April 7, 2002

I am going to start right off today with the web site of the day. This one isn’t so much weird as just a nice funny site. Tedd Goff is a cartoonist who makes cartoons that kinds of cross the gap between Dilbert and the Far Side. His stuff isn’t as funny as either of those but it is pretty good. You can find his work at www.TedGoff.com. You can also buy his work there to add to your company newsletter or whatever. I found him because he is associated with the Opera Web browser.

Speaking of the Opera web browser. You will most likely notice that we have added some advertising for Opera to our web page. We aren’t getting paid for it, we are just trying to increase our readers awareness to alternative browsers. Opera is free and now with version 6.01 (yes, Josh, you need to go and get the most recent one now) it is even better than before. This latest version includes some updates to the overall look and feel. Opera is very functional and extrememly fast. For those of you working over a phone connection, you really need to switch to a fast browser like Opera or Mozilla as thier performance blows Internet Explorer away. Over cable or DSL it isn’t as noticeble. But it is still faster. I have been using Opera since verion 4 and have always been happy with it. I use Mozilla mostly now but I use everything from time to time. I also use Konqueror a lot but that is only available on UNIX platforms that use the K Desktop Environment (KDE). Which, by the way, just went to version 3.0 this week.

Dominica is addicted to the Sims again. She has added the first three expansion packs and will probably install Vacation today. We have noticed, however, that as you add expansion packs the game really begins to slow down. It is unfortunate that they designed the game to not use the graphics card in the computer to help in rendering the environment so the main processor is stuck doing everything. It really takes a toll on the system – even though it is nice that you can play this game on every machine everywhere because of it – it also means that you have to have a totally amazing machine to get it to run well. Dominica is currently running a PIII 866/133 with 256MB of memory and the game is still having a hard time keeping up. With Vacation added, it will most likely be even slower. With the new expansion packs added, especially Hot Date, The Sims is a little less for children – if you catch my drift. The game is completely a computerized soap opera.

Nate and Bob were expecting to have company this weekend but noboday came up so it is a quiet weekend here. Josh is thinking of coming down to visit and my Aunt and Uncle’s family is expected to be here this afternoon. Loopy is in North Bay today. We won’t see him again until Monday night. He has been working at Cornell and they let him work for only an hour yesterday so that he could drive up to Canada earlier in the day.

I want to get this site to having at least 100 people looking at it on a single day. And I don’t want that to just be a couple of us going to it a million times each (ok, I guess that that would just be ten of us at ten times each…) I need you guys to help me come up with some ideas to get people to come to our site here. Somebody email me with something – ok?

Dominica’s computer has started acting up and it appears to be a dying DVD-ROM drive so she is now in the process of installing a new 16x DVD-ROM drive and a new TDK CD-RW drive that she bought today. This is her first venture into the world of tearing apart a computer.

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