Entertainment
Enjoyed the day yesterday in Charlotte at a performance of Cirque du Soleil . Worth the price of admission - colorful, creative costuming and fantastic performances by some incredibly gifted athletes. Great choreography. These folks perform without a net either and some of these stunts could lead to serious injuries. Did see one person get a bit injured coming off some huge mid air triple twisting routine that landed on a slanted board - he disappeared discretely offstage and most folks wouldn't have noticed. Heck, they'd be still scraping me off the floor! This particular performance told the following story (they have different performances in different cities) (TV Schedule - If you'd like to catch this on TV, you can see it on the Bravo channel - TV Schedule

VAREKAI

Deep within a forest, at the summit of a volcano, exists an extraordinary world—a world where something else is possible. A world called Varekai.

From the sky falls a solitary young man, and the story of Varekai begins. Parachuted into the shadows of a magical forest, a kaleidoscopic world populated by fantastical creatures, this young man sets off on an adventure both absurd and extraordinary. On this day at the edge of time, in this place of all possibilities, begins an inspired incantation to life rediscovered.

The word varekai means "wherever" in the Romany language of the gypsies the universal wanderers. This production pays tribute to the nomadic soul, to the spirit and art of the circus tradition, and to the infinite passion of those whose quest takes them along the path that leads to Varekai.
Varekai

Bargains
Speaking of Charlotte, if you are looking for a nice place to stay, use Priceline and put in $25 - you can net yourself a nice room for a total of $35 (taxes and fees included). We stayed in a very nice Suites Plus, which had a full kitchen, sofa, bed, writing desk, etc. Hard to beat that price - conveniently located, as well. Charlotte obviously has a surfeit of hotel rooms and they'd rather have that $25 than nothing.

If your're looking for a good place to eat, try out Kaffé Frappe - excellent place to grab breakfast - far beyond your normal Cracker Barrel, IHOP, Waffle House routine.

Word of the Day
hagiography (ha(g'e--o(g'r?-fe-, ha-'je--) - 1. Biography of saints. 2. A worshipful or idealizing biography. "My money's on Pincus, who was appropriately skeptical about the administration's WMD claims while Woodward was writing hagiography about the brave president and his fearless aides.""

Computers

Phishing

I'm telling you, these emails look more and more authentic every day. I got one today from Amazon that looked absolutely like an Amazon confirmation statement. Of course the Panasonic 50" flat screen I ordered was a tip that I didn't order any such thing (although I wish someone would order it for me!). The kicker is that there is a link with https: before it (indicating it is a secure site supposedly) and advising you to click on it if you find this order is in error. You are told you can reactivate your account at Amazon by doing this.

I can only imagine how many folks click on that link. Don't do it. If you see something like this, type in www.amazon.com yourself in the address bar of your browser and go to My Account and look at recent orders. That will tell you if something is amiss.

Pays to be careful these days.

Computers

Windows Installer Cleanup Utility

The link above points to a very nice little program to have in your toolbox of Windows fixing solutions. I was having a problem with uninstalling a version of Desktop Sidebar (picture on left). Add / Remove Programs wouldn't uninstall it. Trying to install a new version over the old one wouldn't work. Finally at one of the Desktop Sidebar forums, a user tipped me off to Windows Installer Cleanup Utility (see link above), which worked like a champ. It quickly deleted the offending registry entries and allowed me to install the new version of Desktop Sidebar (which is a very slick tool, by the way). Takes up minimum resources.

As shown in the picture to the left, you can have many various panels - weather, stock quotes, quick launch of programs, media player of choice (currently playing Neil Young's Crazy Horse), Performance panel monitoring disk usage, memory, cpu,etc, Run command panel, slideshow of pictures on your HD and from other places, Newsroom which will bring you all kinds of feeds from news sources, as well as RSS feeds. There are also many other panels and ways of configuring it. This panel sits on the right side of your desktop and can sit topmost or float or auto hide. As you hover over items, a larger picture will spring out providing you with more details. For instance, in the slideshow panel, hovering over the picture will make the full sized picture pop into view. As I've said, you can customize to your choosing. Quite slick.