Here’s a photo of the TOS Box Set (that stands for The Original Series). Cool, huh? Season Two is in blue, Season Three in red. If you have to know why, er, don’t ask. :)

Well, it is. Don’t get me wrong - I love Star Trek, grew up with it. When I was a kid, I’d watch re-runs on the TV in the basement. It was a nice big basement, half-furnished, half-not. It had a worn gray carpet. The rear of the finished-half was the TV room … a big, old TV on a big old cabinet, with a big brown leather couch and some old chairs arranged around it. The rear of the room was a play-room for my sister and I. There was an old cushioned bench (like from a bar) in the corner, around a table that I used to play with my Lego collection. There was a rack of shelves on which I could store my collection (which, as you can imagine, since I’m a big kid) has grown considerably.

Anyway, I’m getting off topic.

I used to lay on my stomach in front of the TV, watching re-runs of “Star Trek”. I used to think the Enterprise (of course, I thought the ship’s name was the “Star Trek”) consisted of the Bridge, and then right through those red doors, the transporter room. Just those two rooms. I remember going to my friend Brendan’s house (he lived right across the street) one summer afternoon to watch “Star Trek III.” I know it was summer, because during the fall and winter, we never played together - I went to a Catholic private school in White Oak, he went to a public magnet school far away, I never knew where, but we never saw each other except for the summer, when we would spend every daylight hour together. At the beginning of the movie, there was a commerical advertisement for a new “Star Trek.” My only impression of it was the color beige and a bald guy. My reaction was: “There is only one Star Trek!” and I vowed to never watch the new one. I think Brendan made the same pact with me.

And I didn’t watch the new Star Trek, the imposter, Star Trek: The Next Generation. I’d be flipping through the channels (no remote control, just a big old dial that eventually fell off, forcing us to use pliars) and TNG would flash up briefly, and my Mom once commented (about Data), “He’s so pale! Is he a statue?”

I’m getting off topic. I did eventually begin to watch TNG, and became quite the devoted fan. Yes, I’ve been to Star Trek Conventions, and yes, I own all the DVD box sets of “Deep Space Nine.” Bite me.

Back to classic Trek. I’ve watched probably ten episodes of the original series so far, from this box set. It is corny - the sets are corny, the uniforms are corny, hell, everything but the writing is corny (and even the writing is questionable at some points). It’s been really amazing, watching these episodes again, seeing the “layers” I couldn’t comprehend when I was five.

And, y’know, the box this DVD set comes in? Corny, too.

Do you use Internet Explorer?

A specially crafted JPEG image can now cause a buffer overflow, leading to arbritary code execution. In other words, an image can hijack your computer. This is basically a nightmare.

You should raise the continued IE security issues, including the idiocy of the latest, with your IT department and encourage them to consider bailing. Chances are that they’re tied to a third party vendor that uses some IE-only idiocy in an application in use by your employer. That third party vendor must also be encouraged to open their application up to other browsers.

From Charles Capps, UBB visionary and general computer geek know-it-all. I’ve switched to Mozilla Firefox , and I love it so much more than IE. Download Mozilla here.