Musings...
Not exactly a blog or diary -- I'm not going to promise to write something every day, or even frequently. But, when something strikes my mind, I might put something in here. The newest entries will be at the top.
2008-06-24
Lots of thick smoke in the Ukiah area this week, from fires around Northern California sparked by lightning strikes over the weekend of June 21. Look at the view from our front porch:
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Looking east toward Coyote dam -- you should be able to see the yellow grass on the face of the dam over the tops of those trees behind the trailers, plus the hills across the lake. Today, we're doing well just to see the trees! |
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Looking to the south. The knoll is just across the river from our trailer park -- just a couple hundred yards away. Look how the smoke is making it hard to see details even at that short a distance! |
2008-06-03
I've got my calling assignments for the National Square Dance Convention in Wichita, and have put them on my Schedule page. There's always the possibility that I might pick up more when I get there, if some callers are unable to attend, but I won't be able to show them here.
I'm staying at the Holiday Inn Express West, which threw me for a loop temporarily -- that didn't match any of the names on the hotel list on the back of the registration form. Google Maps to the rescue -- it's practically on the airport itself, but about 4 miles from the convention center. That's actually fortunate for me, as my flight is on Frontier Airlines, and they eliminated the early-morning flight I had originally booked as one of their cost-cutting measures. I had intended to get into Wichita early Wednesday afternoon and maybe go to the Cessna factory to see if they give tours -- but now I'm not getting in until late Wednesday night. No time to see either Cessna or Beech. :-(
We're still waiting to try to find out what caused the seizure that Dad experienced about a month and a half ago. 45 minutes after the ambulance had him at the hospital, he was pretty much back to normal, and the CT scans and MRI that the hospital took didn't give any clues as to the cause. It took a month for him to get in to see a neurologist, who wanted an EEG that was just performed yesterday. Hopefully, it'll give some answers. In the meantime, nothing of the sort has happened since then, which suits me just fine -- it was a very frightening experience for me, even if Dad doesn't remember it at all.
Note to AVG Free users: the new version 8.0 of AVG Free has come out. You can upgrade to it by downloading the installer from their website (free.grisoft.com) but you don't have to hurry -- they will continue to supply updates for the old version (7.5) until the end of the year. If you aren't comfortable downloading the new version and would like me to do it for you, you can call me for an appointment. (Lake/Mendocino/Sonoma counties only -- I do charge travel time one way, after all!)
If you do download it yourself, be careful what you click on -- they will present you the option in several places of downloading the trial version of their commercial product side-by-side with the free version, and you have to be sure you're clicking on the free version if that's what you want!
2008-01-10
I've been using a program called Mailwasher for years, ever since my friend Nate Bliss told me about it. It's a program that sits in your system tray and periodically checks your mail server to see if any mail has arrived, and lets you know (via a flashing icon and a sound) if it has. It also does more than that; it
- Allows you to view the contents of your inbox on the mail server and delete individual messages BEFORE you download them into your mail program
- Optionally compares the sender's address on each email to one or more "blacklists" of known spammers maintained on the Internet, and flags messages that match so that they can be deleted.
- Allows you to set up rules that will automatically delete (or just flag as spam) any messages that match certain criteria you define, such as words appearing in the address or subject line. (I've used that feature to eliminate spam that pretends to be FROM me, by checking the sender's address to see if it has my own email address but NOT my plain-text name.)
I've used it since about 1998 or so, and it's worked great. Until I installed Internet Explorer 7.
After installing IE7, I noticed two things:
- Mailwasher is supposed to pop its main window up when you double-click the icon in the system tray. After IE7 was installed, it usually takes two double-clicks to wake it up.
- When the main window pops up, the window frame will sit there empty for several seconds before it fills in with the mail list. It used to fill in immediately, if not sooner.
At first, I figured that it was because I was using an old version of Mailwasher. I hadn't updated since 2003 or so, because the program worked so well already. So, I downloaded the latest version of Mailwasher -- and it had the same behavior. So, I reverted back to the 2003 version -- it worked fine except for the slowness in popping up.
A couple of months later, I added a service called Postini to my Pacific Internet email account. (Pacific and some -- but not all -- other ISPs have it available as a free add-on service.) Postini is a spam filtering service -- it weeds the spam out of your email BEFORE it ever gets to my mailbox @pacific.net. I found that it did a VERY good job -- so good, in fact, that almost nothing was getting through that Mailwasher would flag from being on one of the blacklists.
