Woke up with a slightly sore throat that never went away today. Also, feel totally wiped out. Not sure why. Just can't seem to get to be my normal self. Might throw in the towel and take a nap. Maybe another round of sore throat drops will help.

Coffee is barley picking me up. Very annoying. Feel kind of cold. Have my jacket on. It is not really cold inside but the air is kinda dry.

I can see a big problem looming and it is not because I am either brilliant nor paranoid, just observant and thoughtful about ionterrelected facts.

Here are some doozies.

1. mobile code (Flash, JavaScript, and Java) is being syndicted even more fervently than web ads
2. tainted web ads have were positioned all over the web even on legit sites last year
3. problem is "too much trust"
4. same companies syndicating this mobile code are the companies who were accepting Windows-virus infected ads last year
5. nobody is publicly moderating these tendrils
6. if live.com, msn.com, facebook - or one of a half dozen or so other mobie code/content sites getes hacked - the social web is going to infect a really huge user base
7. if there is an "architect" for syndicated content on the web who does risk management and general security oversight of social media sites, I sure do not know his name or what agency or non-profit he works for
8. browesrs are getting "overpowered" by malware hacks o varying degrees; IE, clearly has no limits to what can go wrong
9. once a browser gets infected: game accounts get stolen, money in bank accounts vanishees, corporate & private data makes a quick getaway

My opinion is this is probably going horribly awry or will soon. The viruses spread by web ads was easy to see coming a year ahead of time. This syndicateed moobile coode on social web sites is looking like a time bomb comparable to ActiveX and some other "you have got to be kidding" technologies.

If you are running your computer and browser as-is, instead of having major white list driven constraint addons in it - I think you are asking for trouble and it will arrive. Do not trust your web browsre and do not trust the web.

The downside is that a fair amount of social web sites will not run if these sites are blocked. I think I am giong to back away from using social web sites much until the whole thing breaks down and someone finally comes along and builds them right.

I should not have to trust 10 companies, some of which I do not trust, just to use a web page from some completely different company that I trust a lot more than them.

I have not watched much TV in past couple of weeks. i was taking some advantage of it during the blizzard of 2010 to keep up on the weather and road situations.

That stuff has cleared up now.

I just do not watch TV the way I used to when I was a kid or even back in the 1990's.

The genres I used to love for the most part now just seem tiring.

Tried out WoW after a long break. After two evenings of play, I have 3 impressions.

1. Blizzard is pulling out all the stops to make the game play easier, particularly the progression from level 1 until you get to Northrend. Not sure about Northrend. I only spent a few hours there.
2. The game is becoming unstable. After spontaneously disconnecting a bunch of times, someone in my guild mentioned everyone was getting disconnected when I did. In addition to that, my computer locked up hard once last night. That is rare for both my computer and WoW.
3. There are now as many gold scammers and spammers sending junk instant messages in the game. I got one to several messaegs per day from someone impersonating Blizzard, inviting to visit to a sight and log on to get a free prize. Isn't this a little immature way to be a criminal and run a business as well. Robbing people mid-stream during their recommendation is a nasty way to be a killjoy. Spamming and hucksterism in furtherance of that is pretty wicked.

I must have picked a bad week to drop back in and give it a try.

Two other things that reaared their head was hackers and Bliizzard recently announcing a change I really hope is not going live anytime soon.

I had read in security news columns that a bevvy of malware, black hat SEO, Trojan techniques, and other technical dirty tricks - not just the fake web site login thing, was being used to rip off WoW players.

Well, apparently it is true. A couple of my guilds indicated that indeed, someone in the guild had recently had their WoW account hacked. In one case, the victim was a senior guild member and his account cleaned out the guild bank.

Not a nice thing to do.

The other thing overshadowing the game is that Blizzard is about to make a dramatic change to the way battlegrounds work. Traditionally, you get: marks, honor points, and starting last year experience points as well. The BG marks you get are 3 if your side wins, and 1 if your side loses.

Marks are what Blizzard is about to get rid of. Granted, I have not played in a long while, but I'm a little worried about this change. The marks were hard to get and the idea was that I would be turning them in for some really good armor between level 18 and 70.

Now, I might not get that armor I had generally expected to get. It is not clear what the impact will be. Blizzard announced they are going to fudge some things, which to me just makes it all the more unsettling. If they published the conversion rates and new price schedules for PvP year, it would make it a simple matter for players to see if it bothered them or they need not worry.

