Seriously?  You can’t think of a single reason other than surfing porn that you would want a privacy mode for?  If so, you are either too naive or too obsessed with porn.

Let’s start by saying I don’t want other people accessing my computer to know what I do on my personal time no matter what it is.  It’s none of their business if I play fantasy baseball, if I shop at Costco, or if I’m looking for a new dentist.  So, yes, I’ll be using privacy mode for that.  Just because it isn’t red-faced embarrassing, doesn’t mean it isn’t private.

Then, remember that privacy mode doesn’t just keep websites from writing new cookies, or tracking, or whatever to your computer, it also keeps them from reading the ones that are already there!

If it weren’t for people manually deleting their cookies, or installing new programs to do it for them, websites both legit and not could track you FOREVER with your cookies and other things on your computer.  Are you really OK with Sears knowing (before you enter any personal information or tell them who you are) that you bought tires from them in 2001 and then searched for wiper blades but didn’t buy any in 2006, and that now you are back looking at the automotive section?  Since you paid full price the last two times you visited, maybe they should not display the sale prices while you are browsing?

Does Sears do this? No. Could they? You bet.

There are dozens, or maybe hundreds, of very useful thing that can be using the new privacy modes whether it’s Google Incognito, Microsoft InPrivate, or Firefox Private Browsing.  The only reason it seems like you don’t need private browsing is because users developed tons of add-ons, plug-ins, and settings to control their privacy. 

Controlling what a website keeps track of on you and your computer used to involve downloading a whole new program like CCleaner, or having to dig into the Tools-> Options-> Privacy menu on your browser. Some people even resorted to learning how to use the semi-hidden profiles feature of Firefox and then creating a separate profile in order to do certain tasks.

Doesn’t privacy mode sound a lot easier?

Here are some great reasons to use your browser’s privacy mode including some that used to take much more complicated measures to get the same results.

Top Reasons to Use Privacy Mode That Are Not Porn

1. See what your Google search results would look like without "personalization" – Now you don’t have to listen to SEO consultants who tell you that just searching something to get results is not an option.
2. Research Products and Services so that when you are ready to buy, they don’t know that you have ever been there before.
3. Use Coupon Codes, Shipping Discounts, and more that are only good for "new customers" or those who have never been to a website before. Thanks to privacy mode, they won’t see that cookie or authenticated session that makes you ineligible.
4. Get a new registration or user name at a website or forum that you already use without the hassle of having two registrations. (Just always use privacy mode for the 2nd one.)
5. Keep your boss, co-workers, or spouse from knowing how much time you spend on Monster.com.
6. Avoid "personalized" offers from online merchants.
7. Or research whether those offers are really personalized, or just the same ones everyone else gets.
8. Respond to a post, debate, or review without giving away who you are.

The list could go on and on.  Research info on new banks, doctors, jobs, services, and more without them knowing and without the next person on your PC knowing.

Let’s also not forget that the world is full of embarrassments that are not porn.  What about online dating, weight loss, plastic surgery, medical conditions (unusual bowel movements, anyone?), collections (you still collect stamps? figurines? baseball cards? beanie babies? – Do you want the creepy guy in accounting to know that?)

So, let’s give the whole "porn-mode" thing a rest.  You’ve made your point, if you every had one.

Actually, nobody has ever been better at getting along without a privacy mode than those who surf for porn, because they knew that they needed to watch their privacy-backs.  It’s all of those other things that people naively do on their computers that are leaving things that they wish wouldn’t be left there that need privacy mode.

Enjoy.  I’m off to get credit for a referral to a website that I’ve already been to once or twice in the past.

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Thinking about buying a lightweight, ultra-portable, netbook computer?

You aren’t alone.  Netbook sales have been rising which is a good thing because regular laptop sales have taken a hit during the recession.

Now that there are lot of netbook makers out there with multiple models each, the question becomes which netbook is right for you.  The quick answer is, the cheap ones.

Expensive Netbooks Have No More Power

Thanks to Microsoft’s limits placed on being able to install a copy of Windows XP on a netbook, no netbook has more than 1GB of RAM and a hard drive no bigger than 160GB.  Also, the screen must be less than 14.1” inches.

Plenty of netbooks near the $200 level have the full 1GB of RAM and 160GB hard drive along with the current Intel Atom processors.  That means that those $400 netbooks don’t have any more power (they can’t).  In other words, you are paying for something else, like durability or “feel”.

Don’t waste your money.

Windows 7 has restrictions on its cheaper Starter Edition that don’t allow screens larger than 10.1”.  That means that in order to upgrade your bigger screen netbooks, you’ll have to buy the pricier Windows 7 editions.

Furthermore, 1GB is barely enough to run today’s applications let alone the next versions.

