The doctor at the pet hospital I took my cat to called yesterday and gave me the good news: kidneys appear not to have severe permanent damage. They still are not all better - and I have 5 weeks of antibiotic pills my cat must eat daily to prove it. However, it is a relief. She still needs a subcutaneous IV of fluids every other day - but that beats daily, believe me! She has hyperthyroidism, like a lot of cats her age. So, she has a specially prepared liquid medicine on its way to arrive her sometime today. It is chicken-flavored, to make sure she will like it.

Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 7. Anyone who has Windows XP can download/install it. Windows 98 and 2000 users have been officially disenfranchised. Despite Bill Gates claims when IE was introduced that it would "always be free", well - it is not. IE existed for a a few years on Mac OS X. But Microsoft quickly pulled it the day after Apple announced its own Safari web browser for Mac OS X. IE is bundled with MS-Windows operating systems. That is the only way you can get it, it seems. And the only upgrade path nowadays, is to buy a new operating system from Microsoft - at least for many users. So much for free - oh, well. The good thing is that IE 7 is more capable of displaying web pages properly than IE 6 was. Or is, I should say, for those users with computers that cannot be upgraded. MS-Windows 98, ME, and 2000 users will probably want to install Firefox - since they cannot get IE 7 and run it. Firefox 1.5 has been available for the past year. Firefox 2 will probably become available sometime in the next week. October might launch the biggest revolution the web has seen in half a decade.

There is a Firefox 2 party weekend happening. It is the weekend after next - the weekend of October 27. I think that means that Mozilla is planning on releasing the final version of Firefox 2 sometime in the next week. You can read the Firefox 2 release notes to see what the current stage of Firefox 2 (currently in release candidate 3) is.

Statistically, this appears to be my favorite artists based on the total number of plays they have gotten on my iTunes during the paste nine or ten months. You can use the iPod-look Last.FM chart style yourself, if you join Last.FM and use iTunes or another supported player. They support the most popular players on Mac, MS-Windows, and Linux.

Firefox 2.0 RC 3 (release candidate 3) has just been released. Given past history with Firefox and Mozilla, it seems likely that Firefox 2 will go final within the next two weeks. Internet Explorer 7 is rumored to be coming out this month as well.

If you have a TV set (or computer) capable of displaying HDTV, you have to tune in to PBS this week. They are running a show a few times per day called OCEANS IN GLASS: BEHIND THE SCENES OF THE MONTEREY BAY AQUARIUM. It is awesome. The brightness of the colors, details of the scenes, breadth of interesting subjects across the screen is pretty much unrivaled. Plus, you will not get many chances in your life to see a great white whale in captivity. The variety of creatures sharing the tank with it is staggering. The margine biologists have done a stupendous job with this aquarium. Videographers - or a film crew - have done a magnificent job of capturing it. And PBS brings it to your living room for free!

I listened to a decent amount of music this week. I was really busy during the day/evenings, but I managed to squeeze in a little listening when I was having dinners - and also thanks to the fact we had the whole day off Monday. I have not gone out much other than to pick up some necessities. So, music has been on a fair bit. Here are my top 10 artist tracks for the week. If you want to get the same kind of badge to show off your music listening, you need to go to the Last.FM website and download the LastFM application that is written for your computer OS. Then, when you play iTunes or whatever MP3 music player you have, it will upload each song title as you play it. The Last.FM site does the rest - which is a lot. It compiles your stats each week, from which it displays your own "charts" for you. It lets you create little badges like the one above - they have close to a hundred different styles. Maybe even more, now. You also get a blog, so you can write about your music things. It is kind of like this site is to TV - except it is just for music, not for TV. They gave the whole site a huge make-over a couple of months ago. It looked pretty decent before but now it looks amazing.

I played WarCraft III a little bit last night on my Mac and I had a blast!

The gamespot RSS feeds for blogposts do not include the Category or the Tag values that are being accepted in all blog posts now. Not sure what use these things are put to, if anything - at the moment. Hopefully, TV.com will be carrying these RSS feeds directly soon, and include the values from these fields. By the way, if you have not looked into RSS - you should check it out. It is a pretty handy technology. You could use it to keep track of your own blog posts, or other people's, for instance.

I have watched virtually no TV the past week. What little I did watch, was in HDTV format on my iMac, instead of on TiVo - the usual way I watch TV. I watched a few episodes of the Blade TV series that I bought from the iTunes music store. And I watched parts of some PBS documentaries that were in HDTV format, as well as a couple cop shows. I pretty much always watch TV when I am eating at home. It is kind of a habit. The iMac makes it a pretty fun habit. Hey, the 20-inch iMac makes a pretty great TV set - when you have the El Gato Eye TV 500 hooked up to it! A nice gadget, it is a tiny metal box that hooks up to the Firewire port on a Mac, and requires no separate power supply of its own. The only investment I had to make to get it to work as a $25 DTV antenna by Zenith that I bought new on Amazon. The Eye TV itself only cost $350, and I got it a year or two ago for $325 because it was on sale or I had some points on Amazon, or something like that. I am using it now on the Core 2 Duo 20-inch iMac I got last month. It is working great. Anyone who is about to buy a 24 inch HDTV set for two or three thousand dollars should look at getting the 24-inch screen version of the iMac - and plunking down a modest $350 for Eye TV 500. Also, definitely splurge the extra $69 it costs at purchase time to make sure that your iMac keyboard and mouse are the Bluetooth (wireless) versions, not the cabled versions. Then you can surf the web, do your word processing, and read your email. Kind of makes the idea of having a separate computer and TV set obsolete. Between you and me, once you get to HDTV, the screens are so expensive that you really do not want to have a separate TV and computer. Why page for two different huge, expensive LCD screens when you can have just one? Next year Apple is coming out with a gizmo of its own that will let the iMac stream its video to a separate TV set. I think I read that will operate with HDTV resolution too. I think El Gato already has something like that out already. You really need to start thinking about how you are going to swtich to digital TV now. In less than 2-1/2 years, all the broadcasters are required by law to cease broadcasting the signals that your regular old TV, like all TVs for the past five decades, have been able to receive. So, you are either going to "go digital", or entertain yourself by watching a black screen. Instead of buying an HDTV - which is basically a single-purpose computer with a digital TV receiver and an awfully big screen ...you might was well buy a kick-ass digital computer with an awfully big screen. Then, just shell out a tiny bit of money and get a digital TV receiver to connect up to its Firewire or USB 2.0 port. The nice thing about going the computer-as-an-HDTV-DTV route is that you basically get the TiVo-like capabilities thrown in for free. At least that is how El Gato has been doing things ever since I got my first El Gato TV device back in 2003. El Gato has been partnering with a company called TitanTV to deliver the NTSC (analog) and ATSC (digital) TV schedules to its customers. You get an ID and you access the schedules from web browser, and directly from your El Gato EyeTV nnn device. Whichever is most convenient for you at the moment. You can add things to your schedule through either one, as well as of course see what is on, read the synapsis, and stuff like that. It would be cool if CNET and TItanTV would work together, to make sure that TitanTV linked to the appropriate page on TV.com for each series and each episode, plus each actor, and so forth. They have not done that yet, but I figure when they do, both companies will be able to get a lot more traffic and a lot more advertising revenue. John