On Saturday, I watched one of the most innovative High School programs I’d ever seen. Mount Michael hosted a robotics tournament where 24 High School teams competed with robots they’d assembled from the Vex Robotics Design. Each team formed an alliance with another team, to compete in a rounds where their robots needed to pick up rings, move the posts, block opponents, and more. It was fun to see smart kids use their talent and have a great time at it.
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A study was conducted by two Professors at University of Washington to determine which browser allowed for safer browsing. They tested a several different setups, between Firefox and IE.

Internet Explorer users can be as much as 21 times more likely to end up with a spyware-infected PC than people who go online with Mozilla’s Firefox browser, academic researchers from Microsoft’s backyard said in a recently published paper.

Yahoo Article on the Study

Google Safe Browsing for Firefox

Protect yourself from web pages that ask for your personal or financial information under false pretenses. This type of attack, known as phishing or spoofing, is becoming more sophisticated, widespread and dangerous. Google Safe Browsing is an extension to Firefox that alerts you if the web page is not legitimate. You can download the extension at the following address:

http://www.google.com/tools/firefox/safebrowsing/

I got a Tivo box for Christmas. It’s been great, I haven’t missed any favorite shows since. Before, I stopped watching TV shows and series. It seemed that if I missed one episode I was lost and the show wasn’t as fun to watch. Now with Tivo, I can grab past seasons from a marathon. Once I’m caught up, then I can record all the new episodes. Tivo does everything for you, scheduling and recording. It’s extremely easy to use.

If you happen to sign up for Tivo, they have a Reward system. If you put their email into the referral system, they get points towards awards. If you don’t have an email address to use yet, you can use:

Mozilla Firefox 1.0.7, a security and stability update to the flagship Mozilla browser, is now available for download. Fixes are included for the international domain name (IDN) link buffer overflow vulnerability and the Linux command line URL parsing flaw. There are also other security and stability changes, including a fix for a crash experienced when using certain Proxy Auto-Config scripts. In addition, some regressions introduced by previous 1.0.x security updates have been resolved. (More Details)

Firefox 1.0.7 can be downloaded from the Firefox product page. Download and install the latest Mozilla Firefox, the best web browser on the market.

Google is beta testing a new service, Google Maps. This is simply amazing, the interface is slick and very easy to use. One problem is that older browsers will not work, it currently only runs on Internet Explorer or Mozilla/Firefox.

Here are some examples:
Hastings, Ne
McDonald’s in the Hastings Area
Brandon Petersen in the Hastings Area

The Mozilla community has just released Sunbird 0.2, the first official release. This is a very big deal, a free Calendar program that will run on any Windows, Mac, or Linux system. This is from the same community that wrote the Firebird browser and Thunderbird email client, so we can only expect a high quality product that works according to standards.

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I just added a photo gallery to my site. I have a few boxes of pictures that I always meant to get online. Expect the gallery to grow, I bought a digital camera and I’m having fun.