I am working on my daughter’s Christmas present, or maybe her birthday present, which is December 15th. I have my doubts about finishing it this year but I’m giving it my best shot! Of course I can’t tell you what it is because she reads here. I hope I have it mostly done before classes start again. Muahaha Mir, this should drive ya crazy! This project is killing my arthritic fingers. Anyway, that’s where I am in case anyone has been wondering

It’s that time again! Registration is open now. Bean has split the blogging class into two, which should make it easier because there is much to absorb. The first is Blogging basics. This class will help you set up a blog and learn how to manage it. You will learn how to modify your theme and add widgets, How to find topic ideas and an introduction to social networking. For those who have that under their belt we have Blogging for Fun, Fame and Fortune which will teach about writing compelling content, gaining authority with your blog and networking with a community of other bloggers. This course will vary with input from students and that will make it doubly interesting! I hope you’ll join us, it’s really an eye opening and fun time!

Register for Blogging Basics at LVS Online.

Register for Blogging for Fun, Fame and Fortune at LVS Online.

Not aliens but Internet Explorer. Luckily I didn’t have much on this one yet. Still, I stupidly forgot to backup my email and bookmarks and save them elsewhere first. I hope the Christmas present I ordered for my daughter comes since I’m not sure I can even find the website again.

Back a while ago when I was offline from Comcast and tried repairing my windows, it wouldn’t even let me log onto my computer because I was not online to activate windows! That is just plain bad management.

This is a new computer. As in a year ago on my birthday I bought all the parts at Newegg to build myself a great graphics computer that will last me forever (it’s going to have to). Unfortunately I apparently had no idea how to build it, so it sat here for over a year. I finally took it to a place in town and said just get it to boot. That was pretty cheap and I came home and installed everything. Other than that one validation glitch we were working like a charm. But I hadn’t gotten around to installing a lot of my graphics programs yet. So a couple of days ago I tried installing one of them and I got the message that I must close Internet Explorer first. What!?!? I don’t even use Internet Explorer but sure enough there it was in my processes. Simple enough, I terminate it. But wait! It pops right back up again. I decide to delete the darn thing. Oh carp, do you know if you have sp3 installed on Win XP you cannot delete Internet Explorer?

I head to Google and spend hours trying to find out what is calling it and forcing it to run, with no luck. I tried renaming it, nope, it just makes it all over again. So I did what any sane person would do, I reformated my drive. Now I have Windows reinstalled, my programs reinstalled and I am NOT going to update to sp3! If that makes security a problem on my computer, have at it.

Now if I can just find out how to make all those idiot speech balloons go away on my desktop and start menu. I did several solutions I found online but I am still getting some. Plus there’s that annoying messenger that won’t die no matter what I do. I told it not to load, I have the service disabled (which ought to be enough by itself), but no, every time I open my email program there it is. I think I am going to try deleting it, but I won’t be surprised if that’s not allowed either.

I don’t mind Microsoft making a program that even the ignorant masses can use but come on, give the rest of us a break!