Catsup, ketsiap, ketchup

Catch up. The real stuff has anchovies. Fancy that!

Nothing here lately, there's been lots of Real Life to be attended to.

Al Gore makes a bid for the title of looniest (wanna-be) leader in a while. Demolish and rebuild the nation's entire electrical power generating system in 10 years? Yeah, right. Some people are just innumerate. Not Gore so much as his followers. If Gore had trouble with math, he wouldn't have been able to make all that money out of these here carbon credits. Grumble, grumble …

Obama goes abroad, loses Teleprompter, speaks to worshipful crowds everywhere, with foot still firmly planted in mouth. No need to link this, it' s all over. But, what the heck, might as well link a few.

David Evans hammers another nail in the coffin of the global warming scam.

If you are having trouble seeing the "We Are Building a Religion" Obama music video, try it here. It was working fine the last time I checked it, about a minute ago.

I'm a big fan of the HBO TV series The Wire. As a former Baltimore resident, I kind of like seeing the bits of scenery around the Inner Harbor. Here's a true crime story Too Weird for The Wire. (via)

Windows Update trouble

I've been away for a while, out of town with very limited connectivity, and when I got back, found that there were updates. Happy happy joy joy.

I always look over these updates, and usually download and install them. Today I did that, and found I had no Internet afterwards. System Restore has got me back on line, bless it. Something wrong with either the latest security update, or the latest Malicious Software Removal Tool? Grrr.

Update: This appears to have something to do with ZoneAlarm; see comments.

Wednesday, about noon: it's not the Malicious Software Removal Tool, but the security update, KB951748, that came on the same day, not playing nice with ZoneAlarm. This is a hot topic on the ZoneLabs forums, on the Microsoft user forum, and at Broadband Reports. It seems that what's needed is a fix from ZoneAlarm. The world is waiting.

There's a press release from ZoneAlarm. I tried Option 3, which seemingly would allow one to have the security update and high-level setting on the Internet zone at the same time. It didn't work, possibly because ipconfig /all shows the address of my router on the DNS Servers line. I'm not going to remove the router just to get different DNS server addresses. Apparently, option 3 does not seem to be working for anyone else either.

Here is a blog post about the vulnerability that KB951748 is intended to deal with.

Later on Wednesday: The ZoneAlarm press release no longer lists option 3, entering DNS servers' IP's in the trusted zone, but has a new version of ZoneAlarm—five new versions, actually, the Security Suite, the Pro version, the Antivirus, the Anti-Spyware, and the Basic Firewall, available for download. That was pretty darn quick! All the new versions have the number 70.483.000, as for instance in filename zlsSetup_70_483_000_en.exe. Numbers equal to or higher than this should be good; I certainly can offer no guarantees.

So, as we used to say with BASICA, Ok then. I installed the new ZoneAlarm, then the KB951748 security update, rebooted to get the update working, and all seems well. Kudos and pizza to the ZoneAlarm programmers, who no doubt were coding full speed for the last 36 hours or so. You know, I haven't seen Jolt Cola for sale anywhere in years, though apparently it's still manufactured. Back in my programming days, I liked Jolt (or coffee) for BASIC, and whiskey for dBase. My, that was a long time ago.

New sport: chess boxing

19-year old Nikolai Sazhin is the new champion. Thanks to Mark Hemingway at The Corner.