15 October, 2002
Joni's Ashamed
Joni
Mitchell, one of my all-time favorite musicians, refers to the music
industry as a
cesspool. So we can count her among the ranks of other artists who have
gone on record against the music industry. They include Don Henley,
Janis Ian,
Alanis Morissette, Sheryl Crow, Courtney Love, Tom Petty, and even (Sir)
Elton John.
Posted on 15 October, 2002
How I Use Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer is a decent browser, but it lacks one key feature that is found in competing browsers such as Mozilla: the ability to prevent pop-up windows. I use IE several hours each day, and I've seen fewer than 20 pop-up ads in the past year. And I don't use any of those add-in pop-up blockers. Here's what works for me:
- Install a copy of IE 5 Power Tweaks (it works just fine with IE 6). When installed, you'll find a new item to the Tools menu: "Add to Trusted Zone"
- In IE, select Tools - Internet Options. Click the Security tab. Select the Internet icon for the Web zone, and click the Custom Level button.
- In the Security Settings dialog box, scroll down to the Scripting item, and select the Disable option for Active Scripting.
After performing these steps, scripting will be disabled and you will no longer see pop-up ads. When you encounter a site that absolutely requires scripting, just click the Tools menu, choose Add to Trusted Zone, and press F5 to refresh the page. Then scripting will be enabled for that domain.
Hopefully, a future version of IE will have a user option that will make this unnecessary. But I'm not holding my breath. Microsoft probably doesn't want to piss off the companies who use obnoxious pop-up ads, even though 90% of all users would welcome that feature.
Posted on 15 October, 2002
My First Blog Entry
Today I woke up and decided to start a weblog. I've had a bit of free time lately, and I've spent a lot of it perusing other blogs. They vary from crappy to superb. Hopefully, this one will be somewhere in the middle.
I decided to "roll my own," and not use any of the standard blogging products. We'll see how this works out. Right now I'm just using FrontPage.
I spent a few hours working on the design, and recalling things that I had forgotten about cascading style sheets. My goal, as always: Keep it simple.
Posted on 15 October, 2002