http://www.ComputerBob.com/journal_archive/2005/07.php .
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Regular readers of this Journal know that, last year, my abusive father abandoned my mother at my house and drove
1200 miles back to their home by himself. After that, Mom lived with my wife and me for 10 1/2 months, until we found her a
really nice condominium. I called her yesterday afternoon, to ask how she was feeling about it being the one-year anniversary
of her husband abandoning her. It turned out that she was spending the day with my Aunt Tere and hadn't even realized what
day it was. In other words, she was feeling fine about it. If you think you may be a victim of abuse, or if you know someone who
may be, please see my Abuse Info section, which contains lots of valuable information and support.
I was up until after 5:00 this morning, redesigning my site's home page. First, to make more room in the right column, I moved my "Quotations" area to the top-center of the page and reduced its font size. Then, in the right column, I added a "Newest Posts" area that automatically displays links to my phpBB forums' newest posts, using a phpBB MOD called Topics Anywhere. Like many MODs, it took only a few minutes to get it to work, but it took several hours of trial-and-error, testing, troubleshooting and tweaking to get it to work and look exactly the way I wanted.
One week ago, Thursday night, my wife and I went out for dinner with her sister, Linda, and Linda's husband, Jim. We ended up
eating at
a restaurant that's about 6 miles south of our house. While we were eating, Pastor Jim, from Jim and Linda's church,
stopped by our table to say "hi." Then last night, the four of us went out for dinner again, this time at a restaurant that's
about 6 miles north of our house. Wouldn't you know it, Pastor Bill was there, too. Strange, but true.
What's the going rate to buy a former U.S. president's daughter's hand in marriage? Apparently, it's
40 goats and 20 cows.
Who would have guessed that they've gotten so expensive?
Last night, the phpBB group released v2.0.17 of their free phpBB forum software, which, as expected, included security updates and bug fixes. After downloading the "Changed Files Only" package, it only took me about 20 minutes to update my forums to the new version, carefully reinstall one MOD that had been overwritten by the updated files, and then confirm that everything was still working correctly.
Last night, Mozilla released v1.0.6 of their free
Firefox browser. It includes security
updates and stability improvements. If you're using Firefox, do yourself a favor and upgrade to this latest version.
Look for version 1.0.6 of Mozilla's free
Firefox
browser to be released this week. Various sources say that the new version will strengthen the browser's
security and/or fix a bug that v1.0.5 unintentionally introduced into Firefox.
If your computer is running Windows 98, 98 SE or Windows ME, along with Grisoft's AVG Free antivirus software, DO NOT install the July 15, 2005, AVG update. It has known issues that can cause "blue screens of death," and prevent your computer from starting up normally. Hopefully, Grisoft will release a fix for the problem very soon. UPDATE: Several hours after I first posted this Journal item, Grisoft announced that they had released a new trouble-free AVG update. Though it worked fine on my computer, it appears that it may not be trouble-free for everyone. So, unless you know a lot about computers, you should probably wait a few days before you update AVG on your computer, to give Grisoft enough time to confirm that they've really solved their update problem.
If your Web site uses phpBB forum software, like mine does, conflicting reports say to keep an eye out for an important security update, apparently due to be released in the very near future. Until that update is released, I've read that you can help protect your forums by logging in to your Admin CP and temporarily disabling the ability to display BBCodes.
Long-time readers may remember that, in December of 2003, when my wife and I moved from the Frostbite State to the
Sunshine State, we took almost nothing with us. Instead, we had an "online garage sale" to sell some of our furniture and
belongings, and gave nearly all of the rest to charity. Well, the other day, we were the grateful beneficiaries of some
incredible generosity. A man from the church where my wife is the secretary, gave us a beautiful
solid knotty pine, parquet-top dining room table with 6 matching upholstered chairs, a
matching
china cabinet, and a 7-foot sofa with reclining ends. All of the knotty pine
furniture is
solid and massive; in fact, the table's extra leaf alone weighs 21.5 pounds. Many thanks, also, to my always-helpful and
uncomplaining brother-in-law, Jim, who was nice enough to make three trips with me in the 95-degree (F) heat to get all of the
new furniture into his pickup truck and then into my house.
My wife and her sister, Linda, arrived home safely yesterday afternoon, then Jim and Linda, my mother, and my wife and I all
went out for dinner together last night, just like we do most Thursdays. My wife reports that her father is very tired and weak
from his heart surgery, but his doctor expects him to fully recover over the next several weeks.
My father in-law's heart surgery was a success. In what his doctor described as "a very difficult
surgery on a very old man," they did one bypass and replaced two of his heart valves.
Power companies have used it for years, to monitor their electric lines. Now, BPL (broadband over power lines) technology, more than 1.5 times the speed of cable Internet, is finally ready to be test marketed to consumers in Houston, Texas. Theoretically, BPL will allow any device that is plugged into electric power to access the Internet. I guess it's time to recycle my old joke about my refrigerator selling my toaster on eBay.
My wife and her sister will fly up north today, to be there when their father has bypass heart surgery early tomorrow
morning. They will come home on Thursday.
Have you ever wondered what Free eCards are, and why they appear in my navigation column? As their name implies, eCards are electronic greeting cards. You can choose from many different types of cards, and then personalize your card before you send it to someone. Your recipient receives an email message containing a hyperlink that takes them to your card. In the past few years, this site's visitors have sent 2,200 eCards. Give it a try -- it's fun, and it's absolutely free.
Very early this morning, I finished successfully integrating my forums into my site. For those of
you who have your own phpBB forums, what I did was "wrap" my site header, navigation column and footer around my forums by
extremely carefully adding each of them to exactly the right place in either the phpBB forum software's
overall_header.php or overall_footer.php files. It wasn't extremely difficult, but it required a lot of logic,
concentraion, and attention to detail. I also edited a few other files to change some font sizes, remove the wide gray border
around the forums, narrow the border line around the forums, remove the validation icons (phpBB forum software does not validate
to Web coding standards yet), remove my site's search engine (the forums have their own search function) and change some of the
forum wording. Then I had to figure out which bit of heavily nested table code was causing my forums to display perfectly in my
Firefox browser, but display at about 120% of screen width in Microsoft Internet Explorer. Whew! It's quite a relief to have
finished all of that. And yes, I made plenty of backups, so hopefully I'll never have to do all of that again. When I have time,
I'll edit my forums' colors to more closely match my site's colors.
When I taught college computer courses, other faculty members told me that I worked way too hard because I took the time to
be a very picky grader. Each error or typo that I found in a student's assignment cost them 5% of their assignment grade.
I constantly reminded my students to be detail-oriented, because it doesn't matter how much you know unless you can communicate
it correctly and intelligently to others. Despite (or maybe due to) my high standards, many of my students earned 100% on all of
their assignments, making me proud to send them out into the world. A stock trader in Taiwan just proved my point about attention
to detail by making
a $251 million typo.
