Internet Explorer 7.0 is available for download in its "post-beta" stage -- which means, basically, that it is not ready for the market, but ready to be tested on a larger audience. Or, more specifically, that it's a Microsoft product.

They would kill in the pharmaceutical market... literally.

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I don't think I'd call myself a perfectionist, per se. I've been known to turn in underdeveloped work on a deadline, or even just give in and publish something when I know it's not the best it could be. Sometimes, a project just dies in-media-res and though mine is not the most popular work ethic, I've often found that trying to push these projects is just spinning tires; if it dies, you move on. But sometimes, things move on before you are ready to.

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Let's not kid ourselves: the guy is good-looking.

Is it his body? His face? His personality? Well, it's not his face... come on! He's not bad-looking in the face or anything, but he kinda resembles Mr. Potato-Head: the flappy ears, the big nose, all those teeth? I cannot be alone here! Kinda, he really does.

So, my neighbor came up and we were hanging out and doing shots of some really good vodka [commercial link deleted] and he said that he'd heard that Vin Deisel was gay. So I said, "Aw, they always say that stuff about good-looking guys who make it big -- especially if that guy happens to be about their age..." So he says, "No, man. He said it on like ET or E!, or one of those things -- I remember seeing it!" So I said, "..."

"Really?"

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Let me begin this by saying, "Wow."

After being introduced to Trailfire by fellow Performancing member, brettbum, I installed the gizmo and followed some trails he sent me in a comment to one of my posts.

And I can safely say that this, then, is the future of blogging.

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Why is it that everything I've ever enjoyed involved the ugly question of "selling-out"?

Death metal, punk rock, sequential art/comic books, writing, BBS/Internet, and now blogging.

Don't get me wrong, I think it's cute how kids think that if you get paid to do something, you're "selling-out." Really I do. Just precious. Really.

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[Be forewarned, some viewers may find the subject matter and my brand of humor and speech offensive, so please do not read further, if you feel this may apply to you.  Thank you!]

I'm not exactly sure when blogging, like memoirs, became synonymous with journalism.  Maybe most people just get confused by the words -- "journaling" and "journalism" -- they do look a lot alike, their etymology is the same, and I can see as how someone outside the writing realm could mistake one for the other.  And while journaling is not journalism -- neither is memoir nor blogging -- it's important to know that a writer can commit libel in any form of writing -- fiction or non-.

This has become a really big issue lately, mainly thanks to James Frey and Oprah Winfrey.  But, as I blogged on the issue back when it happened, Winfrey was way out of line to attack Frey the way she did: memoir is not journalism -- far from it, in fact -- and the publisher is the one who decides the genre in which a book is published and how it is marketed, not the author.  And I knew that, given this climate of hostility, it was only a matter of time before it hit the blogosphere.

Now, I had no real idea that blogging was a "new" fad.  The last time I heard about blogging in "fad" terms was probably 1999... of course, the last time I heard a message board called a "bulletin board" was a few years before that (when I was a sysop), and that seems to be making a comeback as well, so what do I know?  But according to many sources, there are tens of thousands of blogs being created every minute, so I stand corrected and -- I'll assert -- that means I was like 7-8 years ahead of the curve.  I don't really buy that, but even if it's off by a few tens of thousands, I'm not worried; every networking site, tech site, portal, and search engine has a blog nowadays, and my guess is that that's where most of these blogs are being made.  A lot of these sites will fall off within the next year or two and most of the rest will remove their blogging features in about the same time (consolidating with other sites, such as Blogger, and so on), in order to make room for the next "big thing."  Further, a full 80-90% of these new bloggers will abandon their blogs after a few weeks -- just as most of them do their very accounts on half the sites across the Web.

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To say that AOL sucks as an ISP is an insult to both oral sex and Crazy Straws. To say that AOL is a dog of a program is animal abuse.

If you say anything good about AOL, you are a paid shill -- I hope. I mean, really. I even hate having to use Nutscrape HTML tags on this site because AOL owns them (and how really sad is that? -- Netscape was one of the best programs on the market up to that point, a real pioneer of the open-source movement)... I don't even allow it on my systems anymore and remove it from others' systems when I work on them.

So, the drivers updates did not work; they seemed to for a while and I was hopeful, but after I left the system up all night, I woke up to the bottom of windows. I'm 98% positive it is a hardware issue concerning this mouse that refuses to work under Linux and am exactly one 24-oz. away from a full, destructive recovery on both partitions...

But then there's this: "Access Denied - SB.DLL".

This little gem comes up when I try to manually delete AOL 9.0 from my system. "Why are you doing that, MD?," I hear you ask.

Well, friends, because the normal, accepted method of uninstalling it through Control Panel left the entire directory on my system!

SB.DLL is known, though somewhat obscure, malware. This is obviously a variation, because no Malware-Detection programs (I've used Yahoo! Anti-Spy, Ad-Aware, Housecall, BitDefender [which only works through IE, by the way]) have found it and it does not show up in the Registry or Startup Folder the way the instructions for manually removing it say it should. It is located in the AOL core directory, along with all the other effing malware on my computer...

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As stated in an earlier post, to celebrate their award as best utility, WinRAR was supposed to be free for one day only (yesterday), but many of us tried and tried and were unable to get through. This started as early as a few minutes after Midnight of July 30th.

After some digging into the subject, I came across this public release addressing the issue, which basically states that the company is working on sending out a newsletter for all those who signed up, detailing how to get their free copies, as promised in the original PR campaign.

Let's keep our fingers crossed and hope the new plan doesn't involve logging into another website for a limited time!

Okay, I know I blogged earlier that swapping browsers had fixed my computer problems, but I was wrong. They abated for a while, then started back up in earnest a few days back.

