TiVo is expensive. I have considered in on several occaisons. Every time I have, the idea of paying a flat fee of $299 and receiving service for “life” has always appealled to me. Of course the small print means that is the life of the receiver, not the life of the purchaser, to my understanding. They have decided to drop that service in the coming week. So the question: should I run out and buy it?

I bought directTV’s dvr service for $4.99 a month recently. It works well. It would take 5 years to get ahead (assuming no price increase … and directTV is doing a price increase in many areas this very month) on the TiVo plan.

Choices, Choices and Choices …

We run our server ourselves and ran into a significant difficulty after a recent upgrade of the server. As a result you may have noticed that we have been up and down. Cost is always a factor as this is a hobby site for both Franki and me. Donations do help us fund the site, so feel free to drop five or ten dollars with us using the link at the bottom of each page.

I rely on this site daily … using our own on-line tools, like email masking. It was inconvenient when it was down for me and I guess it was inconvenient for you as well. If so, that means that we mean something on the web front. Sorry for the inconvenience.

In an article that I find hard to follow at MSNBC, it appears that a judge has ruled that Google may be infringing on another’s copywrite by showing certain thumbnails in response to image search requests. I don’t find the article clear in that it appears what we may be talking about is thumbnails of wrongfully acquired copies of the images by third parties? I’ll hunt for more information I guess when I get a minute.

I happen to like the Wuhan WordPress Theme and have found it works pretty well, even with WordPress 2.0 and 2.0.1. I have found difficulty using it with the page fold menu. Anyway, it doesn’t look too swell in Internet Explorer 7 beta. I have decided it is time to give in and start using Microsoft proprietary code to get my stylesheets. I used a bunch of the hacks previously in order to be proud, but … many are now broken with the advent of version 7, that seems to act suprisingly like it should instead of like a Microsoft Browser.

If you have gotten the Wuhan Theme from Alex King’s wonderful site, you got a broken Wuhan as it doesn’t have the proper stylesheet for Internet Explorer. So go to the theme author’s site and get a copy instead and upload the ie stylesheet. It will be obvious which file it is as it has ie in the file name: style-ie.css.

Next, edit the header file to insert this:
<link rel=stylesheet type="e;text/css"e; href="e;<?php bloginfo(‘stylesheet_directory’); ?>/style.css"e;>
<!–[if lt IE 7]>
<link rel=stylesheet type="e;text/css"e; href="e;<?php bloginfo(‘stylesheet_directory’); ?>/style-ie.css"e;>
<![endif]–>

In place of the existing coding that has conditionals for Internet Explorer:
< ?php if (eregi("e;MSIE"e;,getenv("e;HTTP_USER_AGENT"e;)) || eregi("e;Internet Explorer"e;,getenv("e;HTTP_USER_AGENT"e;))) { ?>/style-ie.css"e;>
< ?php } else { ?> /style.css"e;>
< ?php } ?>

I have no stickr’s! Scoble makes me feel like I am nothing.

I remember however when my grandmother had an old trunk that she had been around the world with. It had a sticker from every location visited, but I think there was an actual purpose because many of them were routing stickers I think. That progressed into the motorhome with state stickers on the back I think. I’ll just have to work on it.

I am not much of a word smith myself. There are however some great sites available to help the slower aword like myself:

• WordSmyth: will allow you to look at words that surround your word alphabetically
• OneLook Reverse Dictionary: give it your concept and it will suggest words … amazing for when you are stuck
• Wordspy: from the guy who got me started on the net, you can look up words by categories and he has current definitions, for example look at blog under computers
• Thesauras.com: find the synonym for the word you have

If you are not supposed to really use tables to control layout, then you should be able to use css to control layout. However, to get a table like alignment, nothing beats a table … until now perhaps. Here is a solution that allows you to get alignment of items using div’s with css. Table free design again becomes a reality.