Djinns and Texas PowerPop
Back over the weekend I was over at my sisters, my older sister, who
has the older two kids. Nicole and Lucas. I had brought my laptop with
me hoping to write some stuff over the weekend. That didn't
happen. Even though my Niece has two computers at her disposal, there
was a certain attraction to surfing about on my iBook. When I got it
out again back at my place I discovered I had a small window into the
world of an American seventh grader by tapping the top
windows back button. At the bottom of this pile representing the start the voyage English forums.com a forum thread on the longest word in the english language. Nathaniel and his Djinn pal Bartimaeus saving London or
what's left of it after the Golem looks about. (a tour
through the trivia quiz section of this site - a stack of correct
answers). This relates to the second book of the Bartimaeus trilogy by Jon Stroud released this year.
Next a meandering set of searches for the lyrics to the song 1985 by the Texas band Bowing for Soup. (I always go to Mp3 lyrics_org first
when I'm trying to find lyrics, I just get lyrics, nobody tries to
sell me anything) from there more sites until a link to the song
itself off the MTV site for BFS is settled on.
At this point there was input from her father downstairs and the browser switches course: Yahooligans > Yahooligans Science > search results: Science Fair Projects > IPL Kidspace Science Fair project Ideas > Agricultural ideas for Science fair projects > Bill Nye > Science Project ideas (rossarts). About then it was time for dinner.
Lucas was miffed that he has been requested to stay off his
favorite online games site. It was choking the light out of the
computer he uses faster than you can say "does that look like Kudzu to
you". Lucas is still too young to grasp the concept of a bad actor (crank the comments filter to four)
and it just seems unfair to him. In three days that machine grew
sixteen spyware programs and had its homepage slammed. It doesn't
do any good to suggest that a browser other than Internet explorer be
used. These are wintell boxes and IE is the browser that came in the
box. (actually Firefox is there too, now) I use Apple OS and don't have
always-on broadband, so I don't own the same problem yet. I know
Microsoft has a well appointed Internet Control Panel that can be
adjusted to eliminate nearly all of this (turn off all of active x,
turn off half of Java, slide all levers up!), If a site needs its bells
and whistle to work place its URL in 'trusted sites' slide the lever
down. Most people; though, expect and frankly want their computers and
the internet to behave as conveniently and simply as any other consumer
product. The internet isn't really like that - it's more like a
hanglider than a bicycle, always will be unless it's turned into
something else.
There is plenty of desire from many sectors to do just
that. It is an unfortunate validation of Microsoft's view (which made
IE, Outlook, XP and 2000 such a insecure group of products) that they
make their products as friendly as possible - as open to outside
control so the consumer needs do little, that the answer probably lies
with future MS products and protocols that are even more black box than
the current ones.
11:45:12 PM  ;;
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