Yes indeed, the mouse speed was too fast. I had turned it up all the way and that was apparently too much for my little MacAlly IceMouseJr. I love the mouse though. Anyhow, now I can say that Photologist is responsive all the time! The photo gallery feature is so nice, and the interface, though needing figuring out, is easily learned. I have to admit I rarely use the HELP feature in a program unless really pressed, so perhaps a read through would have saved me even the small amount of time it took to get going in Photologist. I had tried this program before about a year ago to the week, and I am really impressed with the latest incarnation. Have a look at To the Point Software, Terry Findlay programming in Real Basic. I have the little calendar program and the font manager from him as well. Excellent little programs. Although I cannot call the font program "little." I like it a lot.

A long hiatus, and a change in direction here for awhile. Had to get a good FTP program for the eMac, so I installed (and paid for) Transmit 2 from Panic Software. An excellent program. In just a tiny amount of time I had my website - such as it is - up on a new server without advertising. That is really a plus. And a very smooth transition it was. Now to remember to edit it, and perhaps improve it from time to time.

And did I mention Mozilla Firefox? If not, then this is the time for all to go get a copy and install on your system. Linux, Windows and Mac - all run well. I use the Windows version at work and the Mac version at home, and both run smoothly and without many hitches. I can access all sorts of sites, online ordering at my favorite sites is a breeze, and the speed of Firefox is awesome. On the Mac at home with a modem the speed of Firefox makes all the difference in the world. And I have to admit the "skins" are as much fun as Opera's. And the Open Source Community of Mozilla makes the effort worthwhile. I hope that Mozilla attracts a huge number of users. To say it is better than IE is just such an understatement.

Meanwhile, the addition of Photologist (and I am going to register that too) to my passle of photo proggies has increased my ability to play with my photos even more. I love the effects you can create with photologist, including cropping in shapes, vignetting, coloring backgrounds, etc. Photologist is a bit eccentric though, sometimes I get no response when I click a folder to view my pictures. But it could be this mouse. More trial days to come. Final verdict to follow.

The single most frightening thing on the political agenda of the day is the exportation of jobs to international locations, and the worst possible scenario is set by exporting technical and programming jobs abroad. The security of the country is at stake here. I don't want to talk to support staff in any other country but the US of A. And the thought of the leakage of computational data and programming code to anyone who might wish to copy, distribute or otherwise use this code for malicious purposes is just plain shocking.

Apparently the idea of paying fair wages and benefits to American workers, professionals or blue collar, is only a lip service elocutionary form. Companies by the dozens have opted to evade corporate responsibility by sending jobs and services overseas. There is no excuse for this practice, and there will indeed be consequences down the road, and they will probably not be pretty.

In the coming presidential election, it will be interesting to see if the Democrats address this in any real fashion. I see Kerry has stated that the companies who do this would maybe have to give three months notice. Good grief. What a copout, when we have already bled jobs like water over Hoover Dam.

PHEW! Illness in January, busy in February. Well then, I am reading "Damascus Gate" by Robert Stone. Excellent, yet weird. Very involving. To read this, you need schema galore. All sorts of religious references and some quite arcane. Anyway, the book envelopes the reader with a building tension. We'll see how it ends.

Winter is too long, too cold and too snowy this year. Gives us all an occasion for complaints, so it does serve a purpose.

Just got a plain vanilla dialup for my Mac. Love it. And why not. These days we all have enough software to do whatever we want to or need to, so why download bloatware in order to get online. She, my Mac, was one year old not long ago. The plain vanilla dialup was her birthday present after finding out I couldn't get DSL yet. What kind of antidiluvian system has "my local phone company" got here anyhow?

Blogging has taken a back seat to life, what with the active Holidays, and the vast need to waste the time I don't use in other fun when not working. Reading - first "Mysteries of Pittsburgh." Excellent first novel of Michael Chabon. Great beginning to this book, and the entire book is a word-fest. Getting out my notebook as I always do when reading Chabon, I jotted down some goodies like "sere" and "Belvedere." Don't expect the meaning here. Then I found the end of the book rather draggy and felt somehow that the end was not really enlightening. Who knows what became of our protagonist. But, the book was so much better than most other books anyway, that I enjoyed it, even though it was, overall, a bit dismal.

Also read a wonderful little book called "Flyboys" about a junior high boy and his fantasies of flying a B-47 in cold-war 195?. Quite a bit of this was esoteric stuff that being a Milbrat in the fifties in SAC gave me the "schema" for understanding - otherwise it may or may not amuse you. The author is Tom Hanley. I did enjoy many minutes of hysterical laughter while reading it. Not great literature here, but a great story. Teenage verbiage slightly more than exaggerated, and not that well-handled, but good anyway.