until it was just right. I decided to postpone my Vista upgrade for a time, then forgot all about it until receiving an email last month warning that the offer was about to expire.
So I bit. Sort of.
I bought the upgrade and decided to wait to try it out until I had a chunk of time to spend learning my way around my computer again. Having gone through that very experience back when XP replaced Win98 — which took me several days to get used to — I knew the chances were good that I’d be struggling with a new OS for days, which would quite possibly mean being offline for days, too. So this past Thanksgiving weekend, which I’d told myself I didn’t need to worry about blogging, seemed like a good time to take Vista out for a spin.
I hated it.
It took almost three hours to install, then slowed my laptop’s boot time to a crawl reminiscent of the old PS/2 days… the IBM version, not Sony’s. Meanwhile, my hard drive constantly churned thanks to the numerous unnecessary processes Vista insisted on loading. Then, although I found the Aero interface to be quite lovely, it drained my laptop’s battery so fast that I had to once again tether myself to an electrical outlet just to keep the machine going long enough to read all of my email. So Aero went, but that hardly solved all of the problems.
Vista refused to play nicely with many of the programs that I need on a day-to-day basis. Every time I tried fixing one of those problems another popped up. Eventually it became all too obvious that if I wanted to run Vista I’d have to change just about everything else that I like using, and naturally the changes would all cost money, too.
No thanks.
Yes, I probably could just switch to a Mac… but that would have a steep learning curve, too, in addition to a hefty price tag. I could switch to Linux, but again, I’d need a good chunk of time to learn an all-new OS but at this point I’m a bit reluctant to waste another long weekend as I did trying out Vista.
I’m back to XP, back to my comfort zone, and keeping my fingers crossed that I won’t be forced into using Vista anytime soon. Meanwhile, I’m waiting anxiously for the XP Service Pack 3 update, which is set for release next year. It’s said to speed up performance by 10%, which means that computers running XP will be twice as fast as those running Vista.
So why would anyone bother to switch to Vista, is what I’m wondering. I didn’t notice anything amazing about it, although the Aero interface was quite pretty. Then again, thanks to my friend Margi’s recommendation, I can get a pretty interface now on my XP machine using StarDock.
What, then, is the point of Vista?
Oh, sure, it’s probably just coincidence that Google’s stock closed at the Number of the Beast today.
Then again, closing at that price is getting to be a habit.
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