Darn

My PDA has a cracked screen. Not sure how or when it happened. Pulled it out of it’s protective case before a meeting this morninig, and saw it was broken. I’ve had more than 10 PDAs in the last 5 years, and this is the first screen that has been broken. I am not a happy Dell customer at the moment. I will try to get them to fix it under warranty, but I am sure they won’t. Grrrr.

WTC Site

It looks like a final architectural plan for the World Trade Center site has been cho sen. It is a very impressive design.

CSS Links

Links to CSS sites I’ve bookmarked (thanks Randy):

http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/css/

http://glish.com/css/

http://w ww.thenoodleincident.com/tutorials/…

http://www.bluerobot.com/web/layout s/

CSS Design

This web site uses tables to create the layout you see. However, since the trend continues to move away from table-based layouts to CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) based layouts, I’ve been playing with some different designs over on techlizard.us. All are based on someone else’s free template, with many modifications. No tables, “font” tags or other “bad html” was used, and they all look more or less identical in the latest versions of IE, Mozilla, and Opera. Design Two is my favorite.

Take a look:

Design One

Design Two

Design Three

Soup Of The Day

My sister posted a tasty potato soup recipe on my test site, techlizard.us. Maybe that’s supper tomorrow. I’ve been sick as a dog for a week, so soup sounds good.

It was kind of a test – her first experience with personal publishing (blogging) software. An hour ago, she didn’t know what a blog was.

ModernGuy Update

The content on ModernGuy is now completely managed by MoveableType – including my cartoons. I modified these photo blog instructions a little to work for the cartoons section.

Having all content managed by MovableType is nice, and the process for me to upload cartoons is easy enough, as long as I remember what goes where. (The cartoon goes in the “entry body” box, and the thumbnail goes in the “excerpt” box.)

See it in action here: ModernGuy Cartoons

Weirdest Creature

I found something dead in my house’s rain gutter one time that looked suspiciously like this.

MODERNGUY.com

Modernguy is a site I use to warehouse some of my humor writings and drawings. Hopefully, I’ll add to the collection at some point in the future.

Anyhow, I’ve just redesigned the site to integrate MoveableType for content management. MT really is a versatile tool, and maintaining and redesigning Modernguy in the future has been drastically simplified. My essays have all been MTed, but my cartoons are still crowded onto non-MT pages. I may eventually migrate them into MT as well, using some sort of photo blog feature.

Check out the result: ModernGuy.com

Axim PDA

Dell is once again offering a $50 rebate on their Axim PDA, bringing the price of the cheaper model to $199. This is a very good price on a very good PDA.

Ad-Aware is not Ad-Alone

Cnet is recommending Spybot Search and Destroy over Ad-aware Standard Edition as their choice of adware removal tool. This seems to have more to do with the added features of Spybot, rather than it’s superiority in the core task of removing ad-serving software.

It looks like Spybot does deliver extra tools many will find useful, such as an e-mail list of opt-out addresses to stop unwanted solicitations and a file shredder to securely overwrite unwanted files deleted from your PC.

I’m not sure about the spam opt-out feature – sending your email address to sleazy scummy dirty evil spammers so they won’t bother you seems like a risky bet to me. I’ll look into it a bit before trying it.

I’ve been using Ad-Aware for awhile with good results, but I may give Spybot a try. The basic version of both products is free.

Spybot

Ad-Aware