Good luck getting Office 2007 to run on your netbook at anything other than a snail’s pace.  Oh, yeah, it will also take up most of your hard disk space.  Sure, netbooks are mainly for surfing the net, but most people also want to be able to do basic document work like Word files and Excel spreadsheets too.  But, those hardware specs are barely up to the task.

The point is that you’ll need more powerful hardware, and soon.  Whether Microsoft will cave in to pressure from netbook users and manufacturers or if netbook makers figure out a way around the Windows 7 restrictions remains to be seen.  Either way, that next version of Office will take more than what today’s netbooks offers which means you’ll be upgrading very soon.  If not next year, then certainly the year after.

For a one or two year investment, you are better off getting yourself one of the small, cheap netbooks.  If you need a bigger screen or more power today, then step up to a laptop, you’ll be glad you did.

By the way, there doesn’t appear to be a free upgrade path for Netbooks from Windows XP, so if you are going to shell out $75 to $150 for a copy of Windows 7, you might as well just buy a brand new netbook for $250. Yet another reason you won’t be keeping your current netbook for very long.

Buy the cheapest one that you like typing on and using the trackpad on.  You’ll thank me sometime in the next 18 to 24 months that you didn’t shell out $450 for that netbook that doesn’t cut it anymore.

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The definition of a three-alarm fire or the definition of a 3-alarm fire is not set thing across all fire departments.  The term three-alarm fire simply means that 3 different sets of units were requested to handle a particular fire.

In fact, it appears to be one of those terms repeatedly thrown around in the media because it is an official sounding term that carries a lot of “zip” for the average reader. 

What is a 3-Alarm Fire or Multiple-Alarm Fire Really?

Firefighters, of course, respond to many different kinds of emergency calls ranging from false alarms from a building’s alarm system, to car accidents, and in most cities, as medical support as well.  The purpose for which firefighters are most known is fighting fires, particularly those in buildings.

A fire in a building is referred to generically as a structural fire.

When a structural fire is reported, a single unit is dispatched to the scene, unless there are special factors like being a large or multi-story building, or chemicals, and so on.  For a regular run of the mill fire though, a single unit responds.

How big a unit is, and what kind of trucks and equipment are in it depends upon the fire department and the type of fire.  Bigger fire departments have bigger units.  Fire departments like those in Manhattan have completely different units because almost every fire will be a multi-story fire, and they need to have the proper personnel and equipment.

This first response, however large that is, is termed Initial Full Alarm by the NPFA, or National Fire Protection Association.  The NPFA publishes NFPA 1710 which is a guide for standard fire department organization and deployment.

Once that first unit arrives on scene it begins to assess the fire situation.  If the fire is big enough, or if there are going to rescue operations, or some other factor makes the situation more dangerous or volatile than a small house fire, they will put out a call for more help.  This call is the second alarm and turns that particular fire into a two alarm fire.

Ironically, two-alarm fires are often more rare than three-alarm fires because if help is needed, then you usually need more than just a little help. Thus, multiple-alarm fires are almost always at least 3-alarm fires except in the biggest cities or in rural areas where a third alarm mean getting firefighters from another town.

Hypothetically, if only one extra unit responded to the scene and then more help was needed, that third call would be the third-alarm and would make it a 3-alarm fire.

Additional units responding would be the 4th alarm, and 5th alarm and so on.

An article at Slate recounts a 10-alarm fire in New York.  In New York, a two-alarm fire means that 25 units and 106 firefighters are dispatched, while a three-alarm fire would send 33 units and 138 firefighters.

In Broward County, FL, the first-alarm response to a residential fire is three engines, an aerial unit, a rescue unit, and a battalion chief, which works out to about 15 firefighters for the initial response.

Now, you know what a three-alarm fire means and what it doesn’t mean.  If you are really curious about what it means it in your home town, contact your local fire department and ask.  Tell them you are doing research and they’ll be happy to tell you.

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Deleting the admin account removes it as a target for hackers.  They can try all day long with automated or non-automated attacks to hack the admin account, but if it isn’t there, they’ll never get in that way.

There is a small glitch that most people fail to mention.

If you have already setup your WordPress blog before deciding to remove the admin account, chance are that WordPress won’t let you delete the admin account when you try and click delete.

Why won’t WordPress let you delete the admin account?

Because under Settings –> General there is a field where you enter an email address.  That email address is the administrative email address contact.  You cannot delete the account that the administrator email account is assigned to.

So, take one more step and switch the admin email address to match the one you setup with the new admin account.  Then, you can go back to the Users screen and delete the admin account without any trouble.

