In honor of the Easter season (I presume) mini-cam came back to life this week. Lo these many months mini-cam lie still on my desk. A periodic check would reveal that the camera still was certain its batteries were low, even when new batteries were endowed upon it. Then this last week as sunday gave way to monday and a new week was born, I spied the absurdly small camera ironically sitting in an absurdly large glass. I held the diminutive camera in my right hand and struck it against the palm of the left hand with no little force. I hit the power button and I was pleasantly surprised to find that the camera worked! I have no idea how long it will work this time, but it is sure nice to get a little visit from an old friend.

Ok, I'm officially changing tech tuesday to tech thursday for reasons that I'm not going to go into here

AntiVirus

Why is having antivirus software important?
    If didn't have an antivirus program AND you didn't run updates, you would have a plethora of viruses in short order. If you keep your computer up to date and you pay attention to what you are doing, you will get very few viruses and your antivirus program will be your last defence.

What do viruses do?
    In the good old days, viruses were primarily about gaining fame in the hacking community. They just wanted to replicate fast enough to get out there and do enough damage for people to notice. Now viruses are more about turning your computer into a zombie. Unfortunately, not the fun loving, flesh eating zombies we all know and love. These kind want to take over your computer and use it to do other nefarious task such as sending out spam and attacking other computers.

What do we do then?
    I've used just about all the major antivirus programs at some point. I discovered that the more expensive the program, the worse it is.  McAfee and Norton just try to do too many things and eat up all your computer's resources.  The best one I've found is also free.  It's not pretty, and it could be a more user friendly, but it works well.  The only adjustment I had to make after I installed it was to have it scan my computer in the middle of the night.

Download AVG antivirus here!

I've heard of some other free ones, but I haven't tried them yet. If you have let me know!

It has now been more than three months since Dahlia was born. To sum it all up, I'd say that it's been hard but very rewarding.
    Nobody ever said that having a baby was easy. Our lives have changed substantially; we can't just decide on a whim to go out somewhere.  It takes a lot of planning and timing to do anything. Last Saturday we left Dahlia at the Grandparents and went to the Olive Garden. It was a race against the clock. We decided what to order while waiting for our seats and we asked for the check as soon as we got our food. We almost had to ask the cooks to pre-cut our food to save time.
     The limited time is well worth it though. Every day it's so much fun to just watch her grow up. The changes are slow and often imperceptible, but then you look over at her and you noticed something new. Last week she started sucking her fingers all the time. This week she will turn her head and look at you when you talk to her.
    The best part is when she smiles though. Recently we invented a game called 'One, Two, Three, Push!' While laying on her back, I hold her feet and when I say One, Two, Three Push and she pushes off and scoots herself backward. She gets the biggest grin every time.
    This stage can be quite frustrating at times. But, when we look back on it, we will miss it in a lot of ways.

Ok, I'm late, I know, and it's only my second one...

Keeping with the browser theme, it's time for

Extensions (and themes)
    As I said in my last tech tuesday, the great thing about Opera and Firefox is that you can customize them to do what you like. To change the look of Firefox you simply need to change your theme.
    To change your theme click tools and then themes, then in the box that opens click 'get more themes' in the lower right corner; a new page will open in the background.  Click on any theme and click install and it will appear in your list of themes. You'll have to restart Firefox to see them.
    My favorite two are Noia and Walnut.

    Extensions are done the same way. Click tools - extensions- get more extentions - find one you like - install - restart FF to use it. Here are my favorites:

Can't Live Without
    Mouse Gestures
       Just hold down the right button on your mouse and move the mouse and it will do many common operations. Move the left and you go back, right and go forward, up and it opens a new tab. Very handy and you get used to it pretty quick. (This come built into Opera(
    Adblock with Filterset.G
       This is actually two extensions. Adblock allows you to right click on any image and then click 'Adblock image' and it will block it forever. If you also download the filterset, it will block 95% of all ads on the net!

I Really Like
    Image Zoom
       Right click any image and move the scroll wheel up and down the image gets bigger and smaller.
    TabBrowser Preferences
       Gives you some additional options for the way tabs work.
    Sage
       My RSS reader, I'll cover this some time soon.
    Web Developer
        A must have if you make web pages or if you just like monkeying around with CSS or HTML.
Other
    Reveal
       This is nice if you have lots of pages open at once. I haven't gotten used to it yet.
    Nuke Anything
       It will easily get rid of anything on a page.
    Stumble
       Lots of people like this. It's a good way to find fun stuff.

That's my list for now. I'm always looking out for new ones, I'll mention them as I find them.

 What are your favorite themes and extensions? I'm itching to know!