One of the first things I got to do this morning was conduct a fishy funeral.

I feel a bit guilty for not knowing how sick the poor fish was until yesterday -- if I had paid more attention to them over the weekend, he might not have gotten to the point where he couldn't control himself and spun helplessly in circles, had a big bubble of bad over his eye, and so on. Though I think he, the one I called Gramps, was the one that seemed to have some oddness about his fins when I got him home. So it's probably not entirely my fault.

Still, poor guy...

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I'm only a quarter of the way through this month's PC Magazine, but I've already found a few things that I think are worth sharing:

-- Microsoft now has some new free tools. This one searches your computer for some common viruses. This one is a spyware removal tool that can be automatically updated at the same time as regular Windows updates.

I still don't like Microsoft. But I don't think these could *hurt* anything and probably could help.

For comparison, I pitted my old spyware tool, Spybot Search and Destroy, which was very highly rated at one time, against the Microsoft tool, and Microsoft found a lot more stuff. Spybot S&D hasn't found updates for me to download since March of 2004, it looks like.

-- On the same page of the magazine, they mention Streamload. This comes at a good time, since I was just the other day lamenting the fact that I didn't have enough online storage available. They happily store photos, mp3s, videos, whatever you like. They don't mention that there's a free version available on the main page, but that's what I've signed up as -- a "Freeloader". I get 10 gigs of storage, but am limited to 100 megs of bandwidth a month. But I don't think that will be a problem. And it can even convert audio and image files to different formats.

-- Also, if anyone's interested, Google has tons of tools available. One of the ones the magazine discusses is Picasa 2.0, which is a free photo organization and editing program. Might be worth a look.

But, now my Microsoft spyware program is insisting that I have to close my browser to remove some of what it found, so I think that's that for now.