Some time ago, I was having a discussion with a friend where it came up that I like those nasty, orange candies known as circus peanuts.  I don’t really understand why I like them myself; I just do.  Since then, I’ve used the term “circus peanuts” in my head as mental shorthand for anything that I like which either isn’t any good and/or which I have no distinct reason for liking.  I bring this up because my faithful readers will probably notice I started reading a book which wasn’t on my list of planned books, The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan.  I will not pretend that this book has the greatest story, characters or writing in the world; however it is a book which I have read multiple times and always enjoyed.  I picked it up to read this morning as I looked over my unread book list and nothing on there appealed to me in the slightest.  So I went with a “circus peanuts” book to have something to read over my lunch hour at work. Then as  I was about to start reading the book, I started to wonder what other people’s circus peanuts might be.  What do you think?  What is your “circus peanuts”?

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.