Computing
What I Will Do if Microsoft Buys Yahoo
The impending Microsoft hostile takeover of Yahoo is getting under my skin. Not since the HP-Compaq merger has there been such a more useless waste of human energy and money.
What’s difficult for me to swallow is that Yahoo shareholders may eventually vote for this. These are the same sorts of people who are always looking to trade away good players on sports teams for the hope and speculation that some future drafted player will be the savior of the franchise. Rarely do such wishes come true in sports - and even more rarely do they in business. It seems that no one believes in building anymore, in staying the course, in commitment.
Vote for my Manifesto
Photo by EsseI have a proposal for a ChangeThis manifesto entitled Create an Unassailable Online Identity. Each month ChangeThis accepts a modest number of proposals for what they call manifestos. If voted high enough, they give the manifesto a green light and publish it at their site. Some of the best author’s on the internet have published ChangeThis manifestos, and I’ve learned a lot through them. Thus, I thought it only appropriate to share something in return.
Peter Patera Strikes Back - at Spam!
A fellow blogger, Peter Patera, took a little time (okay, a lot of time) spam-baiting a Sri Lanka spammer into carrying on the most insane email conversation I’ve ever seen. You should read his account if you can afford the time. As I commented there, “If we all join hands and stand our ground, the enemy will flee back to Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Budapest, and other forbidden territories.”
Peter’s emails are tongue-in-cheek and clearly meant to reveal his true intent. But the spammer carries on the conversation, sending Peter all sorts of files and attachments, and in the end, doing five terrible website mockups - for free. All to try and win Peter’s business at a dirt-cheap rate of $14/hour.
Replace your Laptop Hard Drive - and avoid Vista
I had a 60Gb hard drive in my three year old laptop. I was running out of space trying to keep all my projects synced on it, which was the only way to work remote in an effective manner. Needed a new hard drive, at the least.
So, a simply run down to my local computer store to get a new hard drive. I start looking at prices and it looks like 160Gb to 200Gb will work nicely in my laptop. That’s really all I needed. But for almost a $100, I started musing about buying a new laptop.
Death to Techie Primadonnas
Shane & Peter, two of my web developer heroes (yeah, I know that sounds weird, but think of them as sort of really cool quarterbacks in the NFL if that makes it easier for you), have put up a cute definition on their blog of the word “techneurotic” which they pretend is an adjective. Hey, it’s a made up word, so they can do with it as they please. But, I’d like to hijack the word as a noun.
Still, here’s one of their three definitions:
2. Compulsive gadget buying behavior fueled by the impossible ideal that you can own a piece of technology that is not already obsolete
Sticky Notes Finally Good for Something
I’ve always hated sticky notes. Scratch that. I think the real issue is that I dislike it when people use a lot of sticky notes. A sure sign of a disorganized person. Sticking out of magazines, plastered all over the monitor like some Victorian collar for LCD’s, and found on furniture. Ugh.
However, I have found one decent use for a sticky note. Finally. When you develop software, you are constantly wondering what version of a language or architecture you have installed in your machine. Do I have MySQL 5.0.37 or 5.0.36? I can never remember because like many web developers, something changes every month on my machine.
Organizing Sent Email
I’m having a really tough time finding a useful tool or system to easily organize sent email. Every “organizing your email” tutorial out there seems to focus on the deluge of inbound email and how to handle, process, and organize it.
An overlooked problem, it seems, is organizing your sent email. Typically, most of us, when we need to find an email we sent previously, just search through our email Sent folder. Thunderbird and Outlook are more than capable of doing this.
What if I just want to easily browse through the last 20 emails I sent someone?
You don’t need to be a Geek to be Computer Savvy
Background
I come across two types of people it seems: Geeks, and non-Geeks. Somehow, in the past two decades, it has become to cool to be a Geek. Which is very strange. Because to define a non-Geek, I would typically say, “A cool person”. How can both be cool?
Well, not surprisingly, this has left the rest of America in the lurch, too. Here’s why this has become so damaging to middle-America.
Mac Users are Dense
I had a Mac user write me and seem surprised that he had to upgrade a piece of expensive software to keep up with his latest install of OSX 10.4. I actually love Macs, but I just hate dealing with Mac users. Here’s why.
No matter what O/S someone runs, there is no substitute for education - for knowing what (exactly) you have under the hood, and learning how hardware and software interface on your machine, editing config files, adjusting parameters, etc. Just like a car, right? You can buy a Toyota at $30,000 and say it is better and never breaks down and blah, blah, blah, and that is just fine. But don’t blame me if the whole world thinks the Toyota person is a moron because he can’t change a flat tire, or change his oil. It is still a car. Spending more doesn’t isolate you from that cold reality.
phpBB.com Down for a Week and Counting…
No one in the blogosphere seems to have commented, that I’ve been able to find, about the mysterious shutdown of phpbb.com, which hosts the support forums for the popular open source software phpBB, a bulletin board server program (or forum software, as some call it).
Their website says the following:
Ouch! RAID array failure…
We’re sad to announce that during the switch of a failed harddisk to the hot-spare and the planned 2 hours required for the array to re-sync, we’ve been hit by an extremely unexpected double-disk failure which leaves us with a dead array.
My favorite spam email yet
Yes, it’s true: I actually read some of my spam email. Not the stock investment stuff, or the crazy sex stuff. But occasionally, I’ll get a spam email that has no links to any websites, no graphics or images, no nothing… except rambling text.
This is my favorite one so far that I got back on July 11. I haven’t modified it at all, except by changing the line breaks and adding some punctuation, so it looks as poetic as it sounds. I also got rid of a trailing “the” at the end of the missive. It was from a Lila Jorgensen.
Del.Icio.Us Finally Snagged Me
A few years ago, I heard about the rage of saving your favorites online (or “bookmarks” as Netscape and Firefox calls them). The advantage was that you would have all your bookmarks in one simple place. For those of us who use multiple computers (home, work, laptop, friends, etc), this was certainly an attraction. I couldn’t recall the number of times I would have to “re-Google” something because I was at the wrong computer. I don’t mind re-googling when it is something easy. For instance, I already know that Dreamweaver’s extension list is at adobe.com and I can just click a few times to get to it. But there is really a better site called…. something about a zone…. dreamweaverzone.com? No, that’s not it… dmzone.com?… no…. ahh, yes.. . Having your bookmarks with you can really save time.
What’s Wrong with Online Feed Readers
I was reviewing TechCrunch’s post from March 2006 about the state of Online Feed Readers because I’ve been wanting to find a way to read and track my feeds online. I’m a pretty heavy news junkie - for at least the things I like to read about (sorry, Associated Press), but I’m sort of bound to my computer to track and manage my feeds. Sometimes, I have a little extra free time where I’m waiting for someone or something and there is internet access nearby, so I’d like to be able to check out the latest feeds and catch up on them.
Windows XP Taskbar Efficiency
I was at a friend’s house recently and was watching him navigate his own system. It occurred to me how much more efficient he could have set up his computer. I’ve often thought this when I’ve seen other people’s computers, so I thought I’d finally share some ways in which I try to be as efficient as possible. Hopefully, this will help save you some time each week.
The Windows taskbar is a great tool and can really save you a lot of time if you use it to its maximum potential. Otherwise, it is just a waste of precious screen space. In fact, this friend had his taskbar in the “auto-hide” mode which made sense partially because his taskbar wasn’t working that well for him.
