A slap in the face...

I don't know if I mentioned this before, but some time ago, it suddenly dawned on me that any client of mine who uses Google mail will be pelted with ads from my competition every time they open a message from me.

I was jarringly reminded of the "service" that Google provides when I visited a site that offers a free - and apparently pretty good - CD/DVD burning product called ImgBurn (the recommendation comes via Lifehacker). When the site is rendered, the first graphic to hit my eye at the ImgBurn site was an ad for a competing product called Express Burn (which I bought 3+ years ago, but cannot find installed on any current machines, and whose license appears to have "run out").

Then again, I wonder what the likelihood is of a display ad like that tipping the scale just enough to cause a visitor to click on it?

Cheers...

Work, after a fashion...

I have an item due Friday and good prospects for a week-long interpreting gig in early June, so things are looking up.

I clicked on something innocuous yesterday and suddenly had an "extra" toolbar from some outfit with the domain name "cr.am". Putatively, the toolbar looked like it was looking out for dangerous sites, but Googling the name turned up some bad juju, and despite a scan with Ad-Aware, webster seemed to be acting strangely (Explorer crashing several times), so I installed Spybot and scanned using that application and performed an extra scan with AVG to boot.

That pretty much tied up webster for most of the day, but in the end I saw no reports of anything amiss, so I'll keep my fingers crossed and press on.

Somewhere along the lines, someone somewhere missed watering my seedlings while Galina and I were off fetching stuff from New York. As a result, the Venus Flytrap is gone, along with pretty much all of my cucumber seedlings (except for the two that I had inserted in the "Topsy Turvy" device, and they were looking pretty puny).

All my free-standing tomato seedlings became dehydrated past the point of no return, or seemed to, as one of them has since shown signs of recovery (although one of the two tomato plants in my other "Topsy Turvy" has withered, leaving me with the task of carefully inserting the recovering plant - if it recovers - in its place).

The AeroGarden herbs are doing quite well, despite having experienced a dramatic reduction in the water level. In fact, they are almost "snipping" size, which reminds me of a joke about a heroic pig (but that one will have to wait until all the children are asleep).

Cheers...