Deverill

Rob's right, there's nothing you can do. If you filter them you miss legitimate bounce messages. The bottom line is that the email system needs to be rebuilt to avoid this kind of abuse but that's a major undertaking that many are not willing to undertake.

Steve, I gotta admit I'm glad it's not coming here or the bashed central Florida but I'm sad that you'll probably have to deal with it. Definitely take in the welcome mat. I have a Taz mat that says "Go Away!" so maybe that helped. Be safe, my friend.

VNC is also a good one. We used RealVNC for awhile (Lisa's link) and it worked just fine. One thing about Dameware is that you can actually see the remote processes, services, drives, files, etc, etc. without 'taking over' the other computer.

Ah, you see, there's the best part. Firefox is extendable - IE's not. (Don't ask, I've never customized anything for it and never really wanted to so you'll have to go elsewhere for the 'how'.)

We use dameware (dameware.com) at work and it's great. A little pricey but you didn't state your budget for it. pcAnywhere is another one we use and it's not quite as expensive and works pretty well too.

I recently finished the book "Cascading Style Sheets - The Designer's Edge" by Molly E. Holzschlag of www.molly.com - ISBN 0-7821-4184-6 It is an awesome book on the topic and takes you from beginner to tableless design. The best thing, IMO, is that they take an existing web site and deconstruct it and then reconstruct it using CSS. A great exercise that got my head in the right place for doing that to my own sites. W3C also has a great list of books and online resources at www.w3.org/Style/CSS/learning Other than doing it for you it's really tough to get you from "regular" to CSS without some common ground that you can obtain by some research and maybe a book. It's not hard stuff but for someone who has not looked at it before it will seem like Greek to start off. There are hundreds of articles and tutorials on the 'net that should be able to get you up to speed. As always, if you have any specific questions feel free to ask here.

Yes, but some of us are able to remember which thread we just read and go to the next one on the list even if they all still look unread.

To be honest, I think that is the way it's supposed to be. If the focus is in the text box and you scroll (I'm assuming you mean with the mouse wheel) then it should scroll the text box, not the entire page. If you hit back you should go back to the cached version of the last page you hit, not refresh it which uses more bandwidth and isn't really a back feature. Poor Firefox - gets blamed for doing things the right way just because IE is broken.

Right, Thomas. Look at your File manager in cPanel. When you first open it there is already the www "subdomain folder" and that is where we put our website files. At work the WWW is required to get to our sites - if you just put historictours.com it goes to a "Under Construction" page. I don't know why they did that but most places assume that if there is no subdomain to use the www one.

It helps separate different aspects of a site and is easier to remember. For instance, support.microsoft.com is easier to remember than microsoft.com/support and it separats their support section from their products and general information section of the site. Another big difference is best shown as an example: On one of my clients' site he has a fishing charter business and he also has a GTO he's proud of and wants to show off. For a long tme I had to deal with the car fanatics messing up the statistics of who is looking for fishing boats. I finally set up the GTO pages as a subdomain which has a separate set of statistics in the cPanel.

It makes the wait worse that it has slowed down so much. Originally they said Monday early AM for coming near here and now, not only is it not expected to come near here (165 miles), thank God, it's not supposed to be for another day (Tuesday). Everyone nearby needs to keep an eye on this because they can always turn but be safe in all that you do!

If you are using a catchall then the very creation of the domain name will get you spams - you don't have to give it to anyone. The spammers see a new domain pop up in the listings and poof, they have a ready-made scape goat for their spammy garbage.

We were just offered a better place to stay. It's a home that's well boarded up and has a neighbor who has already planned to offer them minimal generator power after the storm. It's very close to my home too so we can evaluate the damage and begin recovery quicker. It's looking better all the time.

Just as a note of curiousity, anyone interested in the local chatter can go to www.us1radio.com which is our rock of information for hurricanes. It may be interesting to check it out after the storm just to see whassup... if it stays online anyway.

I'm sure it means they will refund you $110 to your credit card. The free month only comes when you pay for a full year when you first sign up. The home pages says it this way: " Prepay for one year of web hosting and receive the last month free! " Unfortunately the moderators here like me do not have access to billing info. There's really nothing we can do. The only ones that can help are the ones who monitor the helpdesk. They don't often monitor the forums so it's really not going to help by posting here. You really are better off going through the helpdesk system for any billing issues. Welcome to TCH and I hope this doesn't keep you from enjoying what I personally think is the best hosting available.

See, there ya go! No 50 mph tree crashing with that browser!

I'm glad it's working for you. Just wanted to throw in that when I do that kind of thing I just rename my stable file to index.html and work on indexa.html. I can go to the test version in the URL and it doesn't break anyone else coming to my site. Just a though.

Well, one good thing about an island is that there are no hills and valleys to trap water so it all just gets up about 8 feet above sea level and drains off. It's nasty and dirty and annoying and somewhat damaging to anything on the ground but it's not like a place that has valleys and gulleys where the water can get very deep and run with strong currents. Another thing is there's no dirt here (1/2 serious). It's mostly coral rock and mangrove roots that hold the island together. There's about 1-3 inches of dirt and then caprock so there's no mudslides or anything like that. Anyone here in a very strong building will be ok I think. The worst will be afterwards with power and water situations as fragile as they are, depending on Miami for everything... there's a lot of places those can be broken between here and there. The worst that can happen, short of a weak building crushing someone, is the bridges washing out - that happened before in the 60's and it's hard to bring supplies without bridges. Thanks for the well-wishes and the rest of you near this thing keep safe too!

