I am not the quickest on updating my wordpress usually.  It takes me a week or two, between law school and work its a little hard to dedicate the time to upgrading when I am terrified I am break something.  In the meantime, while I am lagging behind updates, its important to make sure that hackers have not been exploiting security holes patched by the next upgrade.  The best way I’ve found to monitor this is by using a great simple plugin called “wordpress exploit scanner.”  You can get it here, just put it into your plugins folder, go to plugins off your dashboard, and run it.  Just a quick note, it will pick up the names of exploits in the plugin file when you run it, so don’t get scared when things come up, just follow the file path and see if its from the plugin, or your blog.

Good luck, hope your blog is safe.

Made a few changes to the homepage of the website.  Changed the archive list in my sidebar to be by year rather than by month, to shorten the laundry list of items on the side.  If you would like to make yours by year as well, change the code in your sidebar to read:

<?php wp_get_archives(’type=yearly’); ?>

I also added a new page - Monthly Archives.  Used the manage feature to make a new page and then used the phpexec plugin to copy this code onto the page to list the archives monthly:

<?php wp_get_archives(’type=monthly’); ?>

Next I copied the link to my Monthly Archives page and added it under my yearly archive list, in case someone looking in the sidebar under Archives would like to see the monthly list instead of yearly.

Next, I got rid of my ShoppingAds ad box in my sidebar.  It was making money but just a little too bulky for my current theme/layout.  If you are looking to make a little extra money you should check it out, sadly its just not for me right now.  I may add it back when I redo the look of the site.

Last but not least I added a new section in the sidebar -  Where I get great deals!  There are three links there now, go check them out.  This area will grow over time!

I finally purchased my own roomba!   I bought the Roomba 550, pretty good deal.  It comes with 3 extra filters, brush cleaner, 2 virtual walls/lighthouses (it has a switch, can work as either one), self charging docking station, and the roomba (with scheduling built in).

I set up the dock last night, charged it up, set the schedule (for thursdays), and hit clean to watch it on its first exploration.  It did a pretty good job!  Picked up a lot of dust off the floor and carpets.  Better yet, I didn’t see it leave anything behind.  I have a medium carpet, tile floors, and some small rugs (bathroom/kitchen).  It did not have issues with any of those.  I also used one of my virtual walls to keep it away from my rotuer/modem and some wires, and that worked out great as well.

I will try to get some video of it later to show you how it explored and cleaned.  So far, its pretty amazing!  Everyone should get one so your place can stay clean while you do other things!

If you are a costco member, should probably get it there, they have a pretty good deal on them.

A new program just launched for blog advertising called BlogRolled.  I signed up and got my blog accepted this morning, we’ll see what kind of income flow it ends up having.

One catch, no affiliate program… Yet.

Firefox 3.0 was officially released today.  I’ve been using the beta for a while now, and I’m impressed.  Go, download it.  It will do good things for you.

My tivo does a lot of wonderful things but the best thing it does is hidden until you unlock it!  Your tivo can display the clock and time passed in a video you are watching in the bottom right corner of your screen.  At first I thought this was useless, but after I turned it on I got addicted.

Here is how you do it, to turn on the clock, press the following buttons:

• Select
• Play
• Select
• 9
• Select

Tada!  Enjoy your new and improved tivo.

I usually take my breaks from work and school as a good time to run maintenance on my PC’s.  I don’t have time during the year to get to it, so I try to get everything done at once when I do have time.

My favorite utilities are CCleaner and Defraggler.  Both are freeware, clean - no viruses, spam, nothing.  They are both made by the same company and both provide the same excellent results.

CCleaner cleans out all the “junk” files on your PC - this would include temp files, and things of that nature.  I modify the settings not to dump my Firefox cache or history since I like having everything filled in for me.  It is really easy to use and great to clean up a few hundred MB’s.  You can also use it to turn off things that run and startup, uninstall programs, and clean up your registry - all of which will optimize your machine.

Defraggler is a fast efficient Defragmenting program.  It basically reorganizes your harddrive so that the files are not stored in a fragmented way.  This makes your machine run smoother and faster since programs can access files without jumping around on your drive.  I generally run this after I run CCleaner.

Let me know if you know of any other good optimization utilities!  I used to use TuneUp Utilities, but I just don’t have the budget to pay for optimization software anymore… especially when there is great free software out there.

This was a total team effort between my sister and I.  I played mario, she collected the star bits, made me jump higher, and froe the bad guys…  We beat a few stars per sitting and without even realizing it was over.  The game was AMAZING, and if you can’t beat one level (I couldn’t beat one honeycomb level) don’t worry, you don’t need ot beat each an every one.  Consider Mario Galaxy this months timewaster. 

Get a Wii, play Mario Galaxy.  It really is amazing.

…and if you get stuck, follow a walkthrough guide.

Finals are OVER!  Sure I don’t really have a summer break, but at least finals are over. 

Now I’m back to playing videogames, watching tv, sleeping, and blogging.

Speaking of games, for those of you who play word games, you should check out this site.  The guy who runs the site is a talented programmer who just put up a script that solves word scramble puzzles.

Check it out…. great for cheating in scrabble too :-p

For those of you who read my post about how my tivo hates me, because it decides to update WHILE I’m watching and then takes “one hour, possibly longer” to install the updates…. I just wanted to let you know that it did not erase my settings or shows!  Small Victories.