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ARCHIVES: October 1-7, 2003

Spy Sweeper

We were watching The Screen Savers on TV when a caller mentioned that he had run three spyware programs over his system and only the last one found problems. (The first two were Ad-Aware and SpyBot which we use.) The third one was Spy Sweeper. My husband and I both took note. We installed it. True enough, it found all kinds of spyware that the other programs missed.

Spy Sweeper

BloggerCon 2003

Found this interesting report from the BloggerCon 2003 Conference at BusinessWire.com. There's much more information in the article.

Bloggers have conventions?!! Oh well, why not? Everyone else does.

Dilbert on TV

When Dilbert first aired on TV, Huntsville did not have any channels which showed it -- frustrating because we knew about it and could not watch. We just discovered that Comedy Central is showing it on Sunday nights at 11:30 (Central). We now tape it every week. It only ran for two seasons, I think. I wish this show had caught on -- it just cracks us up --but then I am married to an engineer.

CheeburgerCheeburger

My daughter wanted to eat there today. I probably mentioned this before, but they have the best onion rings on earth. I ordered a portabella mushroom salad. It's very good. The mushroom is grilled with the hamburgers -- so much flavor. It is served hot on the salad with tomato, two kinds of cheese, green olives, lettuce, crackers and top with a couple of their fried onion rings. Add a little honey mustard dressing - and yum -- salad heaven!

My husband likes the old-fashioned fried hamburgers and I also like the large variety of milkshakes. They offer to mix any flavors upon request. It's a chain restaurant that seems to be growing rapidly.

Pumpkin Pie Recipe

This is a picture of my husband, the hapless victim of a woman with a camera and a computer. I like how the title and picture  in the newspaper came through clearly - must have had a steady hand that day.

It's that time of year when I want to eat pumpkin. Here is my husband's favorite pumpkin pie recipe - a special family recipe.

Pumpkin Pie Delight

10" uncooked deep dish pie shell or 2 regular 9" shells

First Part:

8 oz. cream cheese, softened

1 egg

1 tsp. vanilla

3/4 cup sugar

Second Part:

1 lb. or 2 cups pumpkin

1/2 cup sugar

1 tsp. cinnamon

1/2 tsp. ginger

1 cup whipping cream

2 eggs

Dash of salt

Buy or make the pie crust. If you make the crust, an easy way to do it is to spray the pie pan with PAM-type spray and pat the crust into the pan instead of rolling it out.

In one bowl, mix the first part. Pour into the 10" deep shell and level. In another bowl, mix the second part. Pour carefully over the first part to form a second layer.

Bake at 375 degrees for about an hour (less for 9" or shallow shells) until knife inserted near the center comes out clean.

ASCII Generator

This is kind of fun. It generates a plain ASCII text image of a picture. The pictures generated are best viewed at a distance, but if you stand back far enough, the photo looks pretty good. Here's what the picture in Thursday's entry looks like (as if viewed from a distance.) Here's a link to the plain text file that made up this photo.

Halloween Decorating

I like Halloween. There are so many happy memories: cooler weather, candy, costumes, candy, staying out late, candy, decorations, pumpkins, candy, parties, music and candy. I remember one party where I dressed up as a vampire and creeped up behind friends to pretend to take a bite. They would jump a mile because I snuck up quietly and wore sharp teeth. (That was umpteen million years ago, it seems.) I finished decorating the outside of the house this afternoon and posted photos in the photoblog. It's not fancy, but it will look good in the dark.

More on Hiding Text in Images

When I hide text in an image, my photoblog site considers it corrupt and won't accept it, but thanks to your comments, it looks like browsers have no trouble with these images. I still can't find the setting in Adobe Photoshop to hide my own text. I think its pretty sneaky that they hide their own name in every image that goes through their program. They do it in a different spot than AnnoTater. Their name is near the beginning and AnnoTater wants to put it near the end. I have a program that can show the image as text, but I can not edit the image. Oh well, it was an interesting thought. (If you aren't sick of these yet, that's my R.N. daughter and her chinchilla silver persian kitten.)

There's a World Record for Everything

Okay, so a man can eat M&Ms real fast with chopsticks. Since we now know they contain a ton of caffeine, I can safely say that he was probably up all night and maybe the next several nights, as well.

How Long does a Hard Drive Last?

Saw this on TechTV last night - at least 80,000 hours which is longer than most folks need before they want to upgrade. In my own experience, other things under the hood will go out first. I lost a power supply and a couple of fans, but have never lost a hard drive yet.

Hide Text within Images

Maybe this is a good idea. I found a program that will embed text within an image - not in the image itself where it could be seen but within the file code. It changes the image a bit. I don't know if it is viewable by everyone so I am putting an experimental image up here. It is embedded with my e-mail address. I guess it's just a way of proving an image belongs to me should the need ever arise.

Photoshop does this with every image run through it. Did you know that all of your images are encoded with the words "Adobe Photoshop" and the version used? I imagine some other graphics programs might also code your images.

I don't copyright anything and everyone is welcome to use my personal images. A mention or link would be nice but not required. After encoding this image, some of my programs will not open the image below such as my photo resizer utility. All of the art programs seem to work fine with it and the encoding can be removed. If you can not see it, I would like to know. The program I used is shareware with no limitations:  AnnoTater 1.0.

Halloween Costume

I had to laugh at this one from JohnsonSmith.com. What will they think of next? I love Halloween -- and usually put out a light or two today. I think I'll go to the store and see what I can find for this year. We are going to give out individually sealed bags of microwavable popcorn this year.

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