Happy Eostre

You can wish me a happy Easter. Just because I don't believe in the existence of god-men who died and came back to life doesn't change the fact that today is Easter (in Western Christianity, at least). Many Easter traditions have much more to do with the fact that it's spring. After all, it's no accident that Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon of spring. When you've got the bunnies and the eggs and stuff, you're just carrying down pagan traditions. Even the English word "Easter" is based on the name of Eostre, the Anglo-Saxon goddess of fertility whose feast was celebrated in early spring. If Christmas can be about "happiness" or "family" or "giving" (as the TV specials tell us), then certainly Easter can be about spring, and for me, that's what it is. Besides that, the rest of my family is observing Easter, so that itself is a pretty good reason to join in (or, rather, to be included). So happy Easter to you (and Passover, while we're at it). Also: today is Militiamen Day in Cuba and Queen Margrethe's Birthday in Denmark.

I reported a few months ago about a scandal at my old church/school. It involved the principal being fired for meddling with funds and the pastor refusing to provide evidence that she did. I didn't take either side, though it seemed that everyone else did. Some longtime churchgoers even left because they believed that the principal was innocent. Well, it turns out that the foul play was on the side of the principal after all, and she's issued a vague apology. It looks like she's going to have to repay for the money she "misappropriated," and she'll be barred from working at schools in the archdiocese. The end.

About a year ago I mentioned that I had gotten Adblock, a Firefox extension. Since then, Adblock has largely been superseded by Adblock Plus, which I just downloaded the other day to replace the old Adblock. Adblock Plus 0.7 offers all of the features of the original Adblock: the ability to remove particular images, scripts, objects, and iframes, with options for whitelisting certain sites. You can even write regular expressions to help you out. Adblock Plus also allows you to subscribe to periodically updated lists of filters, the most popular of which is Filterset.G, which has its own updater.

Even more impressive, however, is the extent to which you can remove items from web pages. With the old Adblock I noticed that not all ads are images, scripts, iframes, or objects. Some are boxes of text and images, incorporated rather well into the contents of a web page. Some are simply text links. Thanks to the element hiding features in Adblock Plus 0.7, you can block any HTML tag based on its attributes; therefore, you can block a <div> with a particular id, a <span> with a particular class, a <table> of a particular width, or even -- get this -- an <a> with a particular href. Partial matches are also allowed, but not full regular expression syntax. Obviously, a knowledge of HTML comes in handy for element hiding, but I've found that the View Formatted Source extension makes it easy to identify certain block-type elements for removal.

Find some tips for singing the blues at BluesGuide.com.

One year ago: "Google Maps is making a splash across the Internet for the ability to view color satellite photos of lots of places."