I appreciate the changes the gameplay designers apparently have made in 2009 and 2010 to make it more enjoyable. By themselves, I think thy were very successful.

However, their efforts are being undermined by technical glitches, malingering criminal presence in the game itself and active measures being taken to steal players username/password by any means they can get it: malware, trickery, etc.

The game seems to perform more slowly too. I thought hey had the lagging problems aside from Dalaran worked out. I get a lot of delay when I log onto or off of a character this year. Was not seeing anything like that happening last year. Maybe there have been protocol or persistence mechanism changes.

Whatever the change is, it is irritating. My gamestyle is the one where you create a small team of characters, and they make stuff for each other and share gear they find and stuff. I think it slows down character progression to have more than one character. On the other hand, you can save tons of golds by doing this this way. In fact, it makes it easier to earn gold. I made a lot of golds in 2008 by crafting gear and selling it in the AH (auction house).

The way I play, when I am crafting stuff, I low in and out of characters rapidly for a bit over 5 minutes, and then the item is created. The necessary items or golds to buy them are sent by ingame email to the character whoo will craft it.

Well, when it is taking 5 minutes or more just to log off on character and onto another character, it is no fun to do that in the game. I do not really see myself spending twenty to thirty minutes just to craft some item. That requires parts supplied from several different professions.

This problem could be caused by addons, but I did not install any new addons, just updated the ones I had been using before for a long time. Maybe the game itself is getting bigger, and it is pushing at the conflines of my computer's memory. WoW does seem to fill it

Anyway, I am probably going to go back to another long break from the game. I just stuck my nose in it to get a look at it before the changes of Cataclysm version come along and make a bunch of things unrecognizable.

On a closing note, I want to tip my gat to Blizzard's game designers. They are basically analysts and they generally seem to have a very good handle on what is tripping people up. Blizzard is not afraid to redo things or remove things that make the game too slow or complicated.

In the beginning, they were al about complicated and slow progression from one level to another was just how the game was done. Appaerntly, it started with level 1-50 characters, and before I joined it the level cap was raised to 50. A few months after I joined, it was raised again to 70. And then near the end of 2008, it was raised to level 80 - soon to become 85.

Getting rid of spices when cooking, increasing bag sizes, letting people get ground mounts in half the time they used to get them - and letting people get flying moutns at 60 - this makes the game much more fun. Removing pointless difficulties is good.

Now, if they could just fix the crime and computer problems, everything would be peachy.

UPDATE Tue., March 9, 2010:

The third party WoW fan web site WoW.com has unofficially announced what the BG gear prices are in the marks-deprecated world of the next patch are - at least, judging by the PTR (public test realm) version of WoW around the time of Feb 26. Patch 3.3.3 PTR: New battleground mark conversion. Blizz is also shaking up the crafted gear economy a little too, with a change to make Froze Orbs more plentiful, and another change to let you buy stuff with them.

By the way, the WoW 3.3.3 patch downloader went active last night, WoW.com says. They say that does not mean it will install this week. That is true, you cannot tell if it will or will not. Sometimes they patch a patch a few times before appling it to the public realms version of WoW. Someone in one of my guilds said the PTR version was not readdy for the publiic realm yet. I realy hope that is the case for another week or two!

I watched The Legend of the Seeker last night. I really enjoyed it.

I really do not like snow at all right now.

I have been running low on free disk space this week. When you run Firefox 3.5, MS Word, and a couple apps on a Mac with like 1.2 GB free - and the Time Machine incremental backup starts running in the background: oh, no!

Yep, your Mac will run slower than you ever imagined. My thinking is that once Firefox runs low on memory, it is ether thrashing memory or else there is a bug in the low-memory handling. The former should work by allocating some memory to use in an emergency at the start of the program - and free it when memory is low so it can pop up a waning message that you need to exit the browser.

Unfortunately, it just hangs. I have investigted the problem and Firefox is not doing a lot when this happens, other than firing off a lot of Mach and BSD messages every half minute or so.

So, if you have a Mac or maybe any computer, and you have Firefox 3 - do not run uot of virtual memory. That is, keep at least 5 GB free at all times. I have noticed when I do that, this problem pretty much gets banished, even if I do run a couple "heavy" apps at once.

