I'm a connoisseur of leisurely things.
Theories, Predictions, Opinions, & Other Nonsense
I meant to post this a while back, when the Democratic race was really getting started. But I had other things on my mind and on my plate. So here it is now. A little late, but still really funny. Some of these faces she makes I really believe are not possible to make during natural human emotion–some, most or all of these are fake. Ah well, she’ll be back in 2012 when we can have some more fun with these.
I’ll say it right now – I’m not a big fan of Windows Vista. I don’t see the point. I don’t see the need to change from what XP delivers. And XP delivers a stable, workable, useful, and familiar operating environment for millions of users world-wide. Microsoft introduced Windows Vista on January 30th, 2007. At that time, Dell only offered one choice – Windows Vista. Windows XP had gone away, even though support for it [by Microsoft] will exist through at least 2009 and in all reality, much longer. In addition to “home users”, many, many businesses rely on Windows XP. Changing a company’s computers from XP to Vista requires months of compatibility testing. If you have experimented at all with Vista, chances are you have found a piece of hardware or software that worked fine on XP but doesn’t work on Vista. Ahh, the trials and tribulations of a new operating system.
Fortunately, after much consumer feedback, Dell has today changed their policy, and will offer Windows XP on select notebooks and desktops. Windows Vista will continue to be available on their product lines. Dell states that Windows XP will be available as a choice at least through the summer, but possibly through the end of the year. At the time of this post, Microsoft will force Dell (and any other manufacturer) to stop offering Windows XP effective 12/31/07.
This is great news! Windows Vista, for all of it’s dressed up features, require a bit more processing power and memory to use effectively. Since Windows XP is now available, one can build a lower-end PC (with a decent processor and 1GB of RAM), saving some money compared to a comperable Windows Vista box. Or, one could put this money toward something I always like to have – a bigger LCD screen!
In the future, if Windows XP is no longer supported but your PC is still useful, one would be able to upgrade the RAM and/or graphics card to take advantage of any features of Vista.
For now, the features of Vista aren’t compelling enough for one to make the change, especially when XP is doing everything I need it to do just fine.
For the impartial parties, here a bunch of links to hopefully answer any and all questions:
MSNBC: Dell to offer Windows XP
Differences between Windows Vista versions
Microsoft Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor
Top 10 Reasons to get Windows Vista
Top 10 Reasons to not get Windows Vista
Dell Inc.
If you have been paying attention to the news, and if you are a Vonage subscriber or a fan of VoIP telephony, you know that Verizon has continued to beat up on Vonage in the courts. Several weeks ago, the courts sided with Verizon, and stated that Vonage was in violation of three (3) out of the seven (7) patents that Verizon had claimed. In addition, the court stated that Vonage had to pay Verizon $60 million (approx) for the violations.
Today brought an upholding of the injunction against Vonage, and the court had stated that as of 4/12/07, Vonage could continue to service current customers through the appeal process, but they could no longer taken on new customers. Several hours after this announcement, a higher court over-ruled this ruling, grating Vonage a temporary stay until the court can hear Vonage’s request for a permanent stay.
As a Vonage subscriber (3 lines here, 2 for business) I hope they are not forced out of business. I feel that the service is so good, that I can’t even imagine going to something else. Call quality is excellent, as are the features and price. I’m sticking with them until the last moment, and if one day I pickup the phone and there is no dialtone, so be it.
Vonage states that they do have a work-around in order to not be in violation of the patents, but that doesn’t negate the last few years of patent violation, if those accusations are indeed true. That being said, the best case scenario is that my bill will go up a few dollars.
And you know what? That’s just fine with me.
-A happy Vonage customer since 2004.
I don’t work in the IT department at my day job, but yet I do work in the company’s largest national branch in an unrelated field. We do not have any on-site IT staff – the closest we have is Totowa, NJ. Easily doable in 90 minutes, but if something goes wrong, most likely it won’t be resolved quickly.
It’s funny too, because our business is healthcare. If our computers are down, it’s really hard to dispense medication and ship product to patients.
In the last month or so, the IT department has changed. Actually, they used to call them self the “MIS Department”, but they later changed that to the more cool-sounding “IT Department”, or “Information Technology”. Part of the whole new IT department is upgrading the per-branch circuit capacity of their Internet connection. Instead of most branches having fractionated T-1’s, each branch is given a T-1 for data and another T-1 for voice.
I’m the guy in the branch that knows the most about computers, so everyone comes to me for help. I help when I can, but for the really big shit, I pull the reins in a bit, and say “whoa, someone has to come out here to do this.”
