Translation in the mail!

I finally got to sleep after midnight, only to be awakened by my "Nutro-powered alarm clock" (aka Shiloh) just short of 6 am. I had made sure to get most of the de-speckling done last night, to the point where I'd be confident of the outgoing product, but I invested a few more minutes this morning before sending off the last of the assignment.

Then I popped open Firefox, and started to experience the same rotten performance that's been plaguing me lateley, so I opened the interface to my firewall (Agnitum Outpost), only to see that my antivirus program (AVG) had opened over 50 browser connections!

I thought I had killed that part of AVG (which has now gotten so big its functionality has been broken up among several processes) that goes out to check potential web pages before you actually click on them, because I don't think I've ever had a problem in that area.

Too, we're entering a strange new phase of online life where, for example, you can be arrested and charged with a serious crime for merely accessing certain "honey pot" sites that have been set up by law enforcement, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if folks here and there are taking a more than passing interest in who visits certain sites.

(Hmmm, Firefox reports that AVG SafeSearch is not active... then what is AVGNSX and why does it go crazy when a page with many links is opened?)

Anyway, there are two jobs in the queue, neither of which is due today. I expect to get around to invoicing the 40K Job, but aside from that, I'm tentatively declaring today a day off.

Cheers...

What has been lost has been found...

I've noticed recently that a heck of a lot of people on my friends list were having the characters "[AD]" show up as their userpic, presumably because something... somewhere.... has decided - using Cthulhu knows what criteria - that the content is an ad and should be blocked.

Searching for "[ad]" on Google is of not much help, as Google's search function doesn't pay attention to punctuation or special characters, and the resulting search on the word "ad" returns only slightly less than a billion hits.

So, I went at the problem from a different direction. I made my search string replaces image with and that led me to a page where a commenter noted that the behavior of Agnitum Outpost firewall fits the symptoms.

Sure enough, Agnitum has a feature that blocks graphics, based on either keywords or size. Deleting the "100 x 100" size from the list of verboten image sizes has solved the problem of the missing userpics.

Feature creep... it's what's for dinner.

Cheers...