I’ve been using Netscape and then Mozilla as my main web browser for a long time. I’ve never been crazy about Internet Explorer and, for a while at least, it seemed to have a lot of security problems. 
Recently, Jeb added Snap Shots to his page. It seemed like a neat thing, so I added it to mine as well. But as I browsed I noticed that if I tried to go Back in my browser, I didn’t go anywhere. If I held down the Back button to see a history of pages, there would be about 3 copies of the current page in the Back history. So I took the code out of my pages rather than have to deal with that (although I have been getting a similar thing on My Yahoo when I would get information on a stock in my portfolio).
Year: 2007
iTunes Plus
This week Apple started selling songs without piracy protection, calling it iTunes Plus. They had made a deal with one recording label, EMI, to offer this. EMI made the same deal with other companies so, while some people are saying Steve Jobs pushed EMI into the decision, I don’t know if that is true. The new songs will cost $1.29 instead of the standard $0.99 (Jobs had previously insisted on the $0.99 price for all songs). But to sweeten the offer the songs are also recorded at a higher quality level (meaning the files are bigger).
Kaspersky Beats McAfee
Back in December Staples had a deal where you could get McAfee Total Protection anti-virus suite for free after mail-in rebates. Susan and I each got a copy and Susan also wound up getting a copy for her mom. I told my mom about the deal and she bought a copy as well. Mom uninstalled hers within a couple of days because it was slowing her computer down so much. I hung on for a few months until I had trouble with iTunes being blocked. Then a few weeks ago I was at Susan’s and her computer was so slow you couldn’t even have a menu drop down in Internet Explorer. I uninstalled McAfee and it was off to the races again.
Balloon Flower
I planted some balloon flowers several years ago. Though they don’t always come back, in general they will in Atlanta at least. Mom has some by her mailbox that have done great and Susan planted some at her house that have come back strong this year. Unfortunately I had some mums and lamb’s ear that overtook where I planted my balloon flowers, so they have gone away for the most part. But I got a couple of stalks that came up this year (the mum having obligingly died, and therefore no longer in the way) and I noticed they were a perfect example of why they are called balloon flowers. On the left is one that is puffed up and the other has already burst open. They are also called by their scientific name platycodon (or platycodon grandiflorus) and Chinese bellflower (on wikipedia).
Google in a Groove
I recently got another payment from Google (my seventh). They pay after the end of the month once you surpass $100 in earnings. This payment was my fifth quarterly payment in a row. While earnings have been down a little lately, taking 3 months to earn a payment seems pretty consistent.