My FURBOL

To begin, "FURBOL" is pronounced "Fur Ball" which is a cat joke. FURBOL is a computer language that my Windows 7 computer doesn't understand, and it comes from the Internet.

F.U.R.B.O.L.

Future
Unusable
Rotten
Business
Oriented
Language

This all started when I bought a Windows 7 computer and then got onto the internet using IE8. I found that I could see pictures in blogs from livejournal.com, but I couldn't see pictures in blogs from blogspot.com. Since I can see pictures in blogs from livejournal.com this sort-of-means that my computer is working.

Then I went to purchase tickets on-line from Ticketmaster. All went well until the anti-bot screen came up with a red frame and a red X inside of a red box. The anti-bot screen is supposed to show some weird words like this example from Frame Games:

[Frame Games picture example www.usaweekend.com web site not recommended because "Automation server can't create object" and "Script on www.usaweekend.com is making your computer run slowly" yada yada]

But then actually the anti-bot screen looks like this, a red X inside of a box.

[anti-bot screen won't show a picture]

The anti-bot wants me to type in the two words. What two words? The business transaction becomes stymied at this point, hence I can't close the deal and I have wasted my own time. I had to log out, change to a Windows XP computer, log in again, then I could actually see the anti-bot picture and then was finally able to spend my money while shopping on the internet. I was lucky that the event hadn't already sold out during the time that I had spent trying to get Windows 7 to work. I was also lucky that the Ticketmaster web site still works with Windows XP.

When I look at a web site in blogspot.com, I get results that look the same as the anti-bot results. Instead of a picture I can only see a red X inside of a box. Here is an example of what I can see on my Windows 7 computer while viewing a typical blogspot web site such as

http://warburtonlabs.blogspot.com 

I can right click in the red X box and select "Show Picture" or "Open Link In New Window" but the result has always been the same, a red X inside of box. Until today! I used right click, show picture, and the internet coughed up a FURBOL. (Pronounced "Fur Ball").

[jpg picture of FURBOL code]
That FURBOL certainly isn't a picture, but it is something that came out of the internet and it got past Norton 360 on Windows 7 using IE8 on a fairly new computer. If you want the full FURBOL.txt file, send me an e-mail.  (send to sumdangdik@earthlink.net )
fin.