Filing

Photoshop is webberizing the first batch of rodeo pix, but it's getting early so i will finish up tomorrow evening. Uploading to the web site will take a while too. I think I have all the files named in the correct order, but it's hard to tell on the 3-a-second group.

Weekend plans are taking shape.  Saturday will go up to wine country and hit between 2 and 4 wineries on my own. For Sunday I've booked a bike tour which I'll hear if they have space tomorrow some time. Last year I took my bike up to Oakville Market and biked to a couple of wineries, but got a flat about halfway through and ended up walking the bike for four miles, back to a bike shop where they found a chunk of wood speared through the tire. This time it'll be their bike, and they will have repair stuff. Overnight in Vallejo.

Stoopid Yahoo

My visiting friend was bit by a Yahoo toolbar hack called red.clientapps which hijacks Internet Explorer - it replaces the home and search pages with an invalid URL, and even if you use MSIE's tools menu to change those, the hijack stays in place. In friend's case, it also slowed the machine to a crawl. I wasn't able to clean her machine in the 15 minutes we had, and running Spybot and Symantec scans did no good. I found out later they need to be run in safe mode. The work-around is easy - use Firefox. But this doesn't fix the 20-minute boot time or incredible slowness of the machine.

I thought I had a variant of this when I went to Yahoo Maps and got a blank page with a URL which ended in ?env=#F. Ran a full Trend Micro scan, which specifically lists the red.clientapps as something it can fix, but it didn't find it on my machine. I killed all the 127 spyware cookies it found, rebooted, and still no joy. So I cleared my yahoo cookies and went to the maps page again - turns out the new maps page requires Flash 9, and if it isn't installed, the only option on the new maps page is to install it or go to the old maps page. Bug in Yahoo's page handler - Flash 9 is not available for Vista 64 or 64-bit browsers, but as soon as the maps page takes you to Adobe to get Flash, it tags your browser as having flash installed, so subsequent visits to the maps site gives you a blank page because no Flash is installed, but Yahoo thinks it is.

So I wiped my yahoo cookies again, and changed my maps link to the old page. Also confirmed Firefox works fine with the new maps page (it's 32-bit). Adobe has no estimate of when Flash 9 will be ready for 64-bit.

This one's for

scendan. From the size of the model, I'm guessing your cat would fit fine in these. ClickyClicky

Voice Post

The King Has Left The Building

Hear it live from the left field view seats - Barry's last at-bat, inning over, leaving the game.