So I’m using Mozilla’s Firebird browser now. Internet Explorer skin. Looks and acts just like IE for XP except that there’s no pop ups. I’m also using Privoxy on there. I tried using Privoxy on IE, but it disable javascript. So it was useless.
Firebird is pretty cool. I’ll probably start using it as my default browser. Mozilla basic is nice, but it can be cumbersome at times. I still keep IE close by on my desktop because some webmasters are still prejudiced enough to design sites which ONLY load in IE.
And it is amazing how many people complain about pop up ads, yet do nothing about it. Mozilla! That’s the answer if you are tired of ’em. I suspect Microsoft is being paid off or something or else they would have put in a utility or option to disable pop up ads altogether on IE. IE is so cumbersome. Pop up ads everywhere. Visit the wrong webpage, and it will set your start page to something less desireable. Ugh. Exploitation at its best.
Other stuff:
I have been reading Josh’s blog while he is studying abroad in Hungary. Maybe you should too. Josh’s latest gripe is that the drinks in Budapest do not come with ice. Iced drinks is truly an Americanism. Never saw much of the cold stuff in Shanghai either. America offers free refills too. Never saw that aboard either. Other countries are stingy with their drinks. Charge you extra for it.

The kids are back in school. So that means that everyone is always online yet doesn’t usually have time to talk. WiFi seems to be quite popular at UTK. That’s wireless internet for those of you who care. Wayne seems to be IMing me from classrooms lately on his laptop. Is it not considered nerdy to carry around one’s laptop to class? I would have judged otherwise.
And Lipscomb is still blocking AIM and all the other instant messengers, causing great pain and suffering among the incoming freshmen at Lipscombland. Instant messaging is so fickle anyways. Kids these days grew up on IMing. I didn’t. I just starting doing that type of chatting in 2000, if only to keep up with friends. Otherwise I consider it a cheap form of communication. Never had it when I was in school. We survived on email and phone calls. And campus mail. And face to face meetings.
The internet is becoming so prelavent, it’s hard to imagine life without it. What did we do with all this time we would have used surfing the net? Watching TV? Talking with friends and family? We stare into these computer monitors hoping to find satisfaction in what is otherwise a drab society. Well, maybe not drab. Just uninteresting.
I remember asking friends if they had email in 1994 and I’d get the old deer-in-the-headlight stare at me. Some of them thought they had it. This was the time when AOL and other ISPs were not prelavent. So if you had email it was through your school. I spent a great deal of time searching for friends’ email addresses at their respective school databases.
Something happened right as I got out of school. The internet exploded. Somehow something that no body knew about in 1993, was a dire requirement for happiness on earth in 1999. Funny how things work.
And somehow I really had an idea for blogs or something like it in 1998. I wish there was an easier way to update my webpage without having to get out the old Netscape Composer and FTP the thing to the server. There had to be an easier way to do that. But nobody ever thought about that until 2000 or so. I read about Blogger in Yahoo Internet Life. Seemed like a cool idea at the time. Now everyone is doing it and it doesn’t seem that unique anymore. That makes me wonder about the people who read this stuff. Is it because I update this thing semi-frequently? Or is it because you’re bored. Maybe a little of both. New information is kinda interesting, even though it usually rambles…like now.
Meanwhile, this makes me worry. I just need to get a hold of some of those lifetime CDRs (do they even exist?).

I have a t-shirt that says “No, I will not fix your computer.” It’s sorta a inside joke amongst us computer nerd types. Someone is always having a computer problem and turns to me or someone else knowledgable to fix it. “Oh Jeff, you’re so smart. You’ll be able to fix it.”
So one of my projects lately has been to upgrade a Compaq with more RAM and a newer OS. The Compaq is probably 2 or 3 years old. We’re using it to replace the one at church which runs the songs on the big screen. More RAM and a newer OS has brought new life to the system. Excellent. We were using 366mhz machines in the a/v portion at church. This one has to be at least a 800mhz, so it’s much better than what we had previously.
Upgraded Todd’s computer to Win2K yesterday. He seemed to be happy with it, although his modem doesn’t seem to work. No worries. He’s back at school with broadband connection, so modem difficulties are mute. The interesting thing is that the Compaq (as mentioned above) had less difficulties getting used to Win2K than Todd’s Dell. And I thought Compaqs were inferior machines (or so I’ve been told). Nope. Everything pretty much worked. Contrast that to the Dell, which I had to find a video driver for, and haven’t had an opportunity to find a modem driver for it.
Another project was to help a friend with her computer problem. Seems she’s been having trouble connecting to Walmart Connect. It tries to connect, but is forever “Talking to the Network,” and so on. Never actually gets to Walmartland. My initual suggestion was to drop Walmart Connect altogether and go for something more stable. But she’d like to stay with Wallyworld, if only for the $10/month unlimited. Still having figured out the problem. Could be the integrety of the phone line or the AOL protocol. I’m not sure.
Interesting thing about Walmart Connect. It’s actually some kinda of pseudo AOL type program. So AOLers are paying $20/month for unlimited, when you could get the same type service for $9/month.
I also have this other computer at home which doesn’t seem to have video capabilities. I put in another formatted hard drive, but somehow it might have shorted out the video leaving the computer useless. I’ve put in another hard drive and the same thing happens.

