do I feel silly? I feel silly!

So, that bizarre web-page loading problem which has bedevilled my browsing, and for which I have variously blamed the Iburst, spyware, the network connection and the conjunction of the moons of Saturn? um... < blushes > it's gone. Because I suddenly noticed this morning that, while I thought I had uninstalled it at the dawning of the Iburst, I still had a Propel Accelerator icon in the bottom right-hand corner of my screen. (This is a nifty program made by MWeb to speed up browsing on a dial-up, but is rife with warnings about not working on wireless. It works by, guess what, messing with images, which explains why Go Fug Yourself has been so Zen lately). So I uninstalled it properly, and all is gas and gaiters. And embarrassment. < traces circles with toe >. Thanks to everyone for all the advice, I feel my system is at least cleaner and more enlightened now...*

Now that I can distinguish browser errors in Sage from actual errors on pages, does anyone know what happened to Charles Stross's blog? It seems to have been eaten by a ravening flock of 404s.

In other news, the English dept. has scraped together enough money to pay me approximately what I'm getting this year for at least the first semester of next year, and probably the second. Together with the new faculty job this means I'll actually have slightly more money next year, which is a Good Thing. The conjunction of the moons of Saturn is clearly favourable in more areas than the techno-jinx.

* I started Internet Explorer to double-check that the browsing problem wasn't Firefox, had it up for 40 seconds, and it picked up a new piece of spyware. Microsoft, ptooey.

felinity

Yes, I'm posting twice in one day because I should be working, but this has to be done. Hallmarks of Felinity. For pink blobs owned by kitties everywhere.

Dispatches From The Front Line: folkloric content can form either the exoskeleton or the endoskeleton of a literary work. This makes literary fairy tale what, postentially chitinous or vertebrate? Explains my sensation of being eaten by giant insectoid aliens. Or, possibly, velociraptors.