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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, February 09, 2002
Come together OK here's the deal, I've had some feedback, both comments and emails from two guys who I think need to chat to each other. The Geek and Jevon, from Blogtrack. They both read this blog, and Geek had some good points the other day about some improvements he'd like to maybe see in Blogtrack. Not that he doesn't like it now, but he thinks it could be even better. Jevon tells me he's working on a new interface and I think he needs to talk to Geek about his ideas and see what we can do to make an already good service, better. That's the beauty of the 'Net, people bringing their own ideas together to make things better than we could by ourselves, and I would love it if they could get together and swap ideas, because I think they're both brilliant! Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 11:54 AM | 0 comments | 
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Friday, February 08, 2002
Bloggage stuff My wife just sent me a little message over our work intranet that said "Hey that javascript last updated thingy on Robyn's blog kicks ass!" See what she's talking about here. The original tip came from Call for Help. See, the advantages of having a blogging wife who works in the same place as you are endless! Life Uncommon points us to a pretty decent site with some pretty decent PHP scripts. I might have to bookmark that sucker in case I need a PHP script! Geek Blog has been giving me some blog pushback about a few items, so let me give it back. I know you were creating a wishlist sort of thing for Blogtrack , I was simply agreeing that those would be really nice features that would make it even better than it already is. Also the free personal Webtrends bites! It really only tracks referrers and page hits to the main root of the site, which this blog is not on. ( that would be the default.htm page, in my case). The rest count as hits, but they are unidentified hits. The for pay versions are awesome, we have them at work and there is a ton of useful stuff in there, but I don't have $35 a month for that here! Oh and thanks to Brian Kane who has this blog listed as one of "Blogs I've been reading recently". Hope you're enjoying the insanity! Can you tell that I've had a bit more free time to read blogs the last couple of days? Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 2:17 PM | 0 comments |
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More Trillian Version .0724 is out. I know I said I wasn't going to keep updating the AIM connection battles, but it seems this version has some other bug fixes as well, so you might want to grab it. By the way they also have, in big bold red letters, a link to download the even newest AIM patch. That should get you connected to AIM for about a day or so..*L* (via NT Compatible) Per an anonymous suggestion from the comments, I'm going to give StatcounteX a try for keeping website statistics. Hopefully that will be a weekend project this weekend, but I've got to get our taxes done first. That will be a chore, but my accounting background from way back when makes it a bearable chore, and they shouldn't be too hard. (Famous last words, I know!) Steve MacLaughlin points out that TiVo is keeping an eye on what you watch and how you watch it. It would be sad if your wife found out just how many times you replayed that Britney Spears commercial, wouldn't it? According to John Robb , WorldCom is cutting free coffee for it's employees as a way to cut costs. Our CEO threatened to do that a few weeks ago, which is ok. I'll just bring my own coffee-maker from home, and lock the door to my office, thereby making the coffee smell available to the rest of the staff, but the supply limited to only me. Or is that too evil? Anyone else ever had to completely rearrange their schedule and potentially work over every night for two weeks because other offices are getting new carpet, and no one wants to take the responsibility to unhook computers, move them, wait for the carpeting to be put in, move them back and hook them back up? I guess those color coded cables are too confusing! But starting the 18th, that may be exactly what I'm doing. And I'm not even getting new carpet! Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 9:36 AM | 0 comments |
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Thursday, February 07, 2002
