TODAY'S TOURBUS TOPIC: NEW SPYBOT / SPRINGFIELD

Howdy, y'all, and greetings from deep inside Chicago's O'Hare International Airport. I spoke in Urbana, Illinois, late last week and decided to hang around Chicago for the Memorial Day weekend. Of course, to get from Chicago back to Orange County, California, I have to change planes in Atlanta. Because that’s the law. When you die, whether you are headed to heaven or hell, one thing’s for certain: you're changing planes in Atlanta.

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On with the show...

New Version of Spybot Search & Destroy Audience: All PC users running older versions of Spybot

Several of your fellow passengers asked me to announce that a new version of Spybot Search & Destroy is now available. Spybot Search & Destroy is one of the two, free spyware removal tools that I *HIGHLY* recommend for PC users. The other is LavaSoft's Ad-Aware 6. In fact, I routinely scan my PC with Ad-Aware and then with Spybot Search & Destroy just to be extra careful/paranoid.

Now for the bad news: If you installed Spybot Search & Destroy any time prior to last Monday, your version is no longer supported. No more application updates, no more host file updates, no more detection updates. Nothing. Your version of Spybot has been abandoned in place.

How can you tell what version of Spybot you're running? Just open the program and then go to Help > About. [You can also right-click on your SpybotSD.exe file, choose Properties, and click on the Version tab.] If you're running version 1.2 or earlier, you need to upgrade to the latest version, version 1.3.

It gets worse. Rumor has it there isn't an easy way to upgrade to the latest version of Spybot Search & Destroy short of uninstalling your old version and then downloading and installing the new version. So, if you have Spybot Search & Destroy and want to upgrade to version 1.3,

1. Go to Start > Settings > Control Panel [or Start > Control Panel in XP]

2. Double-click on Add/Remove Programs

3. Click on Spybot in the list of currently installed programs

4. Click on the Remove button

Once you uninstall the old version of Spybot Search & Destroy, you need to download and install the new version. Fortunately, there are dozens of mirror sites around the world from which you can download Spybot Search & Destroy 1.3. Fred Langa recently recommended

http://majorgeeks.com/download2471.html

and that's good enough for me. Click on a download site at the top of the page [look for the flags]. This should automatically download spybotSD13.exe to your computer. The file is 4.15 Mb in size, so it'll probably take a little over 10 minutes to download over the fastest dial-up connection. As I am fond of saying [and often forgetting when standing in line at Disneyland], patience is a virtue.

The rest of the process is self-explanatory, but if you'd like to see a step-by-step tutorial of how to install and use Spybot Search & Destroy, just head on over to

http://www.safer-networking.org/index.php?page=tutorial

If you'd like to learn more about Ad-Aware 6, the other spyware tool that I highly recommend for PC users, check out my February 16, 2003, post at

http://listserv.aol.com/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0302C&L=tourbus&P=R2

Finally, if you are a Mac user who is concerned about spyware, check out

http://macscan.securemac.com/

I hope this helps!

A Complete Map to Springfield Audience: Fans of the TV show The Simpsons

When I was a kid, I used to watch reruns of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. My favorite part of the show--besides the fact that it costarred a squirrel--was the hidden (and not so hidden) puns. For example, the wrecking company in one of the episodes was named “Edifice Wrecks,” a tribute to Sophocles’ synonymous play.

If you’ve watched the television show The Simpsons closely, you’ve probably noticed similar wordplay in some of the episodes -- the town of Springfield has a "Try n' Save," a "Much Ado about Muffins," and a "New Bedlam Home for the Emotionally Interesting."

Well, our friends at Slashdot recently found both a complete map to the television show The Simpsons and a canonical guide to all Springfield locations. You can read the Slashdot post at either

http://slashdot.org/article.pl? sid=04/05/27/1214231&mode=thread&tid=129&tid=188

or

http://tinyurl.com/3gmes

The map is available at

http://www.csupomona.edu/~jelerma/springfield/map/index.html

and you can find the list of Springfield locations at

http://www.csupomona.edu/~jelerma/springfield/list.html

Hidden among the serious places on the location list like "Ajax Steel Mill" and "Art Store" are some humorous place names like the "Bloodbath and Beyond Gunshop" [a play on Bed, Bath, and Beyond] and the "Municipal House of Pancakes" [a play on the International House of Pancakes.]

Even if you aren't a fan of the Simpsons, take a quick look at the Springfield locations list. A couple of these location names are downright inspired.

Enjoy! :)

SuperCharge Windows Without Spending A Dime

Optimize! Customize! Clean Up! The Internet is overflowing with companies advertising software to make Windows look prettier, and function better than it already does. But you don't need most of those products, nor do you necessarily have to spend much money to make your own system perform better.

This'

There are all sorts of inexpensive or zero-cost ways to improve Windows, if you know what to do or know where to look. Each month in PC Today you'll find several ways to improve your PC. Discover how today -- get your free trial issue of PC Today now.

http://tourbus.com/pctoday.htm

That's it for today! Have a safe and happy week, and we'll talk again soon.

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 (\__/)  .'     )  ))       Patrick Douglas Crispen
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