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Sunday, February 20, 2005InfectedSaturday it took me the better part of an hour to remove 2067 occurrences of skumware and 985 separate Trojan infected files (AVG anti-virus rocks) off a customer’s pc. This is not unusual. She had been getting errors from AOL and had completely lost use of IE. When she contacted AOL they gave their "its not our fault" song and dance. I guess that's three hours she won’t see again. Anyhow two hours of deleting, uninstalling, and windows patching got the Internet back up and I talked her in to ditching AOLhell. Of course she already had Comcast broadband so when I showed the speed of Firefox that was that. It always makes me feel good to help folks and I try to educate my customers on the dos and don’ts of Internet life. It's not unusual for customers to whip out a pen and paper and take notes. It's not that my customers are unintelligent their just ill informed. 
Friday, February 18, 2005CD-R last many many moonA few weeks ago I read an article from the Local “news paper” about CD-R media. The article said that the manufacturer media reliability estimates where grossly incorrect. Claming CD-R media would last 2 to 5 years a mere fraction of the 50 to 250 year manufacture estimates. I took this shocking revelation to heart and relayed it to a few of my customers. Needless to the news caused panic and frantic questions. So I did what I guess should have done earlier. Researched new and better means of backing up data. I found out that the chucklehead that authored said article is full of smelly stuff. Although he may have confused the blank media shelf life (5 to 10 years) with the written media storage life. His statements are mostly unfounded. From what I read it does not matter what pigment your CD-R uses Cyanine or Phthalocyanine if you don’t store them in a windowsill (direct light). The Phthalocyanine might last a wee bit longer. But your CD drive better be in tiptop shape because Phthalocyanine has a smaller threshold for laser light fluctuation. Which means that cyanine may read better in an older drive. I doubt any CD drive will last 75 years but that's another issue altogether. Now I must go back to my customers and apologize for his ineptitude and my laziness. So feel safe in storing your backups on CD as long as you 1. Use quality CD-R's (TDK, Kodak, etc.) 2. Keep your CD's out of direct light 3. Store them at room temp 60 - 80 deg 4. Store them in a paper sleeve or quality CD book 5. Handle them by the edges (finger oil degrades CD's) Your CD's will last at least 50+ years with out degrading.
Sunday, February 13, 2005A tragedy has befallen me.My faithful laptop of 7 years has died. That acer carried me through many a late night writing papers and code for collage. After I graduated I used it for work and later as a dedicated GPS navigation unit in my car. Alas, nothing is forever. Yes, you in the corner. "Don’t you fix computers for a living or something?" Sure do but this mobile CPU has crunched it’s last byte believe me. It has been taken apart repaired and soldered together more times then Michael Jackson. Well maybe not that much be you get the idea. So what’s a geek to do with out a laptop? Replace it with a faster smaller laptop? I say nay nay. Replace it with a faster smaller PDA? I am typing this from my new WIFI friendly Palm Tungsten C and It KICKS RICHEOUS ASS!! This little bolt of lightning has a thumb keyboard and a ton of geeky utilities that I see super useful for my computer fixn job. Plus it has that ultra good new gadget smell.
Saturday, February 05, 2005Video Store Ambush
It was my understanding that random dotcom swag give always were a thing of bubble past. Five swag throwers cornered me at my local video store. Now I under stand that the super blow is in town but this just hasn’t happen to me in almost a decade. WOW that scary to think but true. Free T-shirt’s and CD’s are always welcome. For the effort I took a serf over to their web site. Uuhh…where? www.27thelement.com
Wednesday, February 02, 2005Fire Fox Why?The biggest two reasons I gravitate to when ask this question are 1) Security - if you use IE your just begging to be a spyware target. 2) Tabbed Browsing - If you create a bookmarks folder with say 10 links you can open all 10 at the same time in the same window. This saves time and system resources. Here is a top 10 list that goes in to detail. http://www.switch2firefox.com/whyswitch/
Tuesday, February 01, 2005Okie NoodlingI witnessed the oddest thing on public television last night Okie Noodling. What the hell is Okie Noodling? It’s a bunch of drunken backwoods madmen swimming around in murky snake infested rivers fishing with their bare hands. They use no bait no hooks just their hands. They don’t grab the fish nope that would be too easy. They wiggle their hands in river bottom holes. Hoping that the catfish will swallow their arm up to the elbow. I did not make this up. http://www.okienoodling.com/
So I went to CompUSA store right down the street to buy a hard drive for a customer and to do a little “retailing”, as my pops would say. As I also wanted to see one of them their MAC mini machines in action. I must say I was impressed. Even at bare stock it responded extremely quick. Open close programs play movies. Would have tried safari but CompUSA in there brilliance did not install a wireless or wired internet connection so I can’t say how it handled the web. I am not a Mac user but that thing might tempt me to crossover.
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