It has been cold all weekend here in Las Vegas - below freezing every night. Right now, at noon, the wind is blowing and it's 32 degrees out there. Some tourists show up here this time of year with only warm weather clothes, but many of them ward off the weather by drinking a lot.

My hummingbird feeder froze solid, and I quick stirred up another batch of juice for our little Costas male who is sitting out in the tree guarding the feeder.










The feathers on his head and throat are a beautiful dark purple, and when he's sitting in the tree, he can make a high pitched sound that rises and falls. Mr. Troutbend claims that one time when the mockingbird was here, he made that sound and mockingbird echoed it back at him.

Did you see that thing in the paper about how the US Government is telling PC users to disable Java on their computers because it is so vulnerable to hackers and identity thieves?

Mac computers are not as vulnerable to computer viruses as PCs because Mac users have to click on a link to download the malicious virus, but all PC users have to do to get their computer infected is read their email in Outlook.

Here is a good article about it:

How to be safe as possible with Java

Java and Java Script are everywhere in our daily Internet lives, so disabling it on our computers is quite a sweeping thing. The emoticons here on MyBloggers work by means of Java or JavaScript* . I searched my hard drive for 'Java' and came up with 1,609 hits - all kinds of files from emails to credit card sites contain Java scripts.

Java is one of those things that is behind the scenes, and program updates are automatically loaded onto our computer all the time without our knowledge unless we disable the updates on purpose.

According to the Java people, it is not a good idea to disable the auto updates because that is how they send patches to fix the program. What is Java Auto Update? You can manually download an update so you know you are getting the latest security patch.

Here is a website that will check what version of Java you are running. If you use more than one browser (Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, etc.) be sure to visit this page in each of them. It will display a message telling you the version you have on your computer.

If you are running version 7 of Java, be sure it is Update 11, which is supposed to fix this big security flaw. (The java tester above will tell you this).

*The difference between Java and JavaScript: "A Java "applet" (so-called because it is a little application) is a fully contained program. JavaScript is text that is fed into a browser that can interpret it and then it is enacted by the browser--although today's web apps are starting to blur the line between traditional desktop applications and those which are created using the traditional web technologies: JavaScript, HTML and CSS."

I don't know about you, but when I am on a web page these days, I don't know when I am using a applet or just a script embedded in the code of the web page.