One group continues to freshen up the old Mozilla software suite for the Macintosh. They call their project and the software they lovingly care for and improve, Sea Monkey. They just released a new version, 1.0.4, a few weeks ago. Macintosh software seems to be in overdrive this year.

Last year this time we saw: the flooding of Mumbai (Bombay, India), New Orleans, and - of all things - a flash flood in Saudi Arabia. Not some place I would typically think I could drown in if I was there in the summer time. This year is shaping up similarly, with a new twist. This week Mumbia has again flooded, along with other parts of India and even parts of Pakistan. A family in the Pakistani half of Kashmir was killed not by flooding - but when a mudslide caused by all the rain fell upon their house. Here is where things get stranger. Around the time Pakistan and Mumbai were doing their perhaps-not-so-unusual flooding, Ethopia experienced flash floods that killed over a hundred people so far. But the new wrinkle this year, at least for the US, is the heat. July was the 2nd hottest July on record ever, says NOAA - whose job it is to keep the records. So, while may or may not be experiencing climate change, we just had practically the hottest month in US history last month - and parts of Africa renowned for their droughts are experiencing deadly flooding. I do not know. I could just be weird. By the way, the faction that up until last year was claiming that temperatures had been going down over the past 20-3 years - they were listening to a broken satellite. Yep, there was a satellite that was getting wrong readings because its design/calculations did not take into account the fact that it was subject to absorbing significant heat itself, throwing off its temperature calculations. All the other data coming in from every other source was indicating steadily increasing temperatures. For some reason certain people liked that one. It was kind of their goofy mascot. When it was pointed out it was completely batty and explained why, they kind of dropped the "it is not getting warmer" mantra. Thermometers are kind of a dead give-away, too. That and 600 year-old coral reefs suddenly dying off in the course of 1-2 years due to excessively warm waters in the ocean. There have been some interesting articles published on climatology this year. Maybe not the most interesting thing going on but everyone should know a little about Earth science. I have not read that much on the subject so I cannot really say what the overall picture is. It might be quite rosy.

Yesterday, Apple announced a couple major new products. One, a quad (2 Dual-Processors) Intel Xeon based Mac, completes its conversion to the Intel CPU family. Wow, that was fast! The other, was a preview of the upcoming Mac OS X Leopard (OS 10.5) that will be coming out sometime soon. It will be competing head-to-head with Microsoft's next operating system, which is marketed under the name Vista at the moment. Here is the WWDC 2006 Keynote video. Apple's keynotes, like its software, are always cool to watch. They are funny, surprising, and exciting. They put some really amazing images on their stage-sized screen and Steve Jobs' quips are pretty hilarious. This year's keynote is no exception. Curious about the Mac? Take a look at it! Apple does not mind. That is why they put it online. They want you to see what it is like.

I read tonight that police arrested a couple of suspects in the theft of a computer system, and a lot of other items, from private homes in the D.C. area suburbs. Now here's the thing. These two 19 year olds names were Jesus and Christian. I am sure it is hard to decide which name to give a newborn baby. The thing is, try to match the name with what kind of personality it is going to have when it grows up. In this case, if the police were right, these names were not such good matches.

I finally found a solution to the blogging problem that has been dogging me for a couple of months. Simply remove the following tag from your Blogger template, if it has it, and the problem goes away: $BlogItemCommentFormOnclick$ Make sure you get rid of the angle-brackets (i.e., greater-than and less-than signs) that suround it too. I assumed the fix would be harder, which is why I let it go for so long. Finally, the annoyance/curiousity got to be too much for me and I dug into it this afternoon. It did not take long to find the problem and fix it. Now it is corrected in one of my blogs. Maybe more by the time you read this.

I just found out where the central TV.com help page is. Yay!

My day got off to a pretty gross start early this morning. First, I turned on my TiVo right when I woke up. The first human words I heard today - I kid you not - were: "No creature is more industrious than the dung beetle." Ugh! Then, I discovered a gross taste in my mouth. Turns out there was a hair in it. I have no idea why - because you would think they would be pretty inert but for some reason they really mess with the taste in my mouth. Clears up as soon as I pull them out. Does this ever happen to women? Seems like with long hair it would be even more annoying. My cat woke me up bright and early today, serenading me with her pleasant yowling. You think an alarm clock is bad. Wait until you hear something like this. She leaps onto my night stand next to my bed, sits on it in that upright relaxed, matter-of-fact fashion of cats, and lets out with a soprano-like high-pitched cry. Today, she improved upon her usual delivery, by afterwards walking from the night-stand to the pillow next to me. There, she continued her feline opera. I think the gist of it was, "feed me now - it has already been 10 hours since the last time you fed me". Clearly, in the cat head this constitutes a major emergency and triggers the onset of a loud, noisy bout of feline depression. She got fed before I did.

I found the page here on TV.com that has theTop-Rated sci-fi shows list on it.

Wow, when did the "Tags" arrive? I like websites that support tagging. It makes it easier to organize the things you are interested in or have done. It really multiplies both the usefulness and the ease-of-use of the site. In case you have not notice, they have tagging here now too. Popular TV.com Tags I just noticed them for the first time a few minutes ago. Had you noticed them very long ago or are they a really new feature? Tagging is a neat feature. As other techies have written, HTML/XHTML class attributes are uniquely suited for using as a place to store space-separated tags. People creating websites tend to know that, I think. I noticed a while ago that XSLT has some features that can make it do okay with dealing with space separated tags (in the categories sense) as well. Recently, I noticed that CSS has support for referencing elements that have certain words in their attributes - via a matching syntax in its selectors. In addition to checking for equality - one can also check for the existence of a word in an attribute value. Not a substring match but a real, honest-to-goodness word match. I think it is just fantastic that simple things in technology are combining with fads/trends on the web to enable popular features to be rolled into a site and rolled out to its users quickly and easily. I just hope C-Net adds RSS feeds, user-customizeable stylesheets, and increased support for XHTML tags soon. I taught myself pretty much all of HTML a long, long time ago and over the past several years have taught myself most of the complex - but extremely rewarding CSS (Cascading Stylesheets Language) that is the icing on its cake. I also learned XSLT back in the early 1990s. I would love to be able to use all of these things to customize my corner of the site and also keep track of what I have written. I may be missing something, but I cannot figure out how people figure out if they have reviewed the same show already or not. When you have only reviewed a score of shows or so, that is not too hard to do. I just do not see how the people who have reached a hundred or more shows keep going without repeating themselves. I think at that point, you need some kind of a personnel indexing system. A just-for-you database of all the shows you have watched, rated, and reviewed. Not a real database, of course. Just an index, really. An index to/into the shows you have reviewed and your own reviews/comments about them. I know I dream big. But TV.com is moving pretty fast these days!

I just watched the "Shadow" episode of the "Supernatural" series again today. The barmaid working behind the bar (Nimet Kanji ) Dean and Sam are hanging out in when they reconnect with Meg Masters was really cute. The actress who plays Meg, Nicki Lynn Aycox, looks like she could double for Dido. She is a thin, petite blonde with close cropped hair and beautiful eye set in a slightly elfin face. She is one evil villainess I think should be welcome on the show. Anyone else ever watch this show? It seemed kind of dull at the beginning of the season, but the stories, action, special effects, acting, and quips quickly picked up. It ended the first season with the latter half of its freshman episodes of top-notch quality. I am really hoping this series sticks around.