The Many Faces of Mike McBride

This is the main blog for Mike McBride Online, where you can keep track of everything I'm in to in one place.

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Saturday, January 05, 2002

Here's a question. I'm sure most of you have seen "blogrolling lists", a list of what I would consider favorite blogs that I read on a regular basis. I've purposely not done a list of permanent links like that, well, because everyone else is doing it. *L* However after looking at my wife's new entry into the blog world, I'm wondering if a "recommended sites" type thing wouldn't maybe be a decent idea.

Speaking of her blog she notes her current hunt for new employment. She's got a BA in Mass Communication, with emphasis Public Relations and a minor in Political Science. Hmm it's nice to know that if I ever want to go into business for myself, (which I don't right now, but you never know) being married to a PR expert is going to sure be helpful! Of course that's not the only reason I married her. (She can cook and do laundry pretty well too..*L* Just kidding dear, I promise.) Here's her resume in text format, if you know anyone looking!

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Netscape version 6.2.1 is out. I have no idea how old this news might be, or if anyone even cares about Netscape anymore, but I'm passing it along, in case someone does. Personally I haven't seen anything even resembling a good, solid browser from them since back in the 4.7x days. I have 4.73 and really only use it to test website usability. I don't surf with it. I can understand why people would use it, but don't really understand why people would upgrade to 6.x, it seemed very unstable, and not very useful. Has it improved any since the 6.0 version?

Sam Gallagher has an interesting point:

The weakest link of the digital economy is that people have to intervene to make it work-and sometimes, those people are morons.

That's true of everything, not just the digital economy, and always has been. Still, somehow we keep moving on.

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Friday, January 04, 2002

Work today has been slow. Seems like there are quite a few meetings and discussions going on that don't involve me. While on one hand, that's good, (Any meeting I'm not in is a good meeting in my book) the other hand is worried because these meetings usually wind up with discussions about all the cool things people think we can do with technology, that we really can't do. So they spend an inordinate amount of time getting excited about something, bring it to me, and I tell them why we can't do that now, and how much it will cost to get the ability to do that. Then they get mad at me for ruining their excitement and I get to hear stuff from my boss about how mean and intimidating I am to the rest of staff. Somehow, while I'm not important enough within the organization to include on planning discussions, I am important enough to be viewed as the person putting the veto to them. Go figure.

Dane Carlson has some tips on driving in fog. Very useful stuff to those of us who haven't ever lived in areas where dense fog is all that common.

Scoble has moved his blog to a new location, thereby breaking the "by-the-book" rule of never changing the address of pages other people may be linking to. Bad Robert, bad....I never much cared for half of the "by-the-book" rules anyway, most of them aren't that big a deal. It's what, one more click to the new space for most people? Get over it. Update: Talked to Scoble on ICQ earlier, seems the new URL may just be temporary and they may change it to something easier to remember. So he's going to break links again, I guess. I think he's trying to create a mysterious aura about where his blog has gone from day to day.

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AOL cable, Win XP not connecting

Now here's an interesting story, not because AOL and XP apparently have a bug, that happens. No big deal. But it's the other part that I didn't even realize:

AOL executives have noted that the company's acquisition of Time Warner gives it a powerful means for selling broadband versions of its online service to connected households.

Let me get this straight, you're already connected to the internet using TW cable, and then you go out and pay MORE MONEY for access to AOL services? Is that really what they're trying to do? Do people really need to be babied that much? C'mon people you're not stupid, you are capable of learning to use and enjoy the internet without AOL controlling how you do it. I've always defended AOL users as folks who would rather not be bothered to learn how to use the internet by themselves, but that was back when you paid them to be your ISP like everyone else. Now you're not even paying them to be your ISP, your paying them just for their content, which isn't that good to begin with! Get out of the AOL bubble and take a look at just how much you can do on the internet without them!

Someone please tell me I'm reading this wrong..

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Thursday, January 03, 2002

When did everyone start buying the sulfnbk.exe hoax again? We've had 5 different people get warnings about it since yesterday. Are we the only ones?

Wil Wheaton has a story with an old message that is still important and needs to be remembered.

Gretchen Pirillo has a bit of a rant about the usability of Moveable Type. It's always interesting to read other people's likes and dislikes on software. And yes, that is the same Gretchen Pirillo that is married to Chris Pirillo of Lockergnome fame. They both just started their own weblogs. Very cool guys!

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Wednesday, January 02, 2002

File-sharing programs carry Trojan horse

The amazing thing about this is how ignorant people are to the whole file-sharing model, and how it is insecure by it's very nature, let alone the spyware added into it. Think about it, how is a program that allows people to access your machine, and you to access theirs, not a security risk? You're giving away access to parts of your machine to anonymous strangers, and accepting files from them to run on the same machine that you store your private financial details, without bothering to learn about anti-virus or firewall protection, real smart.

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Someone e-mailed me a survey today in Word format. It was a "circle the number that best represents your overall feeling about this area of our service" type of survey, with instructions to email back the completed form. Think about it for a minute, I have to print it out in order to circle my choices, am I then supposed to scan the completed form so I can email it back to you? That's really asking too much of your customers. I'll not be completing the survey. I have too much actual work to do right now! Send me one that's easy to do, and I'll think about it.

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Gene writes:

Hey Mike,
continuing to enjoy the blog you have going.
Quick question.
Do you use or know of a "ticketing" type system that can be used to keep
track of issues/equipment and such?
Or do you just use the paper and outlook method (which is what I'm currently
using)
I've looked on a few shareware/freeware web sites and what they have is too
big or not enough. Hope you know of something cause if you don't I'm going
to have to write one myself.

