Year: 2007

While I run Kubuntu as my primary OS on all my home machines, my work machine has Windows XP on it.  Recently our IT dept installed Norton AntiVirus 2006 on all our machines.  Some people had problems with this immediately, while others (like myself) had not noticed any problems.  Then today I tried to export some data out of Microsoft Access to a MySQL server via an ODBC connection; only the window to select which connection to use never came up.  One of my co-workers had this problem last week and it quickly escalated into something of a nightmare causing her to get stuck with the office’s loaner machine.  I did some googling and found a simpler solution to the problem:

  1. Double-click on Norton AntiVirus in the systray.
  2. Click on the Norton AntiVirus tab.
  3. Click on Settings.
  4. Click on Virus And Spyware Protection Options (under Additional Options)
  5. Click on Miscellaneous under Advanced Options.
  6. Uncheck Turn on scanning for Microsoft Office documents.
  7. Click Ok.
  8. Restart your computer.

And that’s it.  Simply disabling Norton’s Office plugin fixed the problem for me.

I’ve been reading a variety of webcomics for the past couple years and the list has only grown as time went on. However I recentally decided to whittle the list down as bit for a couple of reasons.

  1. They stopped updating on any kind of regular basis.
  2. The writing tanked and I no longer care about thecharacters.
  3. It’s taking too much damn time to read them all.

So here is my list of webcomics which I will no longer be reading. So long, farewell, goodbye!

Having gotten those off my list, sad fool that I am, I’ve added a couple of others to my reading list which brings my list of regularly read webcomics to:

Coleco Adam computer

PC World is running an article about the 10 Worst PCs of All Time and as a whole the artcle is a refreshing trip down nostalgia lane. However I must strongly disagree with their top third choice, we had one of these Coleco Adam computers when I was a kid and it totally ruled. We never had any of the problems mentioned in the article and that Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom game was sooo rad. I mean after you beat the game once; you got to flip the cassette tape over and play the game all over again. Only on the second time through, you got a different color spaceship. Beating it a second time got you back to your original ship. Beating it repeatedly let you keep switching between the two colors of ship. I wasted spent hours of my youth playing that game and I don’t consider one minute of it wasted. So if Dan Tynan keeps spouting all this nonense of the Adam being a crappy computer; he’s going to get his arsed kick something fierce! :p

Note: The image used in this article was found under the Coleco Adam article on Wikipedia and was released under a Creative Commons Attribute-ShareAlike 2.0 license by Andrew Lih.

Bolted E | Flickr

Mostly, I’m uploading this image because I want to test a new WordPress/Flickr integration plugin I installed on my blog. However I also want to point out Ken Rockwell’s Camera Adjustments: from Blah to Aha! is a great article. I tired making his recommended adjustments to my little Canon P&S and found to my very pleasant surprise that the colors were much, much better. I’ll definitely be using those adjustments in all my shooting from now on. Unfortunately the majority of the shots I took with those adjustments, did not turn out the way I wanted (composition-wise, wind blew leaves the wrong way sort of thing).

Update: The plugin worked perfectly. Wahoo! This means I’ll be more likely to blog about any new images I add to my Flickr account so you my faithful minions won’t have to either visit me at Flickr and don’t have to did through my gallery to see new images. Instead they’ll just appear as regular posts. *glee*

Scalzi for SFWA in 2007!

I couldn’t resist joining in on all the fun, helping to promote Mr. Scalzi’s write-in bid to become the SFWA president. My apologize to Grant Wood for bastardizing his painting but it made for a good joke (I hope). This poster was created entirely in GIMP and uses a Creative Commons licensed picture of Mr. Scalzi that I found on Flickr.

I should probably give you a bit of background, as not all of my readers necessarily read Mr. Scalzi’s blog on a daily basis. On 15 March 2007, Mr. Scalzi received his ballot for this years SFWA elections. After looking it over, he decided he had some problems with it and posted a note on his blog that he was now a write-in candidate. The next day he posted some promotional images/posters made for him by various fans. A couple of days passed and still he kept talking about this whole SFWA election. Naturally, this kept the fans pouring in with comments and additional images. Finally I could resist the siren’s lure no more and created the image you see here.

Update: For the closest thing to an explanation of the bacon on a cat thing, you’ll need to read this post over at the Whatever.