Visiting the neighbor

Sunday, 7:23 pm

By Kate

Feb

03

2008

A couple of days ago, my across the street neighbor had about a quarter cord of wood delivered in her driveway. This afternoon she was out stacking it and looked as if she was growing a little weary. So I went over to ask if she’d like some help. I think she was pleased with the offer, but she declined saying that she really needed the exercise. Her daughter is getting married in a couple of months and told Mom that she needs to lose a couple of pounds. Kids are so sweet, sometimes. ;)

I asked if she had a new wood stove and she said yes, it had just come this week. But she had a slight problem. The stove is very tiny (and wicked cute), but her wood is very large. It doesn’t fit in her stove. She invited me inside to take a look and it’s true—I’ve never seen a stove that small. It looks as if it might require wood lengths around 8-10 inches. She’s going to have a problem finding pre-cut wood for it. She wondered if I had any suggestions for making her wood smaller. I said, “Well, maybe a chainsaw.” She seemed to think that was a good idea. I dunno. I wouldn’t be enthused, but she does have a lot wood that she can’t burn.

While I was there, she gave me a tour of her house. It’s absolutely beautiful. She said that it had been in rough shape when she moved in (aside from the brand new granite kitchen counters) and she had gone through every room repainting, installing new woodwork, putting in new windows, and replacing all the doors with pretty wood panel doors. And the cutest darned door knobs I’ve ever seen.

Her color scheme just made my mouth water. Kind of a pale dove gray in the living room with white woodwork. And the kitchen and dining area were painted a very pale pastel yellow, also with white trim. Just beautiful. And so cheerful. I told her so, too.

I came back home and looked around my house. Yeah, it’s time for a change. New paint, new colors, new doors, new woodwork. Yeah…

That’s what going to visit the neighbors does. Gives me ideas. 

Attacked by paintballs

Sunday, 12:19 am

By Kate

Feb

03

2008

Excitement clings to me like a magnet, I swear.

Tonight I drove over to the grocery store. A couple of streets from my house, something hit my car really hard. I thought it might be a chunk of ice falling from a tree, but I wasn’t sure. Nothing seemed amiss, so I kept going. By the time I’d finished shopping, I’d forgotten about it.

On the way home, several somethings hit my car REALLY hard in exactly the same location. This time there was no doubt that someone had thrown some sort of object(s) at my car.

When I got home, I took a look at the one side of my car and found a very long and very wide gash in my paint...on the roof. Also some abraded paint just above the door. And a similarly large scratch on my trunk and hood. Very upsetting.

I called the police department, not really expecting anything, but the dispatcher wanted to send an officer to the house to take a report. When the officer arrived with his bright flashlight, the story became much clearer. I’d been attacked by the paint ball brigade. The front of my car, on the other side, was pasted with paint ball splats.

I asked the officer if a paint ball could possibly put scratches like the ones on the roof and trunk and hood of my car. “Oh yes,” he said. “When they’re cold they’re as hard as rocks. It’s a good thing you didn’t have your windows open. You could have been hurt.”

I hadn’t thought of that. He was quite put out and was especially pleased that I knew exactly where it happened down to the house and yard. I don’t know that anything will come of it, but I’d be really happy if the little brats got caught. I think they owe me a new paint job on my car. They really did a number on it.

After the police officer left, I took a bucket of soapy water out and washed down the car. He suggested I might want to do that sooner rather than later so the chemicals in the paint wouldn’t further damage my car. Just what you want to be doing on a 35 degree night. So, my car is at least clean now, if slightly the worse for wear otherwise.

Bearish

Saturday, 4:51 pm

By Kate

Feb

02

2008

Now for a little parody performance to brighten our day....

Dueling Kennedys

Friday, 11:58 pm

By Kate

Feb

01

2008

Here in Massachusetts where the Kennedys are still well thought of and, well, maybe almost revered by many, campaign ads by Caroline and Bobby Jr have been running in advance of the primary on Tuesday. I’ve seen Caroline’s ad several times (for Barack Obama), but tonight was the first I’ve seen Bobby Jr’s ad for Hillary.

So...what exactly are they saying? If you liked Jack better than Bobby, then you should vote for Obama? Or if you liked Bobby better than Jack you should vote for Hillary? Or something? It seems so since both call upon their fathers’ legacies to tie in with or promote their current candidate. This is getting crazier by the minute. I think most of us liked both men and watching them being used like this is a little disturbing.

Bad Site Meter

Friday, 6:24 pm

By Kate

Feb

01

2008

When I checked in on the blog this afternoon, the page loaded so slowly that it was painful. I watched all the little link addresses loading on the web browser’s status bar and noted one that said dg.specificclick.net. Wait a second. I don’t have anything to do with specificclick. Why is that loading on my web pages?

I went into my Firefox options and removed the specificclick cookies. I reloaded my web page and it showed up again. In the Firefox Options area, the cookies were back. Several of them. I then blocked the cookies and my web page loaded fast and cleanly. But that only works for my computer. If you have noticed the same thing happening on my or other sites, you need to permanently block the specificclick cookies. It’ll make many web pages load a lot faster and stop your browsing from being tracked by this...disease.

The question remained, though, where did that cookie come from? Off to do a little Googling about it.

