I’m beginning the day with a moment of silence to remember my friend and Star-Bulletin colleague George Steele. It was March 13, 2003, when he was found dead in his apartment. I still miss the guy.

I tried to read Richard Borreca’s story this morning on the latest Council on Revenues projection. After having to find the “close ad” spot to click in order to remove the annoying pop-up that covered the story, and then having to repeat the process when the ad quickly reappeared, I then found that the story wouldn’t load and was left looking at a mostly blank space where the story should have been.

[Star-Bulletin writer Burl Burlingame passed on this suggestion, which I’ll repeat here in case readers miss his comment: “For a “cleaner” version of starbulletin.com, click on “Mobile Edition.” And all stories have a single-page-view link.” Thanks, Burl.]

So I switched back to the Advertiser for Derrick DePledge’s story on the latest estimates of our looming budget deficit and how it is being addressed (or not addressed).

Lingle would not say yesterday how she will respond. She said she would evaluate the forecast and present a detailed financial plan to lawmakers in the coming weeks.

That’s the same thing the governor’s representatives said back in the first week of this legislative session when asked by House Finance Chair Marcus Oshiro when legislators could expect to receive the governor’s detailed plan for coping with the continuing deterioration in the fiscal situation.

Don’t worry. The check’s in the mail. Right.

This year, it seems, Governor Lingle’s administration has simply failed to do its most important job of crafting a workable budget. DePledge captures the growing frustration at the Capitol.

The Republican governor’s insistence over the past week that tax increases and, to a lesser extent, state worker layoffs, are off the table in budget talks has punctured the tenuous collaboration with lawmakers from earlier in the session.

The state House has prepared a two-year budget draft that uses a combination of spending cuts, layoffs and tax increases to close the deficit. The state Senate, which will have to calculate for the new forecast when it gets the budget from the House next week, has kept alive bills that would raise the general excise tax and hotel room taxes as options.

Last week, when Lingle updated her plans to deal with the shortfall, lawmakers mostly held back in their criticism that her assumptions included bills that have stalled in committee and health-benefit cuts that have to be negotiated with public-worker unions.

But now that Lingle has drawn the line on taxes and layoffs, frustrated lawmakers are openly calling the governor’s numbers half-baked.

And looking down the road, there’s another big issue that everyone is trying to avoid for the time being, the retirement gap. The financial gap facing the state’s Employee Retirement System, that is.

Check this story from Capitol Weekly describing the situation in California. Don’t read it close to bedtime, though. Nightmares are possible.

But back to the Star-Bullettin’s online ads. It’s a shame. There’s a delicate balance between trying to generate revenues and driving readers away. Starbulletin.com now increasingly ends up on the wrong side of that line.

I’m not too keen on sites that make heavy use of cookies to track the online behavior and interests of visitors. But I wouldn’t object to a system that was able to target my visits with ads for products I’m actually interested in. I’m sure that I’m not the only one who enjoys catalogs from my favorite retailers, whether computers, cameras, or other stuff.

So I’m not demanding an advertising-free zone. But the current approach definitely needs tweaking.

It may be, though, that there’s not enough time to find a workable system.

An analysis in the New York Times this week points to the likelihood that some major U.S. city/cities will soon be without a daily newspaper.

I received more good advice from a reader about keeping my Mac running properly. Listen up, Mac users.

Forget all that mail optimizing stuff.

There is one free app you can use periodically, like weekly or monthly, that does all the maintenance of various caches, all the maintenance of the BSD Unix that’s under OS X, etc.

it i called Onyx. Google it up and download a copy. Be sure to get the version that works with your version of OS X. Use the “automation” function. Check every box under optimization. Then click execute and it takes five to 10 minutes to do its thing. then restart and you’re in business.

I run it about once a week. Cures everything — everything — that ever ails my Macs.

Unix was made to run day and night. It automatically does syste maintenance around 2 a.m. every day. Very few Macs are awake and active at that hour. Onyx takes care of that, among other things.

I ran Onyx last night after first checking the hard drive with Apple’s Disk Utility. It took while. Not too long. This morning it seems to be running much more smoothly.

I was worried yesterday because I found myself unprepared for Feline Friday. So I got out the camera as soon as we arrived home and captured a bit of our feeding frenzy in this short video. It’s a 3 MB file, so it might take a while to download if you’ve got a slow connection. Keep in mind that not all of the cats were here at showtime, although Ms. Annie might have been the only one missing.