are up in the Skins Gallery. The first one is bright in shades of claret and deep purple called Marbles. The other is a muted light gray and white called Through My Eyes. Enjoy.

I started to comment to Sivad’s post about women naming their cars. He actually may very well believe that no man names his car. That this is the sole province of woman. Not so, say I. I myself have named each and every one of the 300ZXs I’ve ever had (and until now, that’s all I’d driven for the past 18 or so years) … Simone, Monette, Caitlin and Angel. And now my Honda Accord goes by the name Jane F. Honda. A friend has a Nissan 350Z which she lovingly refers to as Penelope. And at work, this friend is (lovingly?) referred to herself as Penelope Pitstop by her co-workers. Yet another friend, and this gal is the President of the Z Club of Houston, and she’s got more Z cars than you can shake a stick at. Each has a name. You better believe it! But of course, above, I’ve spoken only of women. Let’s take on the guys, shall we? I know many members of my car club (and yes, they still love me even though I now drive a lowly Honda), all MEN, who have names for their cars. Of course, most of these names start with Z: Zedra, Zanthippe, Zara, Zeda, etc. And some of those guys spend as much money on those cars as some other men do on expensive call girls or Cuban cigars or … well you name it. A car, is after all, if you are a guy, just another toy. And what’s the difference between a man and a boy? Just the size of the toy, yep, that’s all.

Craig at Nuclear Moose Candy is celebrating The. Big. Four. Oh. And Tigger had a birthday today, too! So I had a piece of cake in their honor. And, should you wonder, it was absolutely delicious. Read more .. »

From the WinAmp web site:

A vulnerability has been reported in Winamp, which can be exploited by malicious people to compromise a user/’s system. The problem is caused due to insufficient restrictions on Winamp skin zip files (.wsz). This can e.g. be exploited by a malicious website using a specially crafted Winamp skin to place and execute arbitrary programs. With Internet Explorer this can be done without user interaction.

Naturally, the problem is worsened by using IE. This vulnerability apparently does not affect version 2.x of Winamp. (Yay!) Found via Neil’s World.

on all the bile and vitriol being spilled over there in the last few days (weeks?) over various things. (I won’t go into any of that right now, but you can probably figure it out, once the site’s back up.) Server problems all day and now it’s issuing a “database error.” Wonder what the peeps behind the curtain are up to? This just doesn’t look like Kansas anymore, Toto.

I’m working backstage to convert most of my designs from a table-based design (because of the copyright footer at the bottom) to a table-less design, using Root‘s Gemini template designed for WordPress. Meanwhile, while I was going through my images, I came across one that had been an old skin when this blog was running on MovableType. So I adapted it to work here. Go ahead and try it on for size. Look for the new template (and migration back to WP 1.2 from Wuh-Wuh) in the coming weeks. (Like I don’t have enough to do!)

At last, I have found a site that my paranoid heard can wrap itself up in. Ever since that trojan infected my computer a few weeks ago and I had to reformat and reinstall Win-Doze X-Pee Pro, I’ve also donned the cyberspace equivalent of a brass bra and installed SpySweeper and Hacker Eliminator (along with trusty versions of Zone Alarm and AVG Antivirus). But I’m still very wary of processes I don’t understand. But this site lists all the friendly or trusted processes that you shouldn’t delete.

Found this site while surfing. The photographer has taken common urban scenes and stripped the text from them to underscore the fact that even bereft of words, some corporate and architechtural images can still be discerned. It also shows how stark they’d be IRL without those words.

I’ve finally done it. I bought a wireless router and PC card and now I can share my Roadrunner connection with my Vaio lappy in the back bedroom. In addition to that, I can access my fairly large MP3 collection from the Vaio, and both computers’ documents can be shared back and forth. No more shuttling docs. back and forth with jump drives and memory sticks. Yay me.

After Windows XP Pro installed an update for me today, it gave me the option to restart now or keep working. I was in chat with someone so I chose to keep working. Right in the middle of that, however, it flipped me off the computer, the computer rebooted itself and this icon appeared in the system tray as a newly discovered HP Deskjet 3820. My Deskjet was already installed (you can see it on the right, fourth from the left. The questionable icon is second from the left. Now mind you, I’ve got all kinds of stuff protecting me now (but I must warn that I just set up a wireless home network). I have Zone Alarm Pro, Hacker Eliminator, Spy Sweeper and a few other things constantly scanning for Internet nasties. On second reboot, this icon went away. I’ve searched my Zone Alarm logs and nothing suspicious jumps out. But still. Anyone ever seen that thing before?