USA tanks in bball; some Windows utilities I use

* And, of course, the Argentinians took out the other end of the equation of my Greece-USA basketball finals fantasy. I *knew* Stephen A. Smith was jinxing the USA team when he said "Team USA will win the gold medal at the end of next week. And it will do it whether the players continue to miss threes or make them" after the new 'Dream Team' lost to Lithuania last week.

* This post on Iran/Iraq/NKorea/Pakistan, and the USA's options & reasoning thereof, made a lot of sense to me.

* I have a few utilities I use on our computers that I thought I'd mention, in case someone finds them useful as well. Let me say right off the top that none of 'em works for Macs, AFAIK, sorry. OTOH, if you're using a Mac, you don't have to worry nearly as much about viruses and spyware, so count your blessings. (I try to have both worlds, but I'm stuck with Mac OS 8.1 for the moment with that.)

> Anti-Virus. If you do any web browsing, you need an antivirus program of some sort running. There's just too many clever evil programmers out there working away at computer viruses, and I think we've just seen the tip of the iceberg. Anyway, I use separate programs on our two computers. The one running XP has McAfee VirusScan running on it. My laptop is an old clunker which was top of the line in 1997 but is now pretty outdated. Since it runs Win98 and has only 48MB of RAM, McAfee is way too resource-consuming for it. What I use instead is a program called AVast AntiVirus. Its small enough to be stable on my laptop without slowing it down, the virus updates are fairly frequent (which was not the case with AVG), and its free. Whatever you choose, remember to turn on the option for automatic updates of the program's virus database, since new viruses are coming out all the time.

> Anti-Spyware. For spyware detection and protection, I use Spybot Search and Destroy. Its free, and I like it a little more than Ad-Aware, mostly for aesthetic reasons. Some folks install both, for maximum coverage.

> Internet Explorer add-ons. I have a number of different add-on programs for Internet Explorer which I use - actually, if it wasn't for the add-ons, I'd probably have dropped IE for a more elegant browser like Opera or Mozilla a long time ago, given IE's various security holes and lack of any updates from Microsoft for the past couple of years.

So, there's three main IE add-ons I use. One is Internet Macros, a program which allows one to design 'macros' which, when run, visit a number of different websites in succession. I use this mainly to visit a series of websites which I peruse regularly for news. A second is Roboform, which fills in online forms with personal information, as well as storing passwords for various sites. The info resides on your PC rather than out on a server, which is good from a security standpoint. It's pretty useful to have, instead of having to remember which password fits which site; its also good for contest entries.

The third program is called the Proxomitron. I like to think of it as doing a lot of the stuff which IE *should* be doing already, if Microsoft had bothered to keep updating it. Basically, its a filter program through which information flows from the site you are visiting before being displayed on the web browser. It can do things like block pop-ups, block ads (though you should also think about editing your Hosts file as well), format certain sites to display better, disable certain kinds of javascript, and so on. There's detailed installation instructions here. I use a particular configuration called JDList, which makes things a lot simpler than they otherwise would be. A beta of JD's most up-to-date config is here, though you'll probably want to use his older file until you are comfortable with it.

The Proxomitron is completely free. Roboform is free in a somewhat limited form, while Internet Macros has a 30-day trial period before requiring purchase.