Wednesday, December 01, 2004

The Nightmare Before Christmas

Here's the new holiday template. As usual, I spent way too much time on this.

In other news, following up my bad computer luck of the broken fan melting the motherboard, and then the virus, I have now somehow managed to lose all of my contacts and emails for my primary email account. In other words, now's a GREAT time to email me with your updated info.

Get Firefox!On the bright side, I've made the very, very wise transition away from Internet Explorer, which was the cause of the computer virus. Indeed, its true that there are websites out there that, merely by visiting them, they can get a nasty trojan into your computer. I'd been pretty lucky up until this past incident, laughing whenever my anti-virus programs detected and automatically dumped the nasty things. And if it hasn't happened to you yet, dear reader, trust me: it will happen. Especially if you use Internet Explorer.

I'm now an enthusiastic, proud user of Mozilla's Firefox browser. You've probably seen the logo and mentions of it all over the net. And, in honesty, I know that a fair number of my readers already use it. There's absolutely no reason not to try it, and here's a few why you should make it a priority:
1. Its 100% free.
2. Hackers have yet been able to create a virus that can effect your computer just by viewing a website with it.
3. On first load, or anytime later, you can effortlessly import all of your "favorites" from Internet Explorer.
and most importantly
4. Tabbed browsing. Its a catchy word that is, quite simply, hard to explain, but is such an extraordinary feature I'd have paid for the program. If you're like me and routinely visit a dozen or so news sites or blogs repeatedly in a day, tabbed browsing allows you to click one button so that all of them, or just some of them (its fully customizable), open all at once IN ONE WINDOW. While you wait for the other pages to load, you can click on the tab for an available site. In the meantime, it is listed as only one open program, so you don't have a mess of boxes at the bottom of your screen to figure out.
Enough geekdom for right now.