Happy Birthday, Andy Roo Andrew!
Summer cleaning - While the girls have been away, it seems Michelle has been bitten by the clean and organize bug. She has been going through the kids clothes, sorting what stays, what can go to charity, and what is better off just thrown away. She had me sweep the basement, basically because she considers it too gross. Besides the dust I must have swept up a couple hundred dead bugs, mostly lady bugs. They're NOT cute once they've been dead a few months.
Chimney - Since we're getting a wood pellet stove insert installed in a couple of weeks, we needed to get the fireplace and chimney cleaned out in advance. A local chimney cleaner came by today. Michael was afraid of the "strange man", so much so that it kept him from following through on his toilet training. After some thought, we also had the cleaner install a chimney cap. It's basically a special cover at the top of the chimney that allows the smoke out but keeps out rain and small animals. Up until now, rain and snow could come down the flue, bringing a sooty smell along with it. It seems that chimney caps are one of those things that's often overlooked on new construction.
Painting - Since the girls' bedroom is vacant, Michelle did a little temporary rearrangement so that she could paint the twins' room. I helped her by disassembling the old crib that was in there. We're not sure at the moment how to dispose of it. I also helped her tape the room edges. She's doing a bit of painting right now to get a jump start on things.
Subwoofer - While she got started on more painting prep, I couldn't help but notice the sound coming from the computer was distorted on the low end. I was listening to Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody. "Excellent!", as Wayne Campbell would say. I stopped the music, unplugged the sound system, and turned the subwoofer over. Sure enough there was the sound of a few things rolling around inside of it. The lil' doo-bees must have thought it fun to shove stuff down the sub's sound vent. Now it was rolling around inside the sound chamber. After a few futile attempts with tongs, I broke down, got a screwdriver and disassembled the subwoofer. With Michelle's assistance we took out: a plastic top, a matchbox car, a plastic ball, and a piece of fake play food. Thanks guys!
Nextel - I had prepared myself for a steep first bill from Nextel: 2 phones, 2 activation fees, billing for the past month and the month ahead. Unfortunately we got penalized for going over. I think that if you're going to switch completely to mobile phones, it can be pretty hard to guesstimate how many peak usage minutes you'll need. You do a little back of the envelope and give it your best guess. Originally I was going to go with 600 minutes between us. Before signing the contract I upped that to 800 minutes. In the first month of use we consumed a little over a thousand peak minutes. More than 200 minutes over, at 40 cents a minute! Ouch!
So I went in this afternoon to up our plan to 1000 shared minutes and get a few tips. One thing I'm going to have to limit are Claire's long "lock myself in the room and gab" time. If she wants to catch up with TJ and Cassidy, I'm going to limit her to weekends when we have unlimited free air time and domestic long distance. The other thing I did was put in a speed dial to my office on Michelle's phone. There's no sense burning peak air time on both ends if I'm just sitting at my desk. Lastly, I learned how to use the walkie-talkie feature in a more discrete phone-like manner so that the conversation isn't blasted on the external speaker. That way if Michelle wants to relay a quick message to me in the middle of the work day, she can still use the complementary Direct Connect minutes without fear of everyone around me hearing her. I think with those minor adjustments, it should be easy to avoid getting penalized for going over our allotted minutes.
Vacation bonus - In a surprise move, ARC paid us for our unused vacation today. I figured we wouldn't see that check for a few weeks. Unfortunately I was so tied up at the Nextel rep I didn't get a chance to deposit that live check. There's no direct deposit on this last check. It'll go a long way towards covering the costs of the pellet stove and its installation. Getting a decent extra paycheck mitigates the heartache of not taking a vacation this summer and visiting family out west. I'd still rather have 2-3 weeks in Chicago instead of a stove, but at least we get some compensation...
Hey Scott, I just downloaded and installed Mozilla Firefox. So far I am very happy with it. Thanks for the advice.
Chris
Of all the browsers out there, it comes the closest in rendering what I've coded/intended for the HTML/CSS. There's only 1 bit of standard CSS which I use that they don't support ... at least not yet. ;-) But at least they don't have many rendering bugs, where they say they support something but then do it wrong. IE is full of those, especially in page layout. It drives me crazy.
It wouldn't be so bad if Microsoft actually was addressing them, but a year ago they stated there would be no updates to IE6 (aside from security fixes) to address the rendering bugs. That's the kind of game you can play when you're on 90% of the desktops out there. It reminds me of the old phone company parodies of the late '70's: "We don't care. We don't have to. We're your phone company".
Play with the popup blocking and try out tabbed browsing options. Tabbed browsing doesn't seem like much at first, but after a while you find any lack of it (as in Internet Explorer) to be annoying. At least that's my experience. Advanced users can bookmark a whole series of webpages into a single monster bookmark. Later you can use that to open a bunch of pages, each in their own window tab, by invoking that one big bookmark. I have one big bookmark that opens all my favorite news sources into separate tabs. Another big bookmark opens all my favorite Catholic writers. It gets addictive in that a single click, wait a few seconds, and *bam* all your favorites are loaded and ready.
Posted by: Scott at July 4, 2004 01:37 PMI just checked out the tabbed browsing and it is a very nice option. Its nice not to have 5 windows open.
Posted by: Chris at July 4, 2004 02:36 PMHi Chris,
Here's an update on what Microsoft is doing about that virus that installs a keystroke logger when web surfing with Internet Explorer:
[quote]
Microsoft Corp. offered a stopgap measure to protect computers using its Windows operating software from a data-stealing program that infected Web surfers last week. The company said it is continuing to develop a comprehensive security fix.
The Redmond, Wash., software giant said it's providing a configuration change for Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows 2000 operating systems that improves system resiliency and protects against this and other attacks. The change is available at Microsoft's online Download Center.
The change will be automatically distributed later Friday to customers who have signed up for its Windows Update service.
The update alters Windows settings but doesn't fix the security hole in the Internet Explorer browser that was exploited by the program, a Trojan horse known as "Download.Ject." A Trojan horse is a hacker program which can be as destructive as a virus but doesn't spread automatically of its own accord. Instead, computer users become infected after visiting Web sites that had been hijacked to distribute the program.
Download.Ject, linked to a Web site in Russia, exploits a flaw in Internet Explorer for which Microsoft had no fix, known as a patch. The program contains a "keylogger" that is designed to steal private information and hunts in particular for account data for services from eBay Inc. and its PayPal unit, EarthLink Inc., United Online Inc. and Yahoo Inc., among others. The program didn't become widespread, but attackers could still use the flaw to create more potent attacks.
Microsoft said it aims to provide a comprehensive update to address the flaw in the coming weeks. A Microsoft spokesperson couldn't be immediately reached for comment.
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