What I learned…

Info from WordPress
Info from AskShane.org (referred by WordPress)
Things you should know before using sitemeter - Michael Sync

Site Meter has apparently made the brilliant business decision to insert a specificclick cookie into websites that use Site Meter (through the coding). Without our knowledge. Without our consent. Without options offered. This has put website owners into the position of being somewhat viral. If we use the Site Meter stats service on our website, we have (recently) unknowingly passed along a tracking cookie to all our visitors. That’s what....like thousand and thousands and thousands of websites and hundreds of thousands of website visitors? Scuse me, but that’s just wrong. And it slows our web sites down to a crawl at times in the bargain. Site Meter has attempted to explain this all as being a super duper method of providing their clients with better service. They apparently don’t understand that when you mess with people’s websites, it makes a lot of them really pissed off. Besides the stink of the ethics involved.

Anyway, just to make sure, I unblocked the specificclick cookies and removed the Site Meter coding. No problems, no cookies. And my blog loaded very quickly. I put the Site Meter coding back and the page loaded slowly and the cookies were back. Removed the cookies and the Site Meter coding and all was well again. Crap.

I liked Site Meter. I really did. They have very useful stats. But I have removed their code from my web site. Trust broken. Screw ‘em. I can live without them. My web site was not designed to provide free marketing stats to some one else or provide income to someone else (most especially without my knowledge or consent) or spread lousy rotten tracking cookies to my friends and acquaintances or anyone else.

Computer Maintenance

Friday, 4:41 pm

By Kate

When my laptop arrived in November, it was loaded with McAfee (a complimentary year’s subscription) and Vista’s pretty worthless firewall. I don’t like McAfee and have never wanted it on any of my machines. It doesn’t get rave reviews anywhere and I’ve had to do some remedial tinkering with a friend’s machine whose McAfee had let some pretty ugly stuff through. But Dell didn’t give me an option. It was fully loaded on my laptop and ready to go. So, I figured I’d put up with it until after the lad went back to school and the dust settled around here.

On Monday evening, I started looking under the laptop’s hood to see how to turn McAfee off...disable it. Well. I guess one doesn’t disable it or turn it off. At least I couldn’t find a way to do it. Which means, if it is an option somewhere, they’ve made it about as difficult as possible to do it. There should be an easy way to disable virus protection software when one wants to install some new software or run certain tests on the computer.

So, then I started looking around for the most effective way to get rid of it—remove it from my computer altogether. That’s not so easy, either. The uninstall feature leaves a lot of little bits and pieces behind that cause all sorts of trouble when one wants to install a different virus protection program. But, following directions that I found at a Dell forum, for people who similarly hate McAfee, I was able to get rid of every last vestige of McAfee. I spent a lot of time combing through the laptop’s directories, deleting crap that should have been removed with the uninstall utility. It took a couple of hours, but I was finally McAfee-free.

So, what to replace it with? I’ve had success in the past with AVG anti-virus (free), Spybot Search and Destroy (free), and Spyware Doctor (free). I also had Sygate Personal Firewall (free) on my Windows XP desktop machine and I loved it. But Sygate is no longer updated (Norton bought it) and the older version isn’t compatible with Windows Vista. So what to use? I settled on the free edition of Zone Alarm and ratcheted it down as tight as a drum. I don’t like the presentation as well as Sygate (I loved its real time graphs and visuals), but Zone Alarm seems to work very well.

I’ve been rather bemused by the volume of traffic trying to get into my machine and the stuff on my machine that wants to get in touch with the world. And more than a little disturbed to find one entity attempting to contact my bank account from within my computer. It surely wasn’t me. As much as I thoroughly enjoy using Yahoo’s Widgets, I wouldn’t recommend using it without a really good firewall in place. And the native Windows Vista firewall is not a good or user friendly firewall. I’ve scanned and cleaned and scanned some more. There was a lot of stuff in there that McAfee let in. My laptop seems to be very, very clean now.

Having said all that, I’m open to other suggestions and recommendations for firewalls or even anti-virus, anti-spyware, and firewall suites. I’ve looked around, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot available for Vista yet. In the meanwhile, I think I have a pretty good line of defense set up and established.

___________

The next issue wanting a little attention.....

I’ve been using LCD screens with my computer for a couple of years now. I didn’t run into this issue with my previous one, but the LCD screen on my laptop seems prone to what the techies call Image Persistence. When a static image stays on the screen for a prolonged period of time (like the task bar or tool bars), the little LCD screen pixels develop a memory and they stick. Like glue. And a ghost image persists after the on-screen image is turned off or moved. I have a lovely grayish ghost image of my task bar at the bottom of my laptop screen. It’s just one of those things that drives me absolutely nuts. Because sometimes I like to move things around and I don’t like having a persistent image where one shouldn’t be.

After reading everything I could find on the problem, I followed some of the advice offered. I made a 1200 x 900 pixel pure white image and set up my screen saver to repeat that image over and over. All that does is make the screen totally white for as long as the screen saver operates. It is supposed to relax all those little screen pixels and, eventually, erase their memory. In my case, it is working, but slowly. If I left the white screen saver on longer, it would probably work faster, but I’m too cheap with the kilowatt hours.

For the near term, I have my laptop set to switch on the screen saver after one minute of idle time. It’s a little extreme for some, but it works for me. After 10 minutes of screen saver time, my screen shuts off and all the little pixels get to rest even more. And after 15 minutes, the machine goes to sleep and after 20 minutes, it hibernates. Meanwhile, I’ve also set my task bar to auto-hide. Same with the Yahoo Widgets dock bar. The LCD pixels shouldn’t have much of a chance to develop a memory with this set-up.

Although Image Persistence is usually temporary and/or reversible, it’s irritating, It was a surprise to find out that LCD screens are as susceptible to that as CRT monitors are to burn-in. Nuts.