FYI – If you have not created another User account and assigned it administrator rights, you won’t be able to delete the default admin account either.  In WordPress, there always has to be at least one admin account, so you have to create the new admin account first, and then delete the old default administrator account.

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However, I don’t just let it go without doing some troubleshooting.

Today, I stumbled across the solution to one of my major annoyances.  I routinely go into Firefox’s about:config to ensure that my browser.tabs.closeButtons is set to 1 which means that there should be a X one each and every tab in Firefox so that you can close any tab you want with a single click.  In other words, there is no need to select the tab in order to close it.

The catch is that even though that parameter was indeed set, and reset, to 1 every time, my close buttons seemed to disappear after I had been using Firefox for a while.

browser.tabs.tabMinWidth

I’ve done a fair amount of reading about Firefox.  Unfortunately, not everything out there is very good or very accurate.  In particular, the numerous articles about how to make Firefox faster by adjusting about:config parameters are misleading at best, and untrue at worst. 

Along the way, I read about setting your mimimum tab width in Firefox.  The point is that by making it smaller, more tabs will fit across a single row.  Google has made Title tags worthless by making every savvy webmaster fill them with keywords instead of a useful title. That means it really doesn’t matter how small your tabs are since most of the time, whatever text is displayed in the tab won’t be unique enough to distinguish one tab from another. So, like many others before me, I cranked the minimum tab width parameter down to 70 or 75 depending upon my mood.

It turns out, that on a tab that is too small, Firefox does not put an X to close the tab regardless of what the about:config browser.tabs.tabMinWidth setting is.  With a small setting, the browser determines that you want a smaller tab and that there is no longer any room for a close button.

In my Firefox installation, testing has revealed that a minimum tab width setting of 138 is required to always have a close button displayed no matter how many tabs you have open.  That number may be substantially different for your installation because I do have some plug-ins that do things to my tabs like color them and allow me to close all tabs to the right, and so on.

If you want a close button on all of your tabs and you already have set your browser.tabs.closeButtons to 1, check your browser.tabs.tabMinWidth setting.  Try bumping it up to 140 or so and see if all of your tabs have close buttons now.  Then, experiment with smaller numbers until you get the smallest tab size that will work.  Then, it’s up to you to decide which you want more, smaller tabs, or easily accessible close buttons.

For me, I want that X on every tab all the time because sometimes I end up with dozens of tabs open while searching for some information, and once I find it, I just want to close all the other tabs about that topic fast and easy.  That is, unless they are all grouped at the right end, in which case I can just Close All Tabs to Right.

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Recently I came across something called binaural beats which are two different beats, or sounds, played simultaneously to each ear that differ in frequency by some amount.  The theory is that the brain perceives this stimulus in a specific manner and that this brain response can be used to create or improve certain mood states.  Some sites claim an ability to mimic illegal drug affects by essentially making your brain feel like it is on cocaine through these beats.  Less far-fetched claims include the ability to sleep better, improve mood, and give you more energy and alertness.

A quick Google search turns up two red flags.  Red flag number one is that the only sites popping up are those from ardent proponents who are, of course, selling the secret to these beats.  Red flag number two is that the Wikipedia entry is littered with those this section needs actual data type messages.

In cases like these, I turn to PubMed, the government’s online database of published research studies.  At PubMed you can read the actual research and not just the pull quotes supporters use to make it sound like their science is a foregone conclusion.

It didn’t take long to find a slew of “No effect” conclusions from the research studies undertaken.  This is where the pushers jump in with their “Yeah, but…”.  Ironically, the “Yeah, but…” to everyone of their points is, “Yeah, but, no one actually has even the slightest proof that what you are saying is true, except for one scientist whose research is at least fifty years old.”

The newer and more current the research gets (the better the technology and methodology used) the worse the results get.

The real shocker about these beats was this binaural beat technology research study which found that there was an increase in depression and worse memory recall after using the binaural beats.  Yikes!

I guess you can tell, this one is not something I’ll be getting into.

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But, at 12:01am, Facebook will allow people to pick a username.  The blog entry makes it sound great. Now, it says, you can be www.facebook.com/bob.smith instead of www.facebook.com/profile=19837254.  Mainstream media is already touting what they are calling “vanity URLs.”

Yeah, sure.

That will be true for about 37 seconds.  According to Facebook’s numbers there are 200 million “active users.”  How many of them have your name? Including middle initial? Your nickname? Your online persona name?

Don’t think for a second that there won’t be millions of cyber-geeks, opportunists, jerks, weasels, and just plain old Facebook users sitting up hitting refresh at midnight.  By tomorrow morning, that oh, so great sounding blog post will look quaint and naive when you can be known as “bob.smith8201735” or “The-Bobster-O-Rooney-Ding-Dong.”

