Monthly category archives in my blog now match the individual archives. This means that when you click on, say, April 2004, you no longer feel like you’ve been redirected to another site entirely because it’s all matchy-watchy. You like this very much. Trust me.
I also tweaked the style sheet for Iowa Chicks Knitting. Apparently this was done for CSS practice because in spite of all the time I spent doing it, it does not look better. Just different. *sigh*
A tree next to our driveway died. It needed to be cut down – before it fell down into the power lines – and today Mr. Brett and Josus did just that.
This is a picture of Joe suspended from the crane arm in a swing, wielding a chainsaw:
He’s much higher up than it looks; the land slopes off sharply on that side of the driveway.
It took hours to cut the crown off and to finally get the tree down. When it finally fell, I felt the ‘thud!’ quite clearly through the floor. It was pretty heavy, to say the least.
Aren’t boys cool? They actually seemed to enjoy the whole process!
I fed them pork chops and frozen pizza and a giant salad with bleu cheese crumbled all over the top for dinner. After all, they’d made breakfast (scrambled eggs with veggies, hash browns, coffee with Bailey’s, corned beef hash, and veggie bacon strips) and cut down a whole tree, so cramps or not I owed ’em!
Head on over to the bookstore and check out the new stuff. Fresh art, updated this morning!
Come on, you know you’ve always wanted a goblinbox.com go cup. Buy yourself one for my birthday!
I went to Wincustomize this morning to dowload a nice wallpaper for Fall. Reading their index page, I discovered that members can now have their own subdomain pages (neato!), WindowBlinds 4.4 is out (cool!), and there’s another IE exploit going around (hurumph).
So I went to September 2004 Security Update for JPEG Processing (GDI ) to check it out, and was even gonna download the fix like a good bunny. Except I couldn’t, my IE permissions are apparently too stringent (I have it set on “Medium”) for the appropriate ActiveX controls to run to find out what updates I need.
Did I mention that I switched browsers the other day? LOL!
Continue reading Firefox vs. Internet Exploder
The new Rants 6 default skin, Aurora, has been updated today with a new logo and various new icons. Please change to it if you haven’t already. It’s matchie-watchie!
Yeah, so, Joe bought a bike after work last night, and brought it out here to play with.
He and Brett pushed it into Brett’s tool storage building thingy, and then the two of them absolutely geeked out on chopperdom until way past their bedtimes. Every time I wandered up there to see them, they were chattering about this or that possible change and how to accomplish it. So cute.
The stock dash was off before Joe even unloaded the bike. No more than an hour after I took the pics linked to above, they’d pulled off the rear fender and were experimenting with a stock Norton fender for line and length! They were in chopper heaven. They drank a couple pitchers of iced water and a few cans of Bud, and mostly squatted and looked at the bike and chattered. If they were any less butch, I suspect they’d’ve been giggling like girls!
I love it when my men have fun. (Especially when it’s in an outbuilding and not in the living room.) Brett’s been an automaton for a long while now; all he does is work or rest. He’s done very little socializing, hasn’t been shopping much, hasn’t been on a vacation for a couple of years… everyone needs to geek out on something they love with a like-minded friend every now and again.
Now our couch is covered in Brit parts catalogues and Brit bike magazines! Hah!
I started getting popups on my work machine last week. Today I dug thru Add/Remove Programs and found a little monster called “Web Savings from Ebates.”
I typed it into Google.
At Remove WebSavings I got a nifty tool to remove the damned parasite. The tool’s running now; I’ve got 37 instances in the registry, 147 suspicious cookies, and I’m only 10% of the way through the scan. (The software only identifies problems; you have to buy it to get it to auto-remove ’em for you. But with a list you can do it manually.)
Argh.
Working in the Internet industry as I do, I’m pretty dang savvy about downloading and/or installing stuff on my machines… and even wracking my brain I don’t know how this baby got installed. Honestly. Those spyware folks are some clever bastards.
I accidentally joined the Science Fiction Book Club today. Ooops! It’s Elizabeth Moon‘s fault, if you must know. I went to Webscriptions to see what else of hers they sold, ended up at her Baen bibliography, then at her personal site, and from there followed a link to the SFBC. Suffice it to say I’m really enjoying Heris Serrano. Sigh.
Tim’s not in today, so I’m rather swamped with stuff to do. I’ve been doing other stuff all day and really need to dive into my DSL db now.
Next week I’ll be here (at LISCO) every day, covering Tim’s vacation. The week after that: AMMA!!! First in Mount Pleasant, then in Chicago. (I am so ready to see Her.) I expect to be inhumanly busy in Mt. P, sitting at the Seva Desk with the wonderful and unflappable miss Christina – who has done essentially all the work of seva assignation this year. The trip to Chicago will be with the ever-lovely misses Tahmi and Anna, and we’ll be staying in the program hotel, always my favorite solution. I am ever so very ready for my annual Amma trip. Sigh.
As for my physical health, lately I’ve been feeling just utterly exhausted. My heart skips beats all the time or beats rapidly, which makes me even more tired. I miss taking my supplements, and have discovered that finding a doctor not suffering from rectal/cranial inversion re thyroidism is harder than one would naturally expect. I doubt I’ll find one and get an appointment before I’m off in Amma world for a week.
Last but not least, I did reverse DNS this morning for a customer who hosts two domains on his own server over a LISCO DSL (ie using LISCO IP addresses). This miraculous feat of competence apparently impressed the hell out of the customer’s network guy, who told the wife of one of my co-worker’s that I was stunningly competent because not only did I know what he was talking about (reverse lookup) but I actually did edit and reload the db within the 10 minutes I’d promised him. Yay, me! (It is so nice to get the occasional attagirl just for doing one’s job.) (I won’t mention that it had been so long I actually had to look up how to do it in my notes. Heh.)
Anyway, off to work. Ciao, lovies!
They’ve got free courses at linuxchix.org. Yay!
I went to check out the new Yahoo! mail interface, and I had over a thousand messages. Spam messages.
So before I could delay myself by rethinking it, I deleted my Yahoo! account – even though I’ve had it for a bajillion years and will probably kick myself when I realize the important crap I had stored in there (like software purchase receipts etc.)
My new Yahoo! username is mushmook. Please update your IM progs accordingly!
I still have nearly every symptom there is associated with hypothyroidism… except for high TSH. The anxiety I was suffering from last year is under control, thankfully, but there are still two symptoms that I have that I particularly dislike.
The first is hair loss. As I’ve said before, I don’t think I’m a particularly vain female, but my hair keeps getting thinner and thinner, and it really makes me bummed. I feel that glasses, bad skin, and pudginess are adequate crosses to bear, and that potential baldness is just going a little bit too far! I mean, honestly – can anyone suggest that it’s in any way fair?!
Continue reading Imbalances