This was the case this week. Dave, an IT Engineering Field Tech from our Totowa branch e-mailed me and asked me to work with him today to remove a WIC card from our router, replace it with a new WIC card, and run a cat5 cable through the dropped ceilings to the new Verizon-supplied T1’s. (For those non-technical people, the hardest part would be running the wire up the wall, through the dropped ceiling and into the router. Removing the WIC card from the router (about the size of a credit card) only involves unscrewing it at two points, sliding it out, sliding another one in, and rescrewing the card back in. If you’ve ever added a PCI card to your computer to expand the capability of it, doing what I was asked to do today was 100x easier.)
At first I said sure, no problem. Then, I thought about it. I’m not in IT, but they want me to take down the whole router, run cat5 cable, and basically be responsible for the state of the Internet connection during the work.
I thought about this for an hour or so, e-mail Dave back and said “Hey man, I’m not trying to be a dick. But this is a biggie you’re asking me to do. I mean, potentially the system may not come back up, and I don’t know the first thing about Cisco routers. I’m going to have to get it in writing from someone at IT (Kal, April, whoever) that they’re OK’ing me to do this, and I’m not responsible for broken equipment or extended T1 downtime.”
Dave e-mails me back…”Are you kidding around or are you serious? I’m just trying to save myself from coming out there…besides, the ISDN should come back up when the T1 goes down…”.
My reply: “Well, people are getting tossed out of this branch for much less then taking the T1 down. I’m really going to have to insist that you come out here for this. I’ll help you as much as I can, but you’ll be driving the bus. And as far as the ISDN, I don’t have too much faith in that. In theory, the ISDN is supposed to come up as the T1 goes down…”
Of course Dave couldn’t get that in writing for me, so instead of me saving him a trip to Long Island from NJ, he had to come out here today. And a good thing he did too, because the upgrade failed. Almost two hours of downtime today because the IT Enginneer in Chicago who gave him the new code for the new WIC card for the Cisco router gave him the wrong code. It was for the wrong WIC card. So the old WIC card didn’t work and the new WIC card wouldn’t work.
When I asked Dave “Are you ok?” as I see beads of sweat dripping off his face in the 85 degree server room, he says “I’m in a world of shit.”
Oh, and the ISDN did not come up. 🙂
He finally called a senior network engineer (Kal), who, mind you had a day off today, and after hooking up the router to accept incoming connections via remote dialup, was able to get new code to the new WIC card so the router now worked with our new T1.
If Dave hadn’t come today and I did the work, not only would the connection still be down, but the router wasn’t properly hooked up to the remote dial-in component, making remote help impossible. We would have been stuck, and I most likely would have been fired.
Sorry to bore everyone here with my trivial nonsense, but the moral of this story is that always go with your gut instincts regarding a decision. If you think something isn’t right with a situation, you’re probably right. In order to get to the correct situation, you may have to inconvienence and/or piss someone off.
In this case, Dave had to take 1/2 a day to drive to Long Island and back, but heck, it all worked out in the end.
Every day when I come into work, I sit down at my desk, logon to my computer, and bring up my essential programs: internal web applications, Legacy, Outlook, etc. I also check the news and weather right away too. After a quick glance at CNN, MSNBC, & BroadbandReports, I get to work.
About once an our (in between all my work), I pop back on CNN and MSNBC to check the news or read stories I didn’t have time to read before. A day last week, like any day before it, I was checking MSNBC at about 11:45 AM, reading up on how Bush continues to break the law and display utter contempt for the Constitution. At 12:15PM, right before I went to lunch, I went back to MSNBC to finish the story, and instead of getting the page I requested, I instead got this:
Screen Capture #1
Screen Capture #2
Well, look what I get there. 🙂 I get an animated icon of a guy mooning me, and then flipping me off. (I couldn’t reproduce the animated icon here, which is why there are two screen captures.) Immediately, I thought MSNBC was hacked. I called home instantly, had my father check it from home, but his MSNBC page loaded fine. I knew something was amuck, so I had some coworkers try it, but they too were brought to a page of an icon telling them to flip off.
I even asked for help/confirmation at a site I frequent.
As it turns out, this is either something the IT guys at my job setup (intentially or not), or it’s some larger conspiracy that I don’t know about. 🙂 All I wanted was the news, and instead I got a guy giving me the middle finger. 🙂
For the geeks that might read this, a quick drop to a “cmd” prompt shell from XP and then typing “ipconfig /flushdns” then resulted in MSNBC.com displaying properly. Bye bye middle finger guy. 😉
Google facinates me. Their corporate culture and way of doing business is unique, the freedoms employees are given at work are unqiue, and the products that Google develops are the most unique and useful found anywhere on the Net.