In other words, after tonight, things will be just like they are now for millions of Facebook users worldwide.  You will have to email, link, or write down your profile address for people to find your Facebook profile.

The only difference is that a few thousand Facebook users with fast Internet connections and nothing better to do on a Thursday night that sit in front of their computer will have better links and web addresses than you do.

It’s kind of a bummer.  One of the things I really liked about Facebook was that I got to use my real name, the one people might actually look for me with, instead of having to try and come up with something that was unique, but not embarrassing, yet memorable, but not too…

It seems every time Facebook makes a change, they make it worse.  The funny thing is that their current platform is wildly popular.  Why not look for things to ADD instead of things to CHANGE!

Coca-Cola did one of them in the 1980s and the other later on.  Which one constantly ranks in the Top 10 Corporate Blunders of All-Time and which one increased revenue and market share around the world?

Those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it.

Facebook, get out the books.  It’s time to study.

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A lot of people use Photoshop to mock-up an layout of their web site design and then use that layout to create the actual website layout, usually via some sort of grid.

There are a growing number of WordPress Theme frameworks than can be used as a starting point for WordPress blog design.

There aren’t really any WordPress-based PSD frameworks available for free. Not true.

The guys over at Area381, who I have never run across before today offer a WordPress PSD Framework file for free download.

Now, no matter how you start your website design, you have a solid jumping off point.

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Obviously, websites with different purposes or audiences require different page designs, but I thought I could find an overall template for webpage designs that would be usable for multiple websites in the same category that performed the same function.  However, even similar websites can’t be shoehorned into a single design.

This morning I was doing what I always do for my morning break which is browsing through the handful of online deals websites that I like.  I know there are hundreds of other deals sites out there or coupon sites or sites with free shipping codes, but the four sites I scroll through every day have turned out to the best deal websites on the Internet for the types of things that I buy and shop for.

In no particular order, my favorite deals websites are:

• Woot
• Slickdeals
• Dealnews
• GottaDeal

All four sites are in the same category of online shopping or Internet-based shopping tips.  All four sites offer daily updates of the best deals they can offer.  But, each one has a completely different design and layout to serve its readers best.  The difference in designs and what that design offers, is very likely one of the main reasons I continue to use all four sites despite the fact that I just don’t buy stuff all that often.

Woot is the most well known.  They offer a single great deal each day.  If the deal happens to hit you with something you want or need, then you win.  If not, then you wait another day. Either way, the site displays a single product including its picture and a tongue-in-cheek review of the product that doesn’t generally contain any real facts until the end.  It is just accepted by users of the site that whatever the product and price is, that it is a good deal.  The site makes no mention of how good of a deal, nor whether it is a better or worse deal than might be sniffed out elsewhere.

SlickDeals.net offers many features to its users including forums where visitors can discuss potentially good deals, coupons, discount codes, and even the quality and specifications of the products in question.  However, the main landing page of SlickDeals is simply a list of text links.  Each product is listed along with its price.  No other information, pictures, or graphics are provided unless you click one of the links.  Only the best of the best make the SlickDeals front page, no matter how many or how few deals that means the site has on any particular day.  If only one item rises to the level demanded by the SlickDeals front page, then only one deal gets posted.  There is no filler.

DealNews and GottaDeal, by contrast, both have more extensive listings including a picture of the sale item as well as notes such as when, if ever, the item was offered for less and whether or not it takes a rebate or coupon to get the low discount price.

While both DealNews and GottaDeal look similar at a glance, a closer look reveals that DealNews groups their big deals by type with computers and computer related deals at the top and other deals at the bottom.  This layout promotes the ability to seek specific sale items. 

GottaDeal on the other hand lists their items chronologically as they appeared on the site.  The upside is that a regular user can stop looking once they encounter the deals they have already seen which can save time.  The downside is that if someone is looking for a deal on a hard drive, for example, they would have to scroll through the whole listing to ensure that they didn’t miss something.

In the in, four sites all offering very similar functionality are laid out and designed completely differently based upon their needs and the needs of their readers. I guess the best a professional writer and web designer can do is build a collection of tools for their design and development toolbox and then pull each individual piece out as it is needed.  It isn’t as sleek as a re-usable template, but if used properly can still save plenty of time and effort while still providing top quality websites.

Time to change the quest.  No longer do I seek the one great website design.  Now, I seek the great design elements and tools that build them.

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From DealNews.com:

Amazon.com offers its 5 Hours of Classical Favorites, an assortment of 49 DRM-free classical music MP3 tracks, for $3.99. That’s easily the best total price we could find for such a collection. You may not recognize the individual names, but if you’ve watched a handful of Bugs Bunny cartoons, you’ve probably heard most of these. Amazon MP3 Downloader is required.

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