http://www.ComputerBob.com/journal_archive/2004/03.php .
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In the past few days, I've received several more photos to add to my
Florida Photos section. I've also decided to make some changes and upgrades to the
"behind the scenes" webhosting of this site. Both of those tasks, plus doing our federal and state taxes, will
probably have to wait until some time next
week, since my wife and I are currently moving all of our stuff from one rented mobile home to another (see
March 25). I'll explain more about my webhosting changes after I've made them.
Today, I added 19 new photos to my Florida Photos section, but 4 of those new photos took the place of older photos of the same subjects, so the whole section now contains 161 photos.
Today would have been the birthday of my little brother.
With the addition of 4 new photos today, my Florida Photos section now contains 146
photos of the gorgeous and unique Sunshine State.
When I paid our rent at the beginning of this month, I asked the manager of our mobile home park if it would be OK for us to extend our stay past the initial 3 months of our lease (which expires at the end of March). He smiled and said, "The two of you can stay as long as you want."
So, imagine our surprise when, this past Saturday morning, he showed up at our door to tell us that the park's owners have decided that they no longer want to be in the rental business, so they need us to move out of our home as soon as possible, to make it easier for them to sell it, along with all of their other rental homes.
That was quite a disappointment, but God provided for us almost instantly. Within 10 minutes, I went to ask my neighbor, James (see March 23), if he knew of any other places that we could rent in the area that would allow us to rent on a month-to-month basis (almost everyone wants a one-year lease), with our 4 pets (almost no one allows pets).
Less than 30 minutes after we had been asked to move out of our home, James and his wife agreed to rent us their second mobile home, right here in the same mobile home park. They took the "For Sale" sign out of its window as soon as we reached an agreement, and they aren't going to try to sell it again until whenever we are ready to move out of it. So, next Tuesday and Wednesday, we'll be moving again, but this time, we'll only have to move about a quarter of a mile down the road.
A few weeks ago, after hearing about some misadventures we had had with our realtor back in the Frostbite State,
an old friend wrote and said, "Good Grief!!!!! Is nothing simple in your life????????" Well, I'm very happy to report
that, although being told that we have to move again felt like one more problem to add to the long list of
stressful problems that we've had to solve in the past year, at least this time, the solution was simple and we
found it quickly.
With the addition of 29 new photos today, my Florida Photos section now contains 142
photos in 10 different categories. If you check out my Wildlife category, you'll see that it now includes 3
shots of the alligator that we saw this past Sunday. Also, you may notice that there's a new Miscellaneous
category. I added that because I didn't know where else to put two new photos -- one is of my neighbor, James,
riding the hilarious, easy chair-equipped Easy Rider adult tricycle that he and
another neighbor recently built, and the other is of that same pair's unusual
adult tricycle built for two.
Today, my wife's sister, Linda, her husband, Jim, and my wife and I, made a trip to beautiful
Sawgrass Lake Park
in St.
Petersburg, near Tampa. There, we had a relaxing picnic lunch, and then walked the park's mile-long raised
wooden boardwalk. For a couple of hours, we explored its thick natural Florida swampland, seeing many
varieties of birds and plants, and even several 18-20-inch-long turtles. At one point, we looked down and saw a
7-foot alligator almost directly underneath us, slowly and silently floating by in Sawgrass Lake, with
only his long head barely poking out of the water. Surprisingly, he was the first alligator that my wife and I had
seen since moving to the Sunshine State this past Christmas Day. After we had watched him for several minutes, he
suddenly swam to the shore about ten feet from us, climbed out of the water, lay down in some green grass, faced
directly at us, and began sunning himself. It was very exciting to see such a prehistoric wild animal up close,
right in his native habitat. I took several photos of him, and hope to publish the best ones here in the next
few days.
With the addition of 10 new photos today, my Florida Photos section now contains 113
photos of the Sunshine State.
If you're interested, here's a step-by-step, 6-part Windows XP Performance Tuneup. Note, it's not for beginners or for the faint of heart, because it involves manually editing the Windows Registry.
Many people don't realize that the Google search engine lets people do searches of public telephone numbers. In other words, if you're listed in your local phone book, then there's a good chance that anyone who happens to know your phone number can type it into Google, and Google will happily give them your first and last name, your street address, and a detailed map to your house. It also means that that same personal information is available to any stranger who overhears one of your children telling someone their phone number.
To find out if your telephone number is listed on Google:
To remove your telephone number from Google's search engine:
If this is important to you, please consider telling your friends and relatives about it.
Tonight, I added 38 more photos to my Florida Photos section, which now contains 103
photos of the Sunshine State.
Are you tired of receiving offers for new credit cards and insurance in the mail all the time? I get at least one or two each week, and I always tear them to shreds, to prevent anyone from finding them in my trash and sending them in. The reason we receive them is because one or more of the major CRAs (credit reporting agencies) have provided our personal information to credit card companies and insurers without our knowledge or permission. The solution is to call the national (U.S.) CRA toll-free phone number (1-888-567-8688), and ask to be removed from mailing lists for 2 years. Alternately, if you request, complete, and return the CRA form that they provide, you will be removed from mailing lists indefinitely.
I just received a whole new batch of excellent Florida Photos. I hope to add them to
this site in the next couple of days.
If you're in the U.S. and you forgot to sign up for the National Do Not Call Registry when it was first created, here's your chance to do it now. It only takes a minute to register your phone number, and that makes it illegal for most telemarketers to call you at home.
