Well my laptop is now in the hands of the Best Buy service people. For a little background, last time they had it I didn’t get it back for almost two months. It wasn’t so bad because I had another laptop I used as a loaner, but that’s not an option this time and it’s going to be tough. I’ve added a day counter to the sidebar to track how long this takes, thoug I truly hope they surprise me and have it back with a week or two. On the bright side, since this is the third or fourth time it’s going back there is a possibility I’ll have the option to get a new laptop, in which case I’m definitely eyeing the new Z1 series.

Well I picked up a motherboard at Fry’s with my dad, and hopefully this will resolve the desktop issues I’ve been having. The new motherboard is pretty sweet, and was quite cheap. I’m quite disillusioned of expensive motherboards with this one failing months after I got it. With the strong prospect that I’m taking my laptop back again it’s important that I at least have a working desktop though, so this will be good. It works!

Mouse pads are probably the most personal and often changed components of most people’s computing setup. I have come to the conclusion that every mouse-pad has a story behind it, and I’m curious to hear them. What’s yours?

I’ll start it off. I have two mouse-pads, the first has a Picasso painting on it, Three Musicians. My mother got it for me as a present, and I believe she got it from a museum store. The other one I use at my desktop has each of the Presidents of the United States on it in chronological order. I bought it when I was in Washington D.C. for the G8 camp over the summer, which was a wonderful experience by the way, and we visited the Lincoln Memorial. Your turn. 🙂

I wonder how long before filtering techniques start to incorporate some sort of OCR and that’s no longer a loophole. I’m waiting for it in SpamAssassin.

Well everyone and their dog’s host is using MySQL 4.0 now, so in my quest to forever remain on the bleeding edge (and after some local testing) I installed it on the server and it’s humming along nicely. People may think that staying with the latest version is less stable or something, but I’ve been following the 4 branch since it went public and in all that time I’ve only had one problem (with 4.0.4 I believe), and a minute later I just downgraded back to my old version and reported the bug to the mailing list. It was fixed in the next release. What’s that you say? Your host is still on 3.23? You want a query cache and sub-queries and UNION? Well I know a place where the bandwidth flows freely and the software is always up to date. Let me know you’re signing up and I’ll hook you up with a discount. Update: Whoa! Either there’s something wrong with my benchmarks or there have been some major performance improvements in this version. I’m extremely impressed.

Just found a quite nifty add-on for IE that gives you nicely done tabbed browsing, a sweet search bar, pop-up blocking, some auto-login stuff I haven’t played with yet, and a page zoom. Sound like what you’ve been waiting for? It uses the same engine as IE, so I see now reason why this shouldn’t replace it for me. My only compliant so far is it won’t let me reorder my links toolbar, but I can live with alphabetical. Did I mention it’s freeware? Hat tip: Dougal Campbell. Okay favelets don’t work. Bummer.