In the last few months, I’ve had a lot of folks attempted to add comment spam. What is comment spam? Canned, vague statements that could apply to just about any post. Why do this? There is a space in the comment section where you can also add a link to a site. Spammers try to flood blog comments to increase inbound links to their crap sites.
I delete most of them, but I’ve started keeping some of them, except I edit them to remove the spam link and add a comment making fun of them. Why? I don’t know. It’s just kind of fun.
I love freeware. People spend so much money on virus protection and spyware protection, yet there are great free solutions out there, including AVG Free edition and Avast! Home edition (which even has an available 64-bit version).
I’ve used registry cleaners before. Messing with the registry is always risky, and most cleaners suggest that you make a backup before messing with the registry, which I always do. I’ve used the Crap Cleaner registry cleaner with no problems on a variety of OS’s, including Windows XP 64. I decided to give RegSeeker a spin.
I found the interface to RegSeeker to be somewhat unintuitive, but eventually figured it out. I backed up the registry, and followed it’s suggestions for deletion. Now my Windows XP 64 install won’t boot. Period. Not even in Safe Mode. I tried repairing it with the install CD, but that didn’t help either. As far as I know, the backup of the registry is useless you can at least boot to safe mode. Luckily, I didn’t have any important data on there, but it will take hours to rebuild it. Thanks RegSeeker, you piece of garbage.
That’s what the boot screen says on my new computer. The same phrase can also be found at MSI’s site promoting their “Core Cell” technology. Core Cell is kind of explained here in case you care. On a related note, I found a good link for getting rid of that stupid boot screen.
While it’s not quite Engrish, it is confusing and grammatically questionable. I’m guessing they forget the phrase “the most,” but it’s hard to say.
I still can’t get networking to work on my SuSE Linux install. I probably just need to play around with the drivers some more, but that’s not fun on a computer without networking. My Linux skills are a bit rusty; I don’t remember off the top of my head how to uninstall drivers. Other’s who’ve had this problem apparently solved it by adding an additional PCI ethernet card, but it would make me really sad to have three stupid ethernet ports when I only need one.
So far, I’ve only been playing one game on it, Far Cry. With the new hardware I can jack up all of the graphics settings and get a lot more detail, which is really nice. I also installed the 64-bit patch, which might not do all that much besides add some additional content. What’s worse is the game is quite unstable. It’s not just crashing the game; it’s making the machine reboot every time it pukes. Nice. I had very few crashes with the old version. I’m not sure if the 64-bit version is buggier, or if it has something to do with my new hardware setup or associated drivers.
On a more interesting note, there was a flock of some sort of noisy tropical bird in the huge ficus tree that hangs over our back yard. I didn’t get a close look, but I think they were green with orange heads…maybe a red-masket parakeet or a red-headed Amazon parrot? I’ll try to get a picture if they come back. Flocks of feral exotics have been observed in San Diego since at least 1998.
Update: found this Union Tribune story about wild (feral) parrots/parakeets in San Diego. Though they are most often associated with Ocean Beach, Point Loma, and El Cajon, I guess it was only a matter of time before they discovered Birdland.
I used to think Yahoo! was a reasonably cool company; well, for a behemoth company at least, and especially compared to Microsoft. Within the last year or so, they’ve been bundling their dumb-ass Yahoo! toolbar with lots of different apps (mostly free ones, such as CrapCleaner, some Adobe products, and a few others I can’t think of). Unless you choose the “custom-install” option, it gets automatically installed. I don’t want another toolbar, thank you. It would be nicer if the installer had a separate step asking you if you wanted it.
Worse is the new version of Yahoo! messenger. If you’re thinking about upgrading your Yahoo! messenger, think twice. The latest version (7.x) adds an obnoxious permanent add to the bottom of the window; the only way to not see the add is to move the window so that the ad is shifted below the screen; however, you cannot resize the window higher than your monitors vertical resolution, meaning that the ad takes away screen real estate from the app regardless. I’m still running version 6 on my other machines, and I’m not missing any functionality that I normally use. I’d recommend not upgrading unless you really need something in the 7.x version.
We have a beautiful Weeping Fig (aka Ficus Benjamina) in our backyard. Aside from looking nice, it provides some shade on one side of the house (though the Ficus Elastica next door towers over it). It also drops a lot of leaves that I have to sweep up and worse, it drops bean-like inedible figs. Lots of them. And those little mini-figs attract scores of flies.
A neighbor also warned me that they have an invasive, wide-reaching root system and should never be planted close to a house (the Western Garden Book confirms this). Ours is fairly close to the house, though it is up a bit on a terraced section. There aren’t any pipes that I know of near that corner of the house anyway.
So if you’re thinking about planting one in your yard, don’t do it unless you really really like flies.