When I created it several weeks ago, I had no idea that my Florida Photos section
would grow as quickly as it has. Since it now has 65 photos, with many more on the way, I realized that it wasn't
practical to continue displaying all of the thumbnails on just one page. To solve that problem, today, I split my
Florida Photos section into several categories, to make it easier for users to find the photos that they want to
see.
If you're looking for free or low-cost alternatives to your expensive Windows software applications, you should check out TheOpenCD. According to its Web site, TheOpenCD is a collection of high quality Free and Open Source Software. The programs run in Windows and cover the most common tasks such as word processing, presentations, e-mail, web browsing, web design, and image manipulation. We include only the highest quality programs, which have been carefully tested for stability and which we consider appropriate for a wide audience. You can download TheOpenCD for free, or you can purchase it on CD-ROM for minimal cost from several sources that are listed on the Web site.
For much more freeware and shareware, be sure to visit my Software pages.
This may be the ultimate in geekiness. A guy built a wedding cake-shaped PC, and used it to propose to his girlfriend. I hope she doesn't end up "rebooting him" out the door.
Today, I added 3 new photos to my Florida Photos section, which now contains 65
photos.
Today, I re-created all 62 of my Florida Photos' thumbnail images, to make them display sharper, both in the upper-right corner of my home page, and on the main page of my Florida Photos section. I also made some improvements to the colors and layout of my home page's right column.
If you're looking to buy a computer, a digital camera, a DVD player, or any other type of electronic equipment, TechDeals.net has user-posted information about tons of excellent, unadvertised deals.
For more great deals, see my Great Deals page.
This morning, I added 18 new photos to my Florida Photos section, which now has 62 gorgeous photographs of Florida, all taken by amateur photographers.
This afternoon, I installed a free PHP script called
MD Random Image Generator
onto my Web server. Its job is to display a randomly selected Florida Photo thumbnail in the upper-right corner of
my home page, each time that page is viewed.
Today, I made some changes to the design of my Web pages. To prevent them from being visually overpowered by other
content on the page, my CB logo and its slogan are now bigger, along with the sunset photo in the
upper-right corner of my home page and its slogan. The sunset photo is now one of the photos from my Florida
Photos section, and clicking on it will take you to that section. That change allowed me to remove the
clickable Florida Photos thumbnail from my home page's right column.
If you're looking for free, simple, but full-featured CD/DVD burner software, you may want to try DeepBurner. According to its Web site, "DeepBurner supports all certified formats for burning CDs/DVDs, thus allowing you to create audio, video, data, archive, etc., CDs and DVDs with... an intuitive and full-featured user interface, allowing you to do all the common tasks with just a few clicks." I downloaded and tried DeepBurner, using it to burn a backup CD of my important data files. It burned the 560 MB CD at 48X (the maximum speed for my drive). The only feature that I miss in DeepBurner is Verify, which compares the files on the burned CD to the original files on the hard drive, to make sure that they're exactly the same. In DeepBurner's online support forum, its author recently stated that the Verify feature will be added to DeepBurner as soon as possible.
For much more freeware and shareware, be sure to visit my Software pages.
Yesterday's bit of irony concerned a virus-spreading antivirus company. Today's irony is the fire station that
burst into flames
while its firefighters were out on other calls.
There's got to be a special place in hell for the authors of computer viruses. In order to fool people into allowing it into their computers, the latest strain of viruses is disguised to look like a message from your email system administrator. When you read the message and follow its advice to open its attached file, your computer becomes infected with the virus.
Speaking of viruses, how would you feel if you ran the antivirus company that accidently sent an email virus to thousands of its customers? Ouch! That's got to hurt the old corporate credibility!
If your computer doesn't have antivirus software, you can find links to several freeware and shareware antivirus packages on my Software pages.
This morning, my wife and I accepted an offer to purchase our home in the Frostbite State. If things go according to
plan -- do things ever to according to plan? -- we'll close on it through overnight mail in about 7 weeks.
I just received a whole new batch of gorgeous Florida photos! I hope to find time to publish them in the next few days.
Rarely do I find a piece of software that's better than what I've been using, but it happened today. For the past few years, I used free SmartFTP as my FTP (file transfer protocol) software, to upload files to this Web site. Today, I switched to free FileZilla software. FileZilla is much faster than SmartFTP, has a friendlier interface, and unlike SmartFTP, FileZilla doesn't nag me to download its latest minor update every time it starts. I highly recommend FileZilla.
For much more freeware and shareware, be sure to visit my Software pages.
If you like to make Windows run faster and be more secure, then you may want to try Safe XP. I haven't tried it yet, but it's free, and according to its Web site, Safe XP allows users to quickly tweak various security and privacy related settings in XP. The options include Media Player settings, Services settings (error reporting, time synch, remote registry etc.), as well as an option to remove items from the Start menu, network security settings and more. Safe XP works with Windows 98/ME/2000/XP.
For much more freeware and shareware, be sure to visit my Software pages.
For the past few weeks, I've tried several different news sources for The Latest News section of my home page. My goal has been for each news source to meet the following requirements:
After much searching, I found many news sources that met all of my requirements except #4. I also found a few that met my first four requirements, but their Web sites were unreliable, which prevented my site's home page from loading each time their headlines were unavailable. So far, the news sources that I'm currently using appear to meet all five requirements. If it turns out that they don't, I'll change them again.
As of today, the feature that used to be called my "Blog" is now called my "Journal." I changed its name because "Blog"
is a trendy techno-term that is unfamiliar to many people, but everyone knows what a journal is.