IE...

I had meant to post on this a while back, but never got around to it. So here goes. About a week ago, (or maybe it's been two now) I found a neat little word match game to stick into my sidebar (that area over there on the right). I stuck it in the template and opened up my FIREFOX 1.5 browser and it looked great. A day later my wife was visiting my sister the muse and tried to show her our blog. My wife told me that the sidebar would appear briefly then disappear and be gone. Hmmm. I didn't think much of it cause my sister the muse has an old computer she bought from her work. I figured that it had some weird security setting that prevented the sidebar from displaying. A few days latter I was at another computer showing off my blog, and low and behold, the sidebar would appear briefly then go away. Well to make a long story short, I discovered that while my blog looked great in my FIREFOX 1.5 browser, IE did not render the size of the new cool word match game correctly. Consequently it made the sidebar about four pixels to big so it had to shift down below the main blog area. So if you had visited before and did not see the sidebar for awhile, that's why. Because I can't change everyone’s browsers to FIREFOX 1.5, I moved the cool word match game to the bottom of the main area, and stuck a pretty hard hangman game in its place. Just one more reason to ditch IE. Like I needed anymore... So that brings up another topic. A good friend was over and we were discussing windows installs. I am the type that knows enough to get myself in trouble so when I want to do anything radical I pass it by others. Anyway, we got to discussing freeware apps and he turned me on to one of his sites. Basically it's a forum about freeware alternatives to major applications that you think you can't live without. These applications are often open source, meaning other developers can make plug-ins for them so the original creators don't have to add all of that "functionality". This often makes them less obtrusive and more resource friendly. Here is the best part though, they are FREE. Yes FREE. Do the math: MS office, $250; Adobe Photoshop CS, $795; being able to save a document as a .pdf for free, priceless. Anyway I asked him to write up what his optimum XP install looked like. Here it is. I want to reiterate, this man is perhaps the most computer literate person I know, and I know a bunch of techies. If there is a computer Guru, he is it. My next install will look a lot like his. I'll link his site under the suggested reading category on the sidebar. But if you missed it up above, here it is again Open For The Masses