My Cat Apparently Speaks The Queen’s English

So, a while back, I installed a locale switcher add-on for Firefox that I use specifically for US vs. UK English. Because I still do some work occasionally for a company in the UK, I find it comes in handy sometimes.

My cat Maggie, who has for some time seemed to think the left side of the keyboard is her personal pillow, is nowadays constantly switching my locale from the US to the UK.

I suppose if I wake up one day and find an online order for fish & chips from some takeaway place in England on my screen, I guess I will know who to blame.

Oops

Apologies to all my readers who still insist on using Internet Explorer as a web browser. I guess y’all must have thought I’d lost my mind last week. I was alerted to the odd-lookingness of my blogs late last week by my mother, and at the time I blamed it on her web browser, which was technically true because if you use Firefox or most other browsers, you likely didn’t notice anything at all different.

But apparently a very small change in HTML I made last week sent Internet Explorer into the equivalent of a grand mal epileptic seizure. She & I had discussed the problem she was having viewing the blog again on the phone earlier, so I fired up IE myself to see what she was seeing, and yup, it was alllll messed up. After we got off the phone I thought about it for a while and poked around a bit, and then discovered the HTML culprit and promptly removed it.

So it’s all fixed now, and I removed a couple of other tinier things that apparently had an issue with Internet Explorer too, so now all you IE diehards should be seeing the same things on both blogs that everyone else does. This is why…

On another note, I saw something at Aunt B.’s today that made me think once again, as I often have in the past, that it’s probably a good thing that I am so ancient that we didn’t have webcams and other such video equipment so easily at our disposal when I was a teenager and in college, or cell phones with cameras and all those sorts of things, or most especially YouTube. Because I would have never gotten anything else done because I would have been making goofy videos or video blogs all the time, no doubt.

Of course, I might have been rich & famous by now, too, but that’s beside the point.

Dear Firefox

Dear Firefox,

After Ivy turned me on to you last winter, I became a big fan and swore I’d never go back to IE.

Alas, whatever you have done with this new 2.0.0.4 release is making my system firewall go berserk and so far I’ve found no way to stop it.

And it doesn’t help much that I can reinstall 2.0.0.3 and be happy for a little while again… until 2.0.0.4 insists on auto-installing again and it appears there’s no way to say no.

And no, I’m not on a Mac or using Vista, I’m still on XP.

Not having fun here,

Lynnster

UPDATE:  Never mind, and Jon Hickman is a genius.  Or at least a demigod. :)

Popsicle of Love

1. I do believe you could break my toes off my feet, like icicles, right about now. Not only do I live in the Ancient House from Draft City, but this will be my second winter trying to get by on two (safe and not left on while sleeping) space heaters. Which can’t be on at the same time or they flip the circuit breaker. Yes, I DO get tired of living like a 19-year-old college student sometimes. Except they probably live in better places nowadays than I do, probably.

2. I got so busy switchin’ all my stuff over to Firefox tonight, I forgot all about the newly released Diner Dash 3. Obsessive stay up all night playing games desire being overruled by desire to crawl into warm bed full of covers though, I think. After I warm up the bedroom with the other space heater first, which means I get to sit out here at the desk for an hour freezing some more while I wait.

3. “Icicle” is kind of a dumb word when you think about it.

Hey Jack, What’s Happenin’?

Ready for this one? THEY FORGOT ABOUT MY CAR.

Oh, yeah, they sure did. They forgot to tow it to the other mechanic for the electrical work. Dude didn’t think about it ’til this evening, when I guess he was squaring away all the pending work at the shop before the day was over.

I was so busy working all day, I didn’t really think about it until late afternoon and decided since I hadn’t heard from ‘em that it probably wouldn’t be fixed today, and planned to call them when I finished working. The guy at the auto shop had remembered and called me before I had a chance to call. Needless to say, apologizing profusely and planning to take care of it first thing Monday morning.

I’m really not that annoyed about it, since (A) I don’t know how much this is going to cost me yet, so that’s one less thing to ruin my weekend, (B) I can pretty much get by without until Tuesday or Wednesday or so if I have to, and (C) it’s too danged cold today to get out anyway. I can’t get away from my ceramic heater for two minutes without my fingers freezing (this house is old and cold). But still it figures that something like that would happen, always to moi. Sheesh.

