I don’t know about you, but Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan makes me feel so Christmasy all over. A couple of years ago we gave Eric a Khan ornament, and this year we gave him Hallmark’s new, deluxe light-and-sound Khan ornament.
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Click a little button and you hear Shatner and Montalban going at it! Blasters and overacting combine to make this year’s tree the most festive ever. I give this ornament a rating of Warp 10.
December 16th, 2007
With ten inches of snow already here, another six have fallen. It’s still coming down, and the furnace is off. I pushed the reset button and it ran for a minute and popped out again. Aaugh! This is the second blog post telling of the furnace being out. Here is the first.
We have a contract with a new oil company. It’s a very old company, but it’s not the outfit we used for nine years. One of several reasons why I left the other place was long delays in service, often eight hours or more. I’m told we’ll have a service tech here before noon, and it’s 10 am now. The roads are in terrible shape, but fortunately ours just got plowed.
I’ll let you know how it goes. Meanwhile, I’m glad I had electric heat put in the remodeled porch. Now I’ve got to get outside with the snow blower and clear the driveway for the service truck.
P.S. HEAT! Half an hour later, it’s working. He came, he fixed, he went. Impressive. Clogged fuel nozzle.
December 16th, 2007
There’s a way of defining a link in a Web page that either replaces the window or tab you’re looking at, or opens up a new one. Whether it opens a whole new window or just a tab in your present window depends on how your browser is set.
To open up a new window in a link, the command target="_blank" is needed. The problem is, this tag is no longer considered to be valid in the strict rules and regulations of Web pages, and there’s no replacement for it. The assumption is supposed to be that links will replace the existing window or tab. Fortunately, newer browsers have a feature where you can right-click a link and select whether or not you want to open a new window or a new tab.
I have been selectively using the target="_blank" tag, usually for external links that aren’t on my own site. I have decided to end this practice. For one thing, it’s a pain to do because I work in the non-graphical WordPress editor, and I have to enter the tag manually. So from now on if you want a link to open up a new tab or window, you’ll have to remember to first right-click. Sorry for the inconvenience.
On another matter, today I had tons of fun replacing the Computer Associates security suite with Norton Protection Center. It’s what Verizon wanted me to do, and I’d been putting it off, but the software is part of my FiOS package so I had to go along with it. Norton is uniformly rated as more secure than CA, so I didn’t really mind, but I’ve had Norton in the past and had a lot of trouble with it.
After some futzing around I got the CA suite uninstalled and Norton installed, I ran a full system scan that found five pieces of malware, and I customized the firewall feature. The system seems stable and it’s not running slowly the way McAfee made it do when it was part of my old Comcast service.
One incentive I had for installing Norton was a problem I’m having with my Web service. FTP — File Transfer Protocol — isn’t working. And I can’t post a couple of videos without FTP working, so I had nothing better to do. Sorry for this very boring post, but when I can upload the videos there will be something more interesting here!
December 16th, 2007