I wrote my own, using Access, which for tracking 25-30 machines wasn't too terribly bad. I was able to input all the information for each PC in it's own record and then tie an "issues" table to it and have all the relevant information at my fingertips. That's not always an option in bigger situations. So does anyone have some suggestions for Gene? By the way, thanks for the kind words Gene!

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Tuesday, January 01, 2002

I finally had to do it to my hotmail account. I have a hotmail account because I like to have some sort of anonymity when it comes to dealing with stuff from my Child Abuse site and the mail lists that deal with that. But today, after some weasel sent me 84 copies of the same spam message, (and counting, I had it blocked as they were coming in!) I decided to set the account to only accept messages from the people I tell it to. Everything else goes into the Junk Mail folder to be perused at my pleasure. I'll still check it to see if I'm getting feedback from the site, but I'll count on the comments on the weblog to be the main source of feedback for now.

I've purposely only dealt with my own geek reading today, nothing that even remotely would remind me of work. My wife and I both needed the break. We try not to take the office home with us, but when management leaves you hanging on issues, it's hard not to. So today was our day to be lazy and not even think about it. I'll have enough to worry about tomorrow in trying to get year-end reports finished.

Interesting reading for the first day of the year:

Burning Bird has an interesting little take on what blogging is about, and how ideas are spread through blogging.

Through Scripting News today, I found that Megnut turned 30 today. Happy Birthday, and remember what an older and wiser friend told me right before I turned 30. "You spend your 20's trying to live up to everyone else's expectations of you, parents, friends, society. When you turn 30, they all give up on you and you get to do whatever you want without complaint". It's totally true!

Also, from Scripting News, I found Aaron Cope , who had the most sensible thing I've ever read about the Open Source debate, everything has a tradeoff. Short, to the point, and dead on!

About half way down this page, (I skimmed the Open Source stuff, and well, see the article above, I'm not getting into these religious wars!) Mark Pilgrim gives a long description of the PressPlay FAQ and his reasons why this service sucks. I'd have to agree with him.

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Apparently I've been doing this just long enough to have this blog start showing up in searches, which is always fun and interesting. Of course it bothers me a little bit that my site comes up in the top 20 results for Stupid Websites . Follow the links to find out why..*L*

I also come out in searches for "best buy sucks", which I never actually said, I was just poking fun .

All of which leads me to ponder, that given Google's penchant for keeping track of everything you type up on your blog, and the resulting searches that pick up bits and pieces of entries, could it not, theoretically, be possible to type so many entries and so much text that you wind up showing up in every search? And if you wrote enough to actually have phrases be used multiple times in your blog, and inter-linked all of the various archive pages, to give off the appearance of being a popular link, could you not show up relatively high in all of those searches?

I think it's possible, however if you have that much free time, I can name at least 100 more interesting ways of spending it. :)

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Monday, December 31, 2001

Driving to work today was interesting. It seems that only 25% of the people who normally would be driving downtown, were on the roads today. Thus I'm concluding that I am one of the 25% of people who either have a) such an important job that they must be here on New Year's eve, or b) work for a company that doesn't quite understand that having people sit in an office all day with very little work to do, on a day when most other companies are off, is very bad for morale.

Guess which category I fit into? *L* It also doesn't help when the president of your company has to call-in for Staff Meeting because he went to Erie, PA over the weekend and got snowed in. So he's not even here while we're all sitting around waiting for the end of the day. :)

I can't even get started on year end stuff, because all the reports are setup to run after the 1st. I'd have to change them all to run them now, and then change them back after I finished. No thanks! You just know I'd forget to change one of them and screw them up royally next month or next year.

Interesting reading for today:

David Coursey has it all wrong.

SEPT. 11 WAS THE absolute conclusion of the roaring '90s. But it also provided immediate and dramatic examples of what really matters. As we leave an era of self-interest and greed, Sept. 11 reintroduced us to the people we might all strive to become - Isn't that what people said about the 80's too? That it was all about self-interest and greed and that the 90's were the change to all that, that by electing Bill Clinton we were moving into a more caring, warm period in our history? Sept. 11 will not make people less greedy and self-interested, that sort of internal change is not brought about by outside forces. It will temporarily change people's focus, but it wont last long. Or am I being too pessimistic?

And the people who he sees as heroes will continue to be the same hard-working, honest, strong people they've always been. Outside forces don't change that either. And in a few years they'll be taken for granted again by the media and corporate elite, just like they always have been, and they won't complain about it at all.

Instapundit weighs in on the hack of blogger and what it means, as far as making sure you have a backup plan. Never a bad idea..

Finally, Robert Scoble pointed his readers in the direction of http://wwitv.com , which looks to be quite a wonderful way to waste time and learn about the world all at the same time through the power of streaming video!

While I know 2001 will be remembered as a bad year by a lot of people, it will always be a very good year for me personally. It was the year Angela and I got married, it was the year I started blogging, which I've come to enjoy quite a bit, and the year I finally got my own domain.. It was the year one of my best friends' also got married and I was able to get to MN. to see it. It was a year that saw me have the opportunity to travel to Toronto, Minnesota, Johnson City TN, Asheville NC, Des Moines IA and New York City, all of which were wonderful experiences. As the media focuses completely on 9/11 and the events surrounding that, try to remember that there are good things that have happened this year, to all sorts of people, all around the world. Just like every other year, there is the good and the bad, and life goes on into the next year, which will bring happiness and sadness all on it's own.

Have a happy and safe New Year's celebration!

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