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.
How many birds can you name? Hopefully more than the developers of the “El Dorado” development back in the early sixties.
We live in a small neighborhood nestled in the southwest corner of Serra Mesa. The neighorhood is known locally as Birdland. I suppose the reason is because all of the street names are named after birds. You’d think that would be a theme you could easily apply to a massive neighborhood; bird names are not in short supply. Nonetheless, the individuals tasked with naming our streets seemed to have run out of real bird names rapidly. Coming into Birdland, we have Cardinal Road. A small cul-de-sac attaches to Cardinal Road named Cardinal Place. Cardinal Road the splits, with one side designated Cardinal Lane (which leads back to some storage facillities owned by the San Diego School District) and the other is named Cardinal Drive. This is not looking good already.
Let’s keep going. We have Finch, Bobolink (yes, that’s a real bird), Seagull, Whinchat, Hornbill,Goshawk, Redbird (which is actually a common name for a cardinal), Macaw, Blue Jay, Meadowlark, Peacock, Canary, Hummingbird, Nightingale, Teal, Kiwi, Pheasant, Starling, Teebird- wait, that’s not a real bird. As far as I can tell, the only thing named “Teebird” is a frisbe model. Talon? Yes, after twenty birds, we’ve apparently run out of real bird names. And how about “Sprig Place.” I’m not sure what “Sprig” has to do with birds.
