28 August 2004

Voncile and her computer return...

Most people would travel away from a storm... not us! We had to take the cat for his knee surgery post op visit. And I promised to help Voncile with her computer and to get her new ISP online.

Charley had other plans. Yes, that Charley -- the hurricane. We lost power about 11 pm Friday, right after an electical surge that sent the APC Back Ups into high squeals.

So poor Voncile has been begging computer time from all the relatives for the past two weeks, just trying to keep her nose above email. Tomorrow she gets to dive in and really swim through it. I finally have everything working properly for her.

Oh, before heading over here this morning, Melody called. She wanted me to come over and fix her computer (she deleted something vital and can't figure out how to get it back). Poor Melody... I had to tell her that the line forms at the rear...

;-p

25 August 2004

Russian Planes

Maybe we should send them a FBI forensic team....I'm sure two planes crashed minutes apart for no apparent reason with no rebel/terrorist help....if so, I'll be down at the corner store with my newly-liquidated stock cash buying Lotto tickets...

19 August 2004

The JibJab Times

The JibJab Times

If you haven't seen JibJab, this won't make a lot of sense. If you have seen it, you'll know the fame is deserved. Finding good humor in this election takes real talent.

18 August 2004

MajorGeeks.com - Download Freeware and Shareware Computer Utilities.

MajorGeeks.com - Download Freeware and Shareware Computer Utilities.

Similar to TuCows, CNet and ZDNet. Very user friendly.

Hi y'all!

Thanks for the invite, Patrice/Patty/Pat/girlie/hon, your invite was of course stuck in my spam filter right between "BiGger mAnhOod" and "Refinance Mister dino". After I wrote out and mailed the check to the enlargement/enhancement folks, I promptly signed up here. Joe, thanks for the link to the Japanese news site--my partner at the office has had to physically drag me out of the cafeteria at times due to some programming genius' decision to put the beach volleyball on during business hours (all this technology and they can't tape- or digi-delay it?). Of course, my interest is purely technical...
Now, in the Worst Kept Secrets Dept., here's a site I consult at least once daily to keep me abreast (insert Beavis/Butthead laugh here) of impending and occurring security issues:
http://www.incidents.org
I found that site a few jobs ago and haven't looked back since...obviously I still hit CERT, SecurityFocus, et al, but incidents.org is updated at least daily and more often during large virus outbreaks, worms, DDOS attacks, etc. And before you ask, I have Mozilla, Firefox, and IE installed on the Windoze boxes I use regularly, Mozilla and Firefox on the Linux boxes. My problem with Microsoft is not that their stuff is any more vulnerable than other products, it's that since they've consolidated their updates and patches to this idiotic one-per-month schedule, you could conceivably wait 29 days for a patch to be issued for a detected (and admitted-to) vulnerability. At least with the open source software, that wait is lessened drastically; in some cases, patches have been issued hours after a vulnerability is found. And these days, the time bloc between announcement of a vulnerability and exploit code being written and made public is getting smaller all the time.
I was just informed the second pot of coffee is done brewing...now I'm faced with the difficult decision....ESPN or CNN (Daryn Kagan)....at least THAT part of my brain still works...


12 August 2004

Microsoft TechNet The Cable Guy - February 2004: Manually Configuring Windows Firewall in Windows XP Service Pack 2

Microsoft TechNet The Cable Guy - February 2004: Manually Configuring Windows Firewall in Windows XP Service Pack 2

Windows XP Service Pack 2 has an automatically on Firewall. You may need to turn it off or adjust the settings. This article gives you detailed instructions and SCREENSHOTS! I just love screenshots, don't you?

11 August 2004

Today@UCI: Press Releases:

Today@UCI: Press Releases:

See! Just because you have a BIG head doesn't mean you are smart. As usual, the deveil is in the details -- which part of the brain is big...

09 August 2004

meryl's notes: Mozilla Is Fallible

meryl's notes: Mozilla Is Fallible

Mozilla and FireFox has a security issue. But as soon as we heard about it, the fix was available and the steps to verify it has been implemented are simple. More than we can say for....

[This is a very interesting article that weighs the most common objections to leaving IE]