Dickie's Quickies

Dan Savage published a column on advice from readers for 15 year old (straight) girls. In response, Jill at Third Wave Agenda published her own column, including some criticism of advice offered in Savage's column. I linked back to these columns while reading Amanda's advice on Pandagon. Me? I have no advice really. I'm much better with specific questions and specific situations. For some reason, however, I find reading the advice from these women fascinating and generally positive.

Amanda also has a great story on an Alabama legislator trying to get books and art work by gay authors or containing gay characters banned from public schools. Once again, Alabama attempts to be the cream of the crop when it comes to bigotry and fear of sexuality. Luckily, most legislators did not show up for the debate. Apparently even the majority of Alabama legislators found this to be an idiotic concept. I guess Lynne Cheney's book, Sisters, won't be appearing in their schools any time soon.

Good news for those who combat spyware: Download.com is now using 2 commercial scanners for products submitted to the site. If the product is thought to contain spyware, then it is not accepted for the site. Some products will modify their practices to be offered on Download.com while others will not. As the editors at Download.com note, you should still get your own spyware scanners. Email me if you want recommendations of free ones.

In old news (as of yesterday, that is) Firefox downloads hit 50 million this week. Hurray for my favorite browser! I like Firefox and prefer it over the current version of IE. Even hard core IE fans have to admit that the entrance of Firefox in the market has been favorable to IE in the sense that Microsoft is upgrading it as we speak. Hopefully, Firefox will weather the storm from the IE upgrades well and may Firefox hit the 100 million mark just as quickly. If you haven't tried Firefox, then you really should give it a go. Even if you end up deciding that you prefer IE, you should check out what the competition is offering. It's free to do so. You might need to re-download plug ins and such, but that's not difficult. I recommend using it for a week or two and learn to love tabbed browsing (once you try this feature, you'll never want to go back).

Finally, some illustrations to (hopefully) amuse you. These are by Gary Taxali. He uses old pieces of print from books, newspapers, and magazines and integrates his own text and messages into the design.