A few months back, I wrote a little bit about Google’s evolution, and how they might continue to evolve. At time, Google Desktop 2 & Google Talk were new. Picasa, Google Maps, Google Earth and Picasa had been released earlier.
Today has been another day of speculation for just what Google will do next.
In the past few months, Google has experimented with free Wi-Fi near their Californa HQ. Google has also buying back dark fiber all around the country. Many people are speculating that these moves will make Google an Internet Service Provider (ISP), offering free (advertisment-based) wireless internet nationally.
There has been talk of a free Office system – Google Office – that would target and compete with the Microsoft Office suite of programs. Google & Sun Microsystems are collaborating to try and bring Sun’s StarOffice to Google users.
Today’s newest rumour is that of a small, cheap, Google-OS based PC called “Google Cubes”, which will be sold through Wal-Mart to bring affordable PC boxes to the end user. The computer would not run on a Microsoft platform, thus driving down the cost of the PC by hundreds of dollars.
How much is true? No one but Larry & Sergey. What is true is that Google is a company that is not standing still at all, waiting for consumers to demand more out of a company for products & services. No no, quite the contrary here. Google is often beating the consumer to the punch, delivering a service or product before the consumer even realizes a need for it. The end user is the winning party here, with a dozzen or so (or more) free services from Google that truly shape the Internet we use today. No other company comes to my mind right now that works like this, and that’s a good thing.
For a look at what the Internet started off as (like back when you had to explain to people what the Internet was), take a look at this video clip. This is a 7 min video clip about “Internet”, circa early 1980s.
I figure now is as good of a time as any time to spread some information on antivirus programs. It’s the end of the year, so may be you have some personal time to devote to your PC and it’s maintenance, or perhaps your current antivirus subscription is coming up for renewal, so it might be time for a change. Or may be not.
For a few years (1999-2004), I used Norton Antivirus (By Symantec) antivirus products exclusively. For it’s time, it was good, though as the years went on I began to grow tired of Norton products, and large resources they required. I then switched to Trend Micro PC-Cillin, which has been a great product for me that I continue to support.
Recently, I tried a program I had heard about for a while, NOD32 by Eset. I happen to be a big fan of not fixing something that isn’t broken, but Trend has recently provided me with an error (update: to which I found the cause of, and the cause was human error-mine) that I didn’t happen to like.
NOD32 allegedly uses less resources then even Trend Micro, and Trend Micro was very lean. With NOD32, you’ll lose spyware scanning, firewall, and WLAN detection, but with other [free] spyware programs, at least the Windows firewall, and a properly secured WLAN, there is no harm in losing those features.
I don’t happen to be a big fan of Windows Firewall, so I checked out Kerio Personal Firewall. Nice looking firewall that I’m trying out now.
This all being said, there are antivirus programs out there that are very good, and very cheap. Free in fact. AVG and Avast are two antivirus programs that get excellent ratings and have free versions available, in addition to the subscription services.
A lot of people will ask, OK, OK…but all I get offered with my new PC purchase from [insert major PC manufacturer here] is Norton Internet Security 200x or McAfee…what about those? Well, my answer is “If you like something and it’s worked well for you, stick with it.” For me, I don’t happen to like McAfee products, though I used one of their DOS-based antiviruses in the mid 1990s. Norton products have left a bad taste in my mouth because of some policies they have, and also the “bloated” nature of their products. (I had a really bad experience – twice actually – with their “System Utilities” packages from 2000 and 2004.
Whatever you do, use *something*. Unless of course you use an OS-X or Linux based machine, where level of virus infection is next to none, compared to that of a Windows based computer.
So, let me guess, you want all the links to some recommended antivirus applications? No problem…
Microsoft Trusted Antivirus Partners
Avast
AVG
KAV/Kapersky
McAfee
Eset’s NOD32
Norton/Symantec
Panda
Kerio (Firewall)
Who here has a iBook, G4, or some other new Apple? Good, you made a good choice from the beginning, so basically, you can stop reading this post now if you’d like, because most likely, you already have some of knowledge of the below information.
