I have been using Akismet for spam protection for a little over a year now. It has been pretty good.

It has just missed some spam over the last couple of days. Obviously, somebody has tweaked their spambot. The thing is, anything not caught by the spam filter is sent to Friendfeed and God knows where else. My apologies if you have been subjected to random characters on my behalf. I do what I can to reduce the signal-to-noise ratio.

And so, I have switched spam prevention. I now use Mollom for my spam prevention needs. I am kinda excited about this, as the same awesome guy who wrote this very blog software that I use here is responsible for Mollom.

Thing is, Mollom requires a specific privacy policy. I don't think Mollum is worse than Akismet in the privacy department. They just require more disclosure.

Anyway, if you are wanting to comment on this post, or maybe one a little older, you will be subject to the Mollom policy before I have spelled it out for you here. Sorry. If you already have an account on this site you will not be affected at all. Let's hear it for old friends.

Here's hoping the Internet can continue to be usable by humans.

The point of this post is mostly to assure my lonely reader that I am in fact alive, and doing well. I have been busy taking care of the things I am supposed to do.

The fact that I get paid to do these things is not the focus. If money were the object I could do much better. I am hoping that will change. But money is not the important thing. I wish it were not an issue at all.

Back when I was much younger, I played the saxophone in the band. I was never the great musical talent, but I held my own. I really enjoyed jammin' in the rehearsals. Live performances brought a rush you have to experience to understand.

I almost feel as if I am approaching a live performance now.

It's probably just a little sad, the way I rely on Firefox. It is my interface to the rest of the planet, and over the years I have collected links and bookmarklets and lots of neat things. It's like my own personal Swiss army Knife for the web. I could probably recover in time if I lost it all and had to start over. Let's hope I never have to.

The method I use to back up Firefox may be completely wrong by any kind of coding standards. All I know is that it has worked for me. It only works as far as I know with Windows 98 and XP. There may be something similar if you run another OS. I think I could do it in Linux with a little poking around.

Let's say you want to try some sexy new plugin. Usually that goes without a hitch. But why take the chance?

What I do I have may be overkill, but it has taken me from computer to computer for the last 6 years with nary a setting lost.

OK, let's say you want to install a plugin with the option of going back 10 minutes should the need arise. I don't really know or care which files or folders the plugin changes. I just know I want full recovery and that I have disk space to burn. So this is what I do.

One day later, and my new Windows install is barely indistinguishable from the way it was before. Well, there is that one thing about the potentially corrupted mbr,

I was not able to boot a working instance of Linux. This is due only to the fact that I tend to buy computers without built in CD ROMs. It would be nice if the manufactures supported backwards compatibility, but hey I understand, you gotta pay to play. Everything is a tradeoff, and I chose traveling light.

This is a special note to all who wrote in and asked if I backed up my data. Perhaps that is a fair question. There may be great numbers who do not understand that FORMAT DISK means you will lose everything. It may be too much to ask for you to remember that I am not one of those. Just for the record, I am not fond of starting over from scratch. Even better, my business requires I keep track of stuff. Yeah, I BACKED IT ALL UP.

So, Windows XP it is. I am not ashamed of going with the path of least resistance. I have work to do tomorrow. I expect to get it done with a minimum of hassle, despite the reformat.

Things have calmed down here a bit, any projects left unfinished have been pending long enough that a few more hours won't be noticed, and I am about to find out if my new laptop will be running Windows or Kubuntu.

I have all my files backed up to my external hard drive, and am even typing this on the older backup computer. The deciding factor will be if the target laptop will boot off my external DVD drive. If not, then Windows will be re-installed.

I am quite comfortable with reinstalling Windows and I feel like I can have everything running well in a very short time. I am less confident with Linux but I should be able to run all but a couple of my favorite programs. If I can get my printer to work then I will be happy.

One of the programs I rely on is proprietary and Windows only. I need it to update one of the websites I maintain. I feel lucky to have a backup computer to run it on.

Here goes nothing!