Steve Gibson is my hero. Well, after StrongBad anyway. Seriously though.  Apparently the WinXP malformed URL vulnerability is pretty serious... it can delete entire directories from your hard drive.  So Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, decided to put off making a patch for the vulnerability until the release of SP1, a few months later.  They claimed that releasing a separate patch immediately would have required "significant technology development."  Steve Gibson wrote a patch in less than a day and put it online.  He’s always on top of these security issues, he calls Microsoft out on their malarkey, and he writes all these cool, tiny programs to fix stuff.  If he told me to put butter on top of my computer and turn it upside down and wipe it on the carpet, I’d do it.  He knows what he’s talking about.

In other news.... you should be browsing the web with Mozilla.  Stop using Internet Explorer.  It’s awful.  It’s full of bugs and security holes.  It displays pages incorrectly and against spec.  And worst of all... it has millions of popups!  Well, at least it allows millions of popups.  Mozilla doesn’t.  It sends that stuff out directly.  I haven’t seen a popup in months, except for the other day when I made the mistake of viewing a page in Internet Explorer and got 3 popups on the first page I went to!  I’ll never go back.  Mozilla forever!

And while I’m showing my support for the underdog, let me just mention Perl.  Maybe Perl isn’t the underdog, but you probably haven’t programmed with it, and you probably should.  Perl will make your life better.  You’ll be happier with yourself.  You’ll sleep better at night.  You can say "Just another perl h4x0r" at the bottom of your emails, and mean it.

It’s snowing!! Muahaha!

My sister Tasha got married this weekend! Check out the photos!

Also, in the process of getting those photos online, I realized that I needed a more streamlined and better-quality process for creating thumbnails and photo albums. I came up with a very slick setup.  I now just right-click on a folder containing my images, and choose "Make Photo Webpage", and it does all the work for me -- resizes images, makes thumbnails, and makes the HTML file.  It takes a little bit of work to set it up (well, it’s really simple, but you do need to download a couple programs)... but that’s once-and-done, and then creating photo webpages is effortless.  You can check it out for yourself.

p.s.

*those things are so gay* ... ???? umm ???

so what exactly is wrong with being gay?
if jesus loves everyone like he says he does,
then whats wrong with homosexuals.
doesnt that mean you should love them too?

its caused by chaos in your brain.
people cant help that i hope you know.

now...please, please enlighten me. tell me how smileys can be *homosexual* i dont think that is what jesus would say. dont discriminate.

i hope you feel like [oops]. before your go around saying your a christian. watch just what the [oops] you say.

...

*The word homophobia.  Let’s be honest, no one’s really scared of gay people.  It’s a loaded word used by gay and pro-gay people to put down those who think it’s wrong to be gay.  If they wanted to be honest, they’d say "that person thinks it’s wrong to be gay," instead of "that person is homophobic," but who wants to be honest nowadays*

you really have issues you need to deal with. there are such people who are homophobes you ignorant [oops].

people who are constantly harrasing gay people, and use such words as gay to describe online smileys...((YOU))...are homophobes.  those are people who are scared of gays because they dont understand it, and  that scares them. and it makes them feel better if they constantly put down homosexuals. and im sure you have met those guys who loooove lesbians, but hate gay men. why? because people fear what they cant understand.

umm what the [oops]?? try to put down people who think being gay is wrong? your putting down gay people. being gay can be caused by [oops] thats all [oops] up in your brain. you cant help that. so sorry.

how are they not being honest by calling someone a homophobe??? get out of your bubble. it will consume you at eat at your *heavenly* soul.

the get up kids. humm. *if you haven’t heard these guys you don’t know what emo is* that statement has NO truth to it what so ever. and not every band is *emo* have you ever heard of cursive or poison the well. the get up kids is probably the LEAST *emo* band on your list. goodjob

Nate got a new car and it’s just gorgeous, and he took an amazing photo of it with this crazy sky and everything... check it out.

It is now 10AM, and Jeremy and I stayed up all night working on math homework. Konstantin stayed up too, and worked on a little Greek homework... but I think really he just didn’t want to be left out. So... I have to stay awake from now until 3:30 so that I can take my CSE quiz and hand in my math homework.  Oh, and then I have to stay awake to finish my (other) CSE project documentation.  Hmmm fun.

OAO’s playing in the HUB, so that’s where I be!

If you’re not there, go see the interview.