So, those of you that are still reading, you most likely have some sort of IBM-based x86 system. Dell, Gateway, HP/Compaq, IBM, etc…run Windows? Hopefully XP, so keep reading…
Every wanted to spice up your desktop a little bit? You know, the main screen of Windows where the background is – that is called your desktop. Besides the cute pictures of your doggy or the not-so-bright pictures of your friend doing a keg stand from his Frat time at TKB (that’s Tappa Kegga Beer by the way – great Frat), wouldn’t you like to make your Windows XP desktop a little more, well, active? May be even a little useful besides the 452 icons and 6 sets of the same broken shortcuts? (Which leads me to another rant—those of you that have a desktop CLUTTERED with nonsense, please stop reading right here. Befriend some nice guy or girl at the local computer lab, buy him or her a subscription to Wired magazine and a 6-pack of good beer or cool-aid or whatever it is they drink, and let them explain to you the proper way to keep your Desktop uncluttered—it’s a desktop people, literally. You don’t want it messy, you want it useful. Get rid of the 4 links to your My Pictures Folder, you don’t need AOL v7.0, AOL v8.0, and AOL v9.0 super-duper verion shortcuts on the desktop, AND the AOL quicklaunch loaded in the taskbar every time you start Windows. You also sure as hell do not need anything you don’t use more than 3 times a day on your desktop. (i.e. Get rid of the shortcut to Microsoft Access. Don’t pretend you know how to use it, no one really knows how to use it. Ok, a few people do, but those people only do it because that can’t program in SQL. I can’t program in either of them, but I sure as hell can spot a liar. 😉 ….Ok, now here you go:
Here is how you spice things up a bit. Konfabulator. That’s right – it’s spelled right, and yes, you did pronounce it right. Brought to you by the people that made Yahoo!, Konfabulator is a program that organizes and runs “widgets”. Remember that marketing or business class in highschool or college where the teacher’s fake company produced “left handed widgets?” Yeah, I know, I got fooled too – I didn’t think a widget existed. Until now. (If it’s one thing you get out of this post, it’s never to listen to anything any teacher in highschool tells you.)
Konfabulator is the program, and widgets are the applications that Konfabulator uses. There are hundreds and hundreds of widgets available. Want to spice up that clock you have in the taskbar? Download one of the clock and calendar widgets and you’ll have a nice little alternative on the desktop. Do you ship a lot of packages or do you do a lot of eBay sales? It’s tough to track some of the packages you send or receive, but there are widgets that will track your packages for you with the major shipping carriers; DHL, Airborne, USPS, FedEx, and UPS. (By the way, did you hear that FedEx & UPS might merge? They’re going to call it FedUp.) It’s a joke, sorry. Anyway, there are widgets for everything – sports, entertainment, weather, as well as time, date and calender management.
Best of all, it’s all free. So check out Konfabulator, www.konfabulator.com
Widgets will run best on Windows 2000 or XP. The bigger the screen, the higher the resolution you can use, and the more widgets you can see. Your mileage may vary. (No, the graphic at the top of this article is not a screen capture of my desktop).
And you thought Google was just a search engine. 🙂
Aside from being the best search engine, Google has transformed itself and the way we use the Internet. No no no…Google has evolved. In the late 1990s, Google was a search engine, nothing more, nothing less. Today, they are a media machine, organizing the Internet for the common man and making a user’s computer that much more efficient.
Take this week for example – Google Desktop 2 and Google Talk have been released. Picasa, Google Maps, Google Earth, and Google Toolbar have all been released in previous months.
Of course there is Google Mail, or Gmail it’s called, which offers an ever-increasing amount of personable searchable storage space for your email.
In 2004, they set out on a mission to digitize many (or all) of the print media from famous libraries; Library of Congress, NY Public Library, etc.
Where are they going? Well, the right answer is no one knows for sure because Google is a constantly evolving force. Where do I and others think they are going? They are going to be organizing EVERYTHING. Making it available. Making searching instantaneous.
According to their website, “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”.
I have a good feeling that’s an understatement. 🙂
Check out Google for more information on their FREE products, and also Google Labs for the recently released programs still in Beta test.
Cablevision is the cable company that services Long Island, parts of Queens and Brooklyn, and parts of NJ with their brands which include “Optimum TV”, “Optimum Voice” (VoIP telephone service), and “Optimum Online”, which is their cable modem Internet service.
Technical Support, as most companies have it these days, is relatively poor. If you’re a caller with a problem, consider yourself lucky if you are actually speaking to someone in this country.
Anyway, if you have some technical skill, you can avoid calling customer service, and instead research the answer yourself. One site I like to look at for info is BroadbandReports.com. On this website, there are forums for many popular cable companies, unsupported by the companies themselves, but instead, other users post together and solve problems/discuss issues collectively.
In a recent post, an anonymous user posted his new blog, “Inside Technical Support” which details the inner-workings of the call-center for Cablevision.
By reading the blog, one can tell that this author is pretty pissed off. Discussion on Broadbandreports even questions if this author still works there. At any rate, Blogs themselves can be quite a tough pill to swallow for corporations, as this author and apparent current Cablevision employee, has no trouble badmouthing Cablevision management and even Cablevision customers.