Not exactly a site construction point, but I've had some trouble in the last couple of weeks with my laptop slowing to a crawl after a while, and then refusing to shut down cleanly at the end of the day. I ran the WinTOP utility today (a Microsoft Powertoy extension to Win95 (I know... the upgrade to Win2000 is scheduled for a week tomorrow, and I'm afraid)) and it showed that Internet Explorer was the fault. Somehow IE was spawning an immortal thread that was sucking up ~95% of the CPU's time, thus rendering my system sluggish and unresponsive. And despite several attempts there didn't seem to be any good way to kill the damn thing and let me get on with my work.

Once I'd identified IE as the culprit, though, I could and did do some more triangulation on the problem. And found that Blogger might have been partially to blame... IE shut down cleanly and thread-less-ly when I didn't surf to the Blogger site, but when I did go there the Thread From Hell® was once again spawned from the Windows Of Doom® and once again I had to reboot to slay the beast.

As I suspected this problem would not long have gone unnoticed and unstomped-upon by the excellent Blogger programmers had it really been their fault, I concluded that it must be part of IE 4.0's java handling (used by Blogger) Gone Bad. Knowing the upgrade to Win2000 is about to replace my whole operating system, I figured there wasn't much risk in installing IE 5.5. Once it was in place the whole problem magically disappeared and my laptop has been running like a purring cat ever since. But just in case you run into any trouble with Blogger... you read it here first.

I just added a service called HumanClick, offered by www.humanclick.com. It's a live chat function that looks like it might be pretty cool. Basically, if I'm online you'll know about it (the little guy on the left will say "click to chat with me") and you can chat. If you're online, I get to see which page you're looking at and for how long. The basic functionality is free, which is important for me! Feedback on this idea? Click here!