In other blogs... I haven't had a lot of spare time to check out other blogs, until today that is. Here's what I've been missing: Paul Boutin on Flashtrack, some sort of popup ad spyware. What sort of idiots think this is a good way to get their message out? Piss off all of your potential customers, that'll be good for business! Grr. Robyn seems a little angry with Wil Wheaton. Can't say that I don't agree with her. It was a little stupid of Wil to ask for donations to take his wife out for Valentine's, I didn't ask for donations, but then again my wife's birthday is in a few weeks...hmm. (j/k) One of America's best and brightest (sarcasm intended) accuses Chris Pirillo of being a terrorist. Speaking of Gnomedex, they have announced the dates for this year, Aug 23-24. I'm hoping to be there again. I'm even thinking of driving this year and making a long vacation out of it. Let's see, drive to Des Moines, go to Gnomedex, drive on to Colorado and see Steve and Emily and their new baby, detour up to Moorhead, MN to see Jen and Nathan and their new baby, come home. OK, it's a bit of driving, but it'd be very cool to be able to pull all of that off, and blog the whole thing, complete with photos! Keep your fingers crossed! Caterina discusses an article about self-esteem that would seem to disagree with popular theory. I like Caterina's blog, it's well-written, and it's a nice change from the tech blogs I'm usually reading, but she needs permalinks! I can't link to the post I'm talking about, but as of right this very second it's the latest post. Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 3:52 PM | 0 comments |
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An update on the security hole in Morpheus. The hole might just be the users..*L* I still don't see why on earth, after being told over and over again to not open strange attachments in email, people would download and run any old file that some random stranger decided to share. Nevermind the copyright violations, and the bandwidth charges we all have to pay to keep these people running, oh don't even get me started. I suppose if you're going to use these things, at least do us all a favor and get Vcatch. It promises to be " a virus protection software. When VCatch is active it will check all the files sent or downloaded to your computer via Email and Web applications. In the event that VCatch detects that a file is suspected to be a virus, the software automatically deletes the file and notifies you" It's supposed to work with E-Mail, ICQ, Napster, Gnutella, etc. (Via the LangaList Plus Edition and various other newsgroup/ email list sources) According to this thread in the Trillian discussion boards, the reason Yahoo Messenger won't connect using Trillian is that the Trillian folks got the name of the server wrong in the latest build. It should be csa.yahoo.com not scs.yahoo.com, so if you go into the Preferences and change that, it'll work again. AOL is still blocking, and I'll stop updating that now. :) The hosting company that I use, well let's just say that there is a seriously long rant in the works for them. It's still ruminating in the back of my head, but someday soon there will be a long detailed rant of all the things I was promised when I signed up, all the things that have gone wrong since I signed up, and all the promises that have been officially shrugged off, apparently. For now, let me just say this, how ridiculous is it that I pay for hosting, and still have to go out and find my own means of getting website statistics? The deal I signed up for had "Detailed website statistics and access to server logs" listed as a feature. I have server logs that don't even list the referrers, and no statistics. The free personal edition of Webtrends Live (Which is what they suggested as a replacement) sucks so much that I won't even link to them. Their reports tell me I had 127 hits over the last 2 days, 125 of which came from unknown referrers, and 86 of which were on unknown pages. So I had traffic, but I don't know to which pages, or where they came from. Very &*^!#$ useful! Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 9:49 AM | 0 comments |
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Wednesday, February 06, 2002
Wow this is really slower than I remember Our ISP at work has been having issues all day long. I managed to get a dialup connection going using my laptop, but haven't had much time to get caught up on news. I did pick up this little tidbit about security in MSN Messenger from today'sLockergnome. You might want to read it. And this tale of spam would be funny if it weren't actually happening! (Via Dane Carlson ) Looks like AOL is back to blocking Trillian again today. I give up, I'm not going to download new versions of Trillian every other day just so I can talk to my wife online. (She's the only AIM user I talk to.) I'll just yell up the stairs at her..*L* Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 1:49 PM | 0 comments |
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Tuesday, February 05, 2002