Of course not, and you're absolutely right that we should do everything possible to make the roads safe... but that "dumb" kid down the street that doesn't know how to drive is not in his father's pickup - he has one of those "Big Wheel" toy cars. Maybe we need to make a Fisher Price web browser until they get big enough for the real thing.

Seriously! I wonder what "they" can really do to one of us if they had reason to. Could "they" really make us disappear or is our data still so decentralized it's not *yet* a possibility. I'll bet the national id nonsense would make it easier!

Wouldn't a tarball on a regular basis use up a lot more bandwidth than just the potentially few or no files that have actually been updated? It may be a show-stopper for someone with a really big site.

Here's a thought for you about electronic versus paper... I read a report today that was very interesting. It seems there was a post office computer that someone loaded Kazaa on and shared the C: drive. This report was a cleaned up list of all the reprimands made against postal workers for long breaks or refusing orders or whatever. The poster was nice enough to remove the SSN and Names from the report but it was available to millions in "raw" form. At least on paper they have to try harder for it!

It just goes to show that any system can have holes. But, "The bug was first identified late last month" "The GNOME graphical user interface project this week released a patch for imlib, a basic library used in many image-viewing applications." and "The first could take effect if a user were tricked into extracting or testing a specially crafted archive. The second can only be exploited if a user were tricked into passing a specially crafted command line to the lha command. In the third, an attacker could create a directory with special characters in its name, which could lead to the execution of malicious commands." I remember having folks using the Vax Cluster at the college where I worked try the new Logo compiler... it had turtle graphics and all! Of course, Logo was an acceptable shortcut for "Logoff" and that's just what it did. It's good for everyone to know that if you do something stupid then bad things will happen and that no system is perfect. It's pretty cool that Open Source stuff seems to have a quicker repair time than MS's proprietary secret-squirrel stuff does.

Ah, analogies, I love them! Using the car analogy, friends letting friends use IE "dumbly" is like letting everyone drive a Pinto. I know it could blow up if they get rear-ended but hey, it gets great gas mileage and it's easy to drive. It's also like people who don't know what oil is. I got a great car that way once, but it's not the best way to live - blowing up engines because you don't care enough to know that a car has basic needs and the driver needs to monitor them. (Like we need to monitor security updates at www.myantivirus.whatever. ) Oh yeah, let's not bother with that pesky thing on the steering column - it just makes that flashy light blink that annoys me. (What? Use a program that's not IE or Outlook? Nah, why bother - I don't signal when I turn so why should I know about ZIP!) The car that does everything, including turning on the windshield wipers when it rains, setting off the alarm when you rock it and opening your door when you whistle at it? How long before someone figures out that if you whistle at the same time you pour water on it and jump on the bumper it will turn off the alarm and open the door? I see IE in much the same manner - a browser should be a browser and it shouldn't do me favors. The best example of MS programs doing this is a recent security hole in which an exe file sent with a music file extension and passed to Windows Media Player would be seen as an exe and WMP would say "Hey, this isn't music. I'll do you a favor and run the exe!" unleashing Pandora's box contents upon your computer. The truth is that folks know that airbags are because they were forced to. The commercials bragged about them being cool things. Their friends got chemical burns from one that was in their car when they wrecked. The babies tragically lost their lives when they were hit by them. The insurance company says "you can save money if you have these new fangled things". Maybe we as a computing industry need to start doing the same thing with programs and other things the consumers don't want to know but should? (No, not kill babies with them, but give them reasons to want to know about them.)

Once is happenstance, twice is circumstance, three times is someone trying to tell you something... like move out of Florida? I'm not afraid, but I am anxious about this one. The latest navy tracks I have show it going about 20 feet west of here so that's not encouraging. Unlike Samantha, flooding is a problem on an island where the highest point is about 20 feet above sea level and I can toss a rock into Boca Chica Bay from where I now sit. Winds are always scary but more so when you live in a trailer. For the fun of it, my home is hideawaykeywest.com/images/8/unit_8.htm and if you click on Property you can see just how close to the water I am. My workplace is an old Navy barracks built pre-civil war so it's about as safe as you can get in South Florida. I'm hoping it goes away because it's impossible to protect everything in a trailer or even to move it out so we have to pick what's most important to save and pray for the rest. Of course, life is the most important - everything else can be replaced. People are already nuts here. The lines at the gas pumps and the stupidity of those in the lines is astonishing. Maybe if the idiots leave the rest of us will be ok here. The stores are doing a pretty good job of keeping up with us but the worst part is the aftermath in 104-heat-index weather, no power, probably no water, blistering heat and no wind, as ironic as that is, and everything being all busted up around you. Well, wish us the best and we'll let you know as we can how things are going! It's not expected here until Monday so I'll be around until then at least and then as power and phones allow. Thanks for your well-wishes and prayers. This one's gonna be an adventure! Maybe I'll get some Tupperware and catch some hurricane winds and sell them on Ebay like some folks did with Frances!