Yeesh

Yeesh. I sit here tonight rather fried, after doing a marathon working session focused solely on one specific project, the newly-posted Pfeifenigma (which includes this year's Halloween pipe). Like the original Halloween pipes, this was a pet project that I just decided to do.... mostly just to see what would happen. I'm pretty fervent with possibilities for future Pfeifenigmas, but it will really depend on the reaction of folks to this first one, and it's highly possible that the whole idea is too complex to easily sell (following the adage of, "It's too complicated if it can't be boiled down to 'DIE HARD on a train' or some such). We'll see. I also posted two new mortas, a smooth and a sandblast, though the blast has already been spoken for as I write this. Very, very strange to be doing photography and posting new pipes to the catalog, after so many months of simply shipping everything over to Pipe & Pint.

I know it's been a long time since the last update, but I'm simply too tired to post anything insightful or complex. Instead, I'll just lavish some praise on two other new Freeware programs I've switched to lately, which have done Very Good Things for me - Nvu and Comodo Firewall. I've always kept my site simply, and so never needed anything like DreamWeaver, but I feel I've launched forward a decade or more with Nvu. Nvu is a WYSIWYG HTML editor that is amazingly easy to learn (I whipped up the Pfeifenigma site pages with it the first time out) and actually produces good HTML coding, unlike other WYSIWYG editors that could be named. And it's free. Perfect for starving pipemakers with websites to maintain, all round the world.

For firewalls, I've used ZoneAlarm for years, but it has gradually gotten annoying, between the nag screens to buy the commercial version and the recent tendency of the True Vector monitor to crash repeatedly (a torrent problem, it seems). I didn't realize just how simple ZA was until I installed Comodo's free package, which leak-tests better and has a wagonload of extra features (just being able to see what is using the net connection at any time is quite nice).

There's my public service announcement for the day. Now I'm off to collapse on the couch and figure out what tonight's October horror movie will be!