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Preparing for 3 days of camping

When the groove strikes me, I go all out: blaring music from my room, tidying up, etc. It feels good. Even better is finding over $25 dollars in spare change. Matt’s bad/good about dropping change into our spare-change cup and I finally counted out the coins (excluding the pennies). So, that will be enough to fill up his gas tank halfway. It’s sad, but gas prices have remained at their high price of $3 and even more in quite a few places. We’ll be meeting up with his dad and then, jointly making our way to the camping site. Matt made a little checklist that has proved invaluable to my preparations. I am definitely taking my camcorder and camera along with me. Jane, please don’t forget to purchase AA NiMH batteries before you leave! I will be offline for at least 3 days so my phone may be the best way to get in touch with me. In other news, I’m presenting my own rolled-up internet security suite:

1. ZoneAlarm Professional (est. $40) from Check Point which serves as a very competent firewall and spyware solution.
2. Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition (got this from my ex-school) which serves the much needed antivirus scanning in my email even.
3. Ad-Aware Professional 2007 (est. $39.95) from Lavasoft. I use this as an on-demand product although there is an option Ad-Watch that can be used as a realtime component.

Those are the basic 3 that I installed to protect my computer. Another layer of protection will be your browser. I have since switched to Mozilla Firefox and I will not be looking back. For my browser, I’ve got Adblock Plus in operation along with their extra filters that remove the most obnoxious of adverts no the web. I used to have the Netcraft Anti-Phishing toolbar, but I have had a low incidence of those sites due to my diligence in looking carefully at the URLs that I’m sent to. The McAfee SiteAdvisor used to be on computer also, but I got rid of it. I lost interest in it once they started running a “premium” version of their tool. That’s just shitty for them to have done that. They bought out the creators of Site Advisor and then, decided to upgrade the tool, but slap a price tag on it (est. $24.99 single user license). That’s just sticking your tongue out at your users. Well, McAfee’s got competition from lots of angles so there! This was as of last year, but I’ve lost interest in them anyway. Firefox comes built with anti-phishing properties so I didn’t need the extra protection. Naturally, I’ll need Internet Explorer because Microsoft has integrated it almost inextricably into their operating system. Furthermore, buyers of new computers will notice that they may come pre-bundled with other security suites. If you don’t trust those programs, don’t be afraid to uninstall them and install programs you trust.