Anyway, I’m in the process of resubscribing to all my feeds via one of these way cool Firefox add-ons I picked up, it’s very neat. Just taking a while, no easy way to transfer them out of my IE-based reader so I am having to manually input them individually. I am finally right now up to the P’s. I read way too many blogs. Wait, there’s no such thing as too many blogs!

I am definitely going to be checking out StumbleUpon thanks to the recommendations from Frank and Ivy. As if I need more things for time suckage, so I’ll blame them when I have no more time because I’ve wasted it all, hehe.

And speaking of time wasters, I got an e-mail notification this morning that Diner Dash 3 has been released, so there goes my weekend. Well, after I spend the next 12 hours or so in bed because (A) I’m tired and (B) it’s too cold! Well, when I go to bed anyway, which is probably going to be sooner than later because my toes and fingers are turning to ice. Stay warm, people!

Switchin’ to Glide (Redux)

I am in the process of switching all my stuff over to Firefox now, pretty soon I won’t need to open IE for anything anymore except maybe a couple of rare apps that don’t work in Firefox. I can’t even comment on Blogger in IE anymore, only in Firefox (which is probably something due to Beta and apologies to anyone I may have accidentally double commented last night trying to fool with this stuff).

Anyway, yeah, Firefox, this is really cool, so far I have no complaints and am just finding all kinds of way cool stuff. You guys were right all along. I’m very quickly turning into a new fan.

Although I do believe I may freeze into a blonde popsicle before the day is through. Could it be any colder? And can you guys that are freezing right along with me today in Tennessee believe it’s supposed to be, like, in the 60′s again mid-week next week?!?! Everyone who hasn’t been sick already is gonna be and that probably includes me since I’ve skated past it all so far. So I really should stock up on Zicam I reckon, as it’s been so highly recommended by John and CeeElCee. Except I’m a little afraid of cat panting and rascalitis, but anything that has to do with cats can’t be all that bad.

Don’t know anything about the car yet. Really don’t care at this point if I don’t hear anything before Monday, the better to not bum out my weekend.

And, I’m just wondering what the hell the Internet is so doggone excited about today (see right on my Blogger blog).

Fox on the Run… Resolved!

My Firefox looks fantastic now, all thanks to Ivy the Great and Powerful and Totally Kickass! Once she took a look at screenshots of my Explorer vs. Firefox (and deemed the Firefox text as “looking pixelated” compared to the same in Explorer, which was sort of what I was blondely trying to say this morning when I said it looked liked crap, heh heh), she went a-hunting and came up with the info needed to fix it and voila, it looks bee-yoo-tiful now and not only that, so does pretty much everything else including my e-mail. What a bonus!

It turned out I needed to flip the switch on ClearType and then tweak it with the ClearType Tuner in XP (which apparently from what we read elsewhere is a default in IE7 even though it’s disabled systemwide in XP), and that did the trick. My blog in Explorer and Firefox now looks almost identical from here.

So now thanks to Ivy, and with some helpful Firefox tips Jag passed along to me today, I’m gonna dig into it and see what all fun I can have, and maybe I’ll fall in love with it like the rest of you now! And be able to do some more worthwhile messing around with Blogger Beta (which isn’t working with IE7). Thanks again, ladies!

And – after being on the national and state Do Not Call lists for about three years now, I got to file my first complaint ever today. Not only that, but it was my former, many years ago, Internet provider, with whom my last year or so of service was a complete and utter nightmare, so I think this is a good case of what goes around comes around and payback. Yes!

So a good day even though I’m still sleep deprived, and tomorrow is my day off. Awesome!

Fox on the Run

OK, all you Firefox lovers. I’m trying, I really am. But every blog I frequent, the text looks like total crap when I go there in Firefox.

Is there some switch or tweak I’m just missing and can’t find? I’m generally not this technodumb and this is annoying me.

In other news, last night’s good night’s sleep attempt was foiled by another unplanned dozing off for two or three hours. But I might lay back down for, like, an hour before work. Mainly because I’m freezing my ass off. I’ll try again this evening. At least tomorrow’s my day off, even though I’m going to have to spend part of it dealing with the car stuff.

Yawn. BRRRR. Happy Wednesday.