Flash forward another couple of months, and just for the heck of it, I was browsing the area on TUCOWS devoted to email checking tools. There was a free, open-source tool called PopTray that got their top "Five Cows" rating. And it was written in Delphi, which attracted me because I develop in Delphi myself. Reading through the documentation, it appeared to have almost all the same features as Mailwasher, except for checking the remote blacklist sites. Since I wasn't using that feature of Mailwasher any more, I decided to download PopTray and give it a try.
I've been using PopTray for about a month now, and overall I'm pleased with it. Its message preview feature isn't quite as convenient as MailWasher's -- in MailWasher, you just press the spacebar to preview the selected message, while PopTray makes you either click a button or right-click the message and choose "Preview" -- and it seems to have trouble previewing a few more messages than Mailwasher does (usually ones that are written in HTML and don't include equivalent plaintext). But, it performs the functions I want -- delete mail from the server, checking for faked "from me" messages, and previewing selected messages -- and it handles multiple email accounts, unlike the current free version of Mailwasher. (The paid "Pro" version of Mailwasher handles multiple accounts, but not the free version.)
PopTray 3.2 -- recommended.
MailWasher -- also recommended (and hopefully Nick will fix the slow popup
problem with IE7)
2007-12-21
Products I use personally (and recommend):
AVG Antivirus (home users,
try the free version!)
Spybot Search & Destroy spyware
removal utility
Mozilla Firefox web browser
Pegasus Mail (inexperienced computer users
may prefer Mozilla
Thunderbird)
FileZilla FTP client and server
software
SyncBack file
synchronization software
CCleaner file system / registry cleanup
utility
PSPad text editor
UltraVNC remote control software
Dimension 4 clock
synchronization software
Winamp music playing software
Apart from the commercial version of AVG (which I use because I use my computers for business purposes), all of the above are available for free. (There is a commercial version of SyncBack with more features, but the free version suits my needs. I do use -- and paid for -- the Pacemaker tempo/pitch control plugin for Winamp.)
It's amazing how much software is legitimately available for free on the Internet, and the high quality of much of that software is impressive as well. I'm not talking about illegal, pirated copies of store-bought software -- I'm referring to software that the authors have decided to make available without charge, and software which was created by open-source projects. A lot of these are in the categories of system utilities (like SyncBack and CCleaner) and software development tools (such as the WinMerge file difference viewer and the TortoiseSVN source code version control system, both of which I use) and, as such, are of more interest to "computer geeks." But, things like antivirus utilities, web browsers and email clients are of interest to everyone, and there are even free office applications like OpenOffice available which rival commercial programs such as Microsoft Office in both features and usability.
2007-09-16
I've got a domain name!
Not one of the big, well-recognized domains -- I wanted my initials (LOJ) like I use for my email address, but loj.com and loj.info were already taken. But there was one domain that GoDaddy said still had my initials available, and I took it. So, as of two months ago, you can also access this web site by typing the following into your web browser's address bar:
Yep, that's right -- "name." Never heard of it before? Neither had I -- but it works! (It still shows the "real" address in the address bar once you get there, though.)
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We had a successful Sunday dance with Joe Saltel here in Ukiah last month -- five squares. Hopefully, we'll be able to do it again next year when Joe passes through the area. It's always great to be able to dance to Joe -- he's my favorite caller, and one of my biggest inspirations.
Looks like the worst of the summer heat may be behind us -- high temperatures in the mid 80s are all that the 10-day forecast at weather.com shows for us. This summer has been nothing like last year, when we had a stretch of two weeks straight over 100 degrees -- but to me, anything much over 80 is too hot. (And, anything much under 70 is too cold, so I'm almost never happy. :-)
We've had a spat of health problems recently in my extended family -- an uncle and two aunts have all spent time in the hospital after falls. One aunt is still recovering in a care facility, but is doing much better than she had been doing before her fall -- she was diagnosed with anemia in the hospital, was given several transfusions, and is much more like her old self than she was before the fall. You can find silver linings in the oddest clouds!
I'll be traveling up to Mount Shasta next weekend to call a dance. That's just north of where I spent the largest portion of my childhood, a wide spot in the road on I-5 called Gibson, in the Sacramento River Canyon in northern Shasta County. It's always nice to get back up into that area again, even though much of my childhood home and haunts are now gone -- victims of widening I-5 in the '80s and '90s.
