Disabling your computer’s power button is very important if you have a little kid (or other animal) crawling around near the computer. I don’t mean, of course, disabling the button so that the computer cannot be turned on, but instead, disabling the button so that the computer won’t turn off when the kid pushes that big button, just as you are getting ready to finish that all-important paper, post, or project.

In Windows XP:

• Go (click on) the Start Menu
• Click on Settings and then on Control Panel (or just on Control Panel if that’s what you see)
• In the Control Panel double-click on Power Options
• The Power Options Properties window should open. Click on the Advanced tab.
• You should see a section of the window called “Power buttons”. In that section, click the on the drop-down box underneath the text “When I press the power button on my computer” and/or “When I press the sleep button on my computer” and select the action called “Do nothing” or the action called “Ask me what to do” (your pick).

In Windows Vista:

• Click on the Windows icon to open the Start Menu
• Select the Control Panel
• Open the option for Power Options
• You should see several power plans, one of which is selected. For that one, click on the associated link called Change plan settings
• Next, click on the link for Change advanced power settings
• You should see a whole list of various settings. In that list, click on the plus sign (+) next to Power buttons and lid and then also next to Power button action.
• Click on the Setting drop-down box, which will likely say Shut Down, and change it to Do Nothing. Now you’re covered!

In Max OS X, pressing the power button should just bring up a prompt asking what you want to do.

Note that on all three of the aforementioned operating systems, if someone presses the power button down and keeps the button depressed for 10+ seconds, that the computer will shut down. The only other way to guard against that is to put something over the power button, like a piece of paper. Do that and keep all of your cables secured where they cannot be reached and you should, and your kid, should be good to go.

Our ten month old is not walking quite yet. She is really close, though. If you hold her hands she will walk across the room, and she can now pull herself up on her own if she can crawl up to a (more) stable object of the right height.

In my weekly parenting email from “The Parent Review”, it talks about walking and about how there really is not a set age at which kids start to walk. Our little girl started crawling a little later than did many of our friends’ kids (she would roll around for some weeks before she would crawl). It looks like now, though, that she may be walking around by her first birthday!

Here is what the email had to say about walking:

The age at which children take their first steps on their own varies widely. A few 8-month-olds can stand briefly, and even take a step. Many children, especially those who have developed an efficient crawl, may not feel the need to walk until they are well into their second year. Once a baby begins to walk, he becomes a toddler, and life becomes more interesting and active for both of you.

When your child does begin walking, you’ll want to find a pair of soft shoes with flexible rubber soles for him whenever he tries out his new skill outdoors or away from home. At home, barefoot is best for babies just learning to balance and step. Babies certainly don’t need expensive shoes, as they walk better without them and outgrow them quickly.

You can read the email here.

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

There is a lot of spam zooming around the internet these days. According to a report released this month by Symantec, more of your email than ever before is spam:

Between July 1 and December 31, 2007, spam made up 71 percent of all email traffic monitored at the gateway, a 16 percent increase over the last six months of 2006, when 61 percent of email was classified as spam.

I can attest to an increase in the volume of spam email, not only in my personal email, but also at work. What is interesting, though, is that I don’t really see more spam at home, while I do see a noticeable increase in spam at work. I cannot speak to what commercial product is in use at the office (I thankfully don’t manage that), but my personal email is hosted by Google, via their Gmail service. They do a nice job of filtering out my spam.

Here’s how much I’ve received in just the last week or so:

The good news is that I don’t have to worry about having beefy enough servers to handle that load, and rarely am I bothered by spam that makes it past the filter. On the rare occasion that a bit of spam does make it through, I hit the Mark as Spam button and Google learns. It’s great!

There is also more to spam than email. Blog spam is another nasty form of spam, clogging web servers and web sites that allow comments, with links back to sites that can offend your sense of decency and/or host viruses. Thankfully, there is Aksimet. I’d be posting even less than I do now if I was always having to filter through all of these spam comments:

Google and Akismet do a great job of helping me lead a less spammy life. I hope your life isn’t very spammy either! I’d love to hear what others of you do out there to reduce the amount of spam at which you have to look.