Fortunately, for me, I had some TV shows in my PVR that I had not deleted yet. Getting rid of them freed up a few dozen gigs. HDTV recorded shows use around 7 GB of storage each. Unreal.

Hope this tip helps someone who uses Firefox 3.5 and/or a Macintosh.

Wow, here it is 2010. Safari 4 is the first web browser to pass the Acid3 test and has the most W3-compliant web browser in existance.

Yet TV.com users cannot write a blog post with Safari.

What do the developers test with - IE6!??

Quick heads-up for those who joined in late in the program. Microsoft has instructed everyone who has IE6 or Windows XP, to switch to a different web browser and operating system.

There are tons of web components that work just peachy with Safari, Firefox, and IE. Replacing this one broken rich text editing component should not be all that hard!

My brother's email account got taken over by someone else this weekend. We started getting spam from him while he was on vacation.

I could tell from the fact it was just a link with no subject or body that it was crap, so I did not click the link. My Mom did and she hasa a Mac so it probably did not matter.

I want to try to help him track down what hole lead his email password to get stolen, so the hole can be plugged. Plus, he can avoid opening such a hole in the future.

Computer security is a pathetic joke these days and computer criminals are deadly serious. So this year they have been getting the last laugh constantly.

Here are some tips that will keep you a lot safer.

1. Trust people you know, but do no trust their computers, email, or their network.
2. Do not trust public free or for fee public networks. Keep your firewalls up and use only SSL (or TLS) encrypted connectinos to read/send email or enter passwords (called "authentication" in techno-slang). If you possibly can, just avoid using other people's Wi-Fi altogether.
3. On your own home/office network, do NOT use the default administrative or user passwords on the Wi-Fi hub. Make up your own that other people will not guess. Crooks will use those default passwords as quickly as they will look at it - which takes them just dozens or hundreds of milliseconds.
4. Your computer and router came with a Firewall. Learn to use them, turn them on, keep ports closed except for ones you really truly need open.
   
5. If your OS is Windows, do not trust USB thumb storage drivers that have been attatched to any other Windows computer. Once they have, do not attach them to yours. Windows will autorun malware on them. That is why Conficker botnet has 10 million PCs in it.
6. Never install a video codec from a web site that says you need it to play a movie.
   
7. Never use MS-Windows for home banking. If you have a PC, use a Linux Live CD and boot off that.
8. Never use Microsoft Internet Explorer, but do not delete it - Windows Update needs it (perversely). Use Firefox or Safari for accessing the web, and keep them both set to automatically check for updates daily. Install their updates when they come out.
   
9. Update MS Office quickly, when updates come out for it - but wait a day or so to make sure that it is not a buggy patch. Microsoft has wrecked Office before with defective patches.
   
10. Update Windows OS quickly, after enough people have to make you feel comfortable that the patch will not render your computer unbootable or unable to connect to the Internet and web - since that would be a fine pickle.
11. Never jailbreak your iPhone. That shreds the Apple-invented security and makes the iPhone almost as insecure as a Windows PC. Jailbreak enables your iPhone toget infected with Trojans, worms, and perhaps viruses. Kills your warranty too. Do not get conned.

These bits of advice are pretty specific and very practical. Along with following them, keeping your computer up to date - update your own attitude. People on the Internet, web, and who are or have been around where you will next be using your computer or smart phone are not honest or honorable or getting quickly caught. Their programs are legion, their opportunties myriad, their chances of success high, and odds of them getting you are average: 75% to 100%, as it turns out. And that is if you have Windows with fully up to date OS and antivirus.

With other operating systems, your risk of infection is far lower. But you must keep the advice and wisdom with you at all times, no matter what OS you use. You still need to use secure network connections, protect your passwords and pick them wisely, not blindly accept software from the web or torrents.

Microsoft does not reinburse you if you get hacked, and neither do the antivirus companies or your bank. Think about that.

She was a good actress. I enjoyed a couple of her films that she made after 'Clueless'. Her role in 'Clueless' was not really a showcase for her but her later romantic comedies were.

She died at a young adult age when me actors like herself are just getting into their prime and commanding their post adolescent roles. She had great comedic talent and had her own adorable style which was not a clone of someone else but her own.

Everyone is pretty shocked by her death. Foul play is not suspected. Natural causes are. Her autopsy is rumored to be happening today. The results might not be publicly known for weeks.