My friend Mark got that MSBlast worm. Called me up Monday night asking about it. Took me just a few minutes to find out it was a relatively new phenomenon on the net. (Thanks Google) The references to it on the usenet were very recent. I pointed out some good resources on the net as an attempt to fix it. Hopefully it will.
Anonymous fame. That’s what these script kiddies are after when they write these viruses to exploit Window’s venerabilities. Anonymous fame. Sounds like an oxymoron. They want to secretly say that it was them that did this, but ultimately they can’t gain too much fame for it or they’d be prosecuted.
Let’s talk RAM. I didn’t know there were so many flavors. RDRAM, SDRAM, non-ECC, ECC. It’s all very confusing. It’d be much easier if there was one universal type of RAM which worked with all brands/models of computers. However that’s not the case. Found that out when I tried to put in a generic piece of RAM into a Compaq. So you have to be sure you get the right type or you’re stuck with a useless stick of chips. My guess is that the computer manufacturers don’t want you to upgrade. Instead they’d prefer you buy a whole new computer. You can extend the life of your computer just by upgrading the RAM on it. It’s just a matter of finding the right type of RAM.

I think I have found possibly the world’s most poorly designed webpage. Ladies and Gentlemen, the Contest of Champions Webpage: http://www.mtsu.edu/~coc/ Both Shockwave and Adobe Acrobat Reader are absolute requirements for this webpage. Shockwave is way overused. Terrible. It’s almost as if someone got a hold of a Shockwave generator and went way overboard with it. Also, why can’t I just view the results of the band contest in plain HTML instead of in pdf format?
In case you were wondering….or if you weren’t able to view the webpage due to the hefty browser requirements…..Contest of Champions is a high school marching band competition. The actual competition isn’t as lame as its webpage. Actually it’s pretty reasonable. Although as far as getting into the finals, band politics are brought into the picture. Lots of times it’s not how you perform, but who your band director knows.
Speaking of band webpages, the MJ High School band has their own webpage: www.mjhsband.org It’s a good attempt. No shockwave to complain about. However sometimes the colors and background are just difficult to read. I went there looking to see if they would have had their calendar updated. School is back in session and they should know their band contest schedule by now. No updates. Blank calendar. This is becoming a common theme on the net these days. Spend a bit of money to get your own domain and webspace, but don’t bother providing updated information. Argh.

File Sharing up 10% since RIAA threatened lawsuits.
File Sharing down 15% since RIAA threatened lawsuits.

Amazing. I got back the 110 roll of film which I took at camp. The surprising thing is that these pictures are much better than the 35mm one-time-use camera which I also took to camp. The 35mm’s pictures are foggy and blurry. In most cases the 110 film is clear.
I’m not sure what started this one time use camera phenomenon. In many cases these cameras cost anywhere from $6-10. Whereas if you decided to buy 5 of these cameras, you might as well buy a cheapo permanent camera for $25. I guess the mentality is to give a kid a single use camera just in case the camera gets lost or stolen during a week of camping.
I’m going to have to get a 110 camera just for nostalgic purposes. Way back in 1991 when I first started going to camp, this type of camera was what the kids used. I never had one myself.

The weather forecast on the front page is permanently stuck on a forecast for Spencer, TN. This is because the XML weather generator which I use is broken. It stopped working around the time I was at Fall Creek Falls on Memorial Day weekend. Hopefully it’ll get fixed soon. It seems like it is down more often than it is up. I thought it’d be kinda cool to show weather, but it doesn’t want to cooperate.
Speaking of nerdy stuff like XML, MSN messenger has the most IM users of any free IM service in Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. I read that here. I thought that fact was interesting. I never really thought about who uses what messenger in different parts of the world. I guess non Americans nix AIM for obvious reason. In China they use ICQ alot. What I’ve really been noticing lately is the decline of ICQ. Way back in 2000, when I discovered ICQ, many of my friends were using it. Now hardly anyone is online anymore. Except for the occassional 1 or 2 people who I know who still use it. I haven’t added anyone to my contact list in a year.
AIM will see a decline when users finally figure out it is an inferior program. Right now the only thing AIM has going for it now is its vast number of users. Remember Netscape vs. IE? At one point Netscape had the greatest number of users. Then came Internet Explorer on all copies of Windows OS’s and the tide turned. With XP coming with a copy of MSN/Windows Messenger on it, AIM will see a decline soon.

So the only thing this webcam works with is Yahoo Messenger. AIM and MSN are pretty lame, but there’s still hope that webcams will reach MSN when version 6.0 is released this summer. Here’s to hope.
The novelty of a webcam is worn thin. Lots of people just don’t bother with webcams when it is available. Some are amused by it. I’m still trying to figure out what to do with the thing. I was thinking about putting it in my window and broadcasting views of my front yard 24/7. Problem is that I’ll need to find a USB cable long enough.
I also got an opitical mouse. My purchase was prompted by the condition of my old mouse when I got in from camping. Huge amount of dust or gunk or whatever gets into the trackball making it temporarily unuseable. So in comes the optical mouse. So far so good. Its got an adapter on the end of it…where it can be used as either a USB plugin or regular ole mouse plugin. Cool. I was worried it might just be strictly USB and I’d be forced to give up another USB port. They’re hard to come by these days. Everything seems to need to use it.
Anyways that’s my life for now.

I got a webcam today. I’m not sure it was worth it. I don’t have any friends very far away which would want to use it. What made me buy it was seeing it being used in El Salvador. We were able to view a friend in the USA and they were able to see us in the hotel in San Salvador.
The box said it could be used with Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, and AIM. I’ve yet to use it with AIM. Doesn’t seem to give me that option. So I guess if you want to use this webcam, IM me and I’ll let you. Otherwise it’ll be a useless expensive toy.