I don't want to violate the TOS here, so I try not to link to my other blogs or websites too often, but I also hate to repeat myself, so it's really more a matter of linking for completeness and/or just more information when I do (as opposed to self-promotion), but I can give you the run-down on the whole thing (along with a bit more technical information, as this is a more technically-inclined site) to save you the time:

Sometime in January, my computer started dying in media-res. It had begun making an odd whirring noise a few weeks earlier, so I thought it was the fan, but the casing was so hot when it did this, that I figured it was the power supply. Finally, it was doing it so often that I took it in for bench-testing, told the guy what I thought it was, and he touched a magic wand-thingy to it and said, "You were right!" (I remember he looked kind of shocked when he said it, as though I were Kreskin or something.) So I bought a new power supply and was off and running again -- for all of about two solid weeks.

Then one day, I turned on my computer to find a black screen with some obscure error message, which I have written down somehwere but don't care to look for right now. It would not let me in my computer, no matter what I did -- not Safe Mode, not DOS, nothing. I searched the web over for the offending message and found only a handful of posts in some tech forums where others had encountered the same problem -- but no solutions. I had had this box networked to another XP box and a 98 box which the grand AOL-provided McAffee AV program had killed a few weeks earlier, so I thought it might be related (still do, in fact), but never got the chance to find out (and, just for the record, none of the work-arounds or solutions to get back into that box worked, either) because I decided I was over it.

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Posting to your blog | Performancing.com

WINRAR 3.51 Free Sunday July 30th 2006 - Neowin.net

I used to have the open-source file for download on the website, but GeoCities stopped allowing that sort of thing, so this is a decent offer.  As you'll read in the comments of this article, a lot of people prefer the open-source version, which I'm sure you can still find somewhere, but you might as well grab this one while it's available.

I've been having problems -- not Milo Oblong problems, mind you -- good, old-fashioned computer problems.

The main one is that I'm unable to connect through Linux, so I'm forced to use XP to get online until I can find an external modem or get off my ass and figure out this WinModem... and since the whole two computer shoppes in this little town have nothing I can use in the way of modems and I am flat-out lazy... well, I connect through XP.

A few weeks back, strange things began happening: first-off, Windows Update would not connect. Kept giving the famous MicroSoft Error Code -- you know the one, the one you can't find, even after hours of searching that stupid error code database. My guess is you can never find it because MS ran out of numbers for error codes around Windows Millennium 2k, v.9, Flavor B, build 2340734097049.09174012940.8724 with built-in AOL 7.0923740974 (the one that shipped with Dungeons & Dragons 3.678854 -- remember?).

Then, my windows would auto-scroll to the bottom when I opened them -- not just IE browser windows -- all my windows. Task Manager, folder windows -- you name it. On-board AV found nothing; couldn't start HouseCall because of the auto-scroll problem; so I ended up loading BitDefender, and it promptly found... nothing.

I updated Java, changed Internet Settings, reset them to Default and changed them again, cleared the cache, deleted the cookies, defragged, manually deleted IE temp folder -- I mean, the whole nine -- with no results. One friend said it was a virus called "Windoze," another said it was spyware, but no program or service I used could find anything and copious manual searches proved fruitless.

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I guess Amazon must have canceled my old account -- after all, when the free webhosts started disallowing external ads, I quit placing them, so the account's been dormant for years now -- so I set up a new one earlier today, but I was dismayed to see nothing mentioned regarding blogs anywhere I could find!

Does the Amazon Affiliates program allow bloggers to create their own links for use in blogs on other sites, or can you only place links on your own website? It seems to me Amazon would be shooting themselves in the foot if they don't allow bloggers to take advantage of their advertising program(s), but I know a message to them might never be answered, so I figured I'd post something here (noticably sans links) to see if anyone else had anything to say on this?

I really don't even know if Geocities or any other free host will allow Amazon ads anymore. It got really dicey there for a while; at first, they either advertised to "Set Up Your Site for Free and Start Making Money!" or their TOS was pointedly mute on the subject, but before long, they started locking you out of your site and/or 404-ing it without so much as a warning or courtesy e-mail!

And with some of the scare stories I've read concerning AdSense and their no-nonsense approach to even possible TOS violations, and all the disdain link exchange networking and similar concepts are drawing from the Big Companies, I have to be honest in saying I'm a little concerned about doing anything without double-, then triple-checking, then verifying the source!

I'm a little confused (maybe wary is a better word?) as to how the Amazon Affiliates Program works for bloggers, as well as all of the revenue-garnering programs out there right now.

I have been blogging for nearly 10 years now (1998, to be exact). I didn't get "caught-up in the blogging craze" -- Suck is what got me going. But when it folded, I kept right on doing it. I found it a great release, as well as neat that what I wrote generated feedback from others (not much usually, but some).

I always fantasized about being able to do it for money. After all, it seemed a no-brainer that advertisers would want to target people who read what I wrote about -- comics, sci-fi/fantasy, writing, art, music, current events -- but where were they?

Back then, there was Amazon and a handful of others, but since most of the blogging sites didn't allow external advertisers, I set up a series of websites... but then most all of the free webhosts cracked-down on ads, too! Still, I blogged on.

And when, very recently, I found several programs and sites which not only allowed this, but encouraged it, I was elated -- albeit skeptical.

But once I got involved and saw that it really is legit, I set to work. I am now busy revamping all the 973204970234502374239470 blogs I have across cyberspace, trying to network them and network with others, and really cultivate this opportunity.

So, I'm here for better or for worse, and if you're interested, I'd love to work with others to develop solid networking between blogs and hopefully help generate us all more readers, more subscribers, and lots more money.

I'm a 31 year-old, SWM, who lives alone in a rural community in the middle of nowhere. This entry gives a bit more detail, as well as lists the things I tend to blog about, and here's my Technorati Profile.