Tuesday stuff After wasting an evening at Nationwide Arena watching the Blue Jackets lose 8-0 to Boston, (ouch!) I'm back on top of the latest tech stuff this morning. Browser tool protects and educates Web surfers -This seems like it might not be a bad thing to check out. They have a 20 day free trial, you might want to consider checking it out if you're concerned about cookies and web bugs. Another article about the fight against spam. It's pretty amazing how much time and money is being tied up in this issue, but it's important, spam is slowly killing the growth of the internet. New users inundated with spam never get over that first impression of the internet. (Especially when you add in the popup ads!) Michael Jardeen writes an open letter to the music industry. I have to agree with him, I'm not nearly as big a music collector as he, but I can't see any reason to ever buy a copy-protected CD. Lately, most of my music has been coming from independent labels anyway, as main stream labels put out generally crappy music that I can hear almost at will by tuning the radio, if I wanted to! In my cd's I'm much more interested in bands that aren't on the radio. (link via Adam Curry) Security hole in mIRC is plugged with the latest upgrade. OK no more cruising the blog stuff, I do have some actual work to do. Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 9:14 AM | 0 comments |
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Monday, February 04, 2002
Communication breakdown day at work... A couple of mass-media articles about blogging today. One from Time Magazine about Blogger and one from the BBC about blogs and the Bloggie awards. The BBC also reported over the weekend about A security risk in Morpheus that could leave everything on your hard drive accessible to other file sharers. Why does this not surprise me at all? Dave Winer lists his two rules of integrity. I'd add one more, if you are proven to be wrong in something you wrote publicly, admit it publicly, don't just make the post disappear. :) I would like to think that if I made a mistake and someone was "kind" enough to point it out, I would correct myself. Admitting when you're mistaken is a big part of having integrity. Today's an interesting day that describes perfectly why I hate this place. I'm in my office working on end-of-month reporting from the database. The new envelope printer is being installed in a co-worker's office. Her boss gave the go ahead to install it there, but apparently, never bothered to tell her. He's off out of town on a business trip so others are left explaining it to her. No one has bothered to come and get me to make sure the printer actually works, which when they came in to install the demo, it didn't. The VP in charge of making this buying decision asked me to oversee the demo, at which point I told her "they left without it ever working properly, there's no way I could recommend buying a printer that has shown an inability to work with Windows NT." She decided to buy it anyway, and together with this other VP decided to put it in this woman's office, hooked up to an NT machine, that they couldn't get it to work with the first time. I did instruct the two people who will actually have to use this thing to not let the guys leave until they were completely satisfied that it worked, and that they could test it. I'm betting that won't happen either. I'm also betting that come Thursday, when they need to print envelopes again, I'll be the one who has to figure out how to make it work, when it doesn't work, and that will all somehow be my fault. Also today, Angela and I got our tickets from the President for the Blue Jackets game on Weds. night. One of our vendors has volunteered use of their luxury box for the evening, not a bad deal at all. Of course, being that even something good that comes from work has to be ruined, we are being joined by 5 other people from work, several of whom I have had ongoing "professional differences" with, and will need to confront these people with their technical screw-ups before Weds. evening, which will make the social event such a tension-filled time for everyone involved, I'm sure. I may have to just put off those impending conflicts until after Weds., but I may not be able to do that with all of them. Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 10:51 AM | 0 comments |
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Sunday, February 03, 2002
Hmm Makes you wonder, during this past year with everything going on, and troops in the Middle East fighting terrorism, and then a team named the Patriots wins the Super Bowl? It's a good story, but almost too good, ya' know? I'm sure the conspiracy theorists will be having a field day with it. Oh well, let 'em, it was nice to see the underdog win, and it was exciting for the last 5 minutes anyway. :) Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 10:07 PM | 0 comments |
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More nice stuff My wife got me an early Valentine's present today. Well actually we got each other early Vday presents, because she wanted a nice cardigan sweater she had seen on sale. So I took her with me to pick it out, (No freakin' way am I buying her clothes by myself, the chances of getting that right are about as good as Microsoft releasing software without bugs!) and in turn she gave me the gift she had gotten me. A 1938 Heritage Club printing of Tale of Two Cities, with the Heritage Club newsletter that came with the book still stuck inside the cover. Very nicely done by a woman who obviously loves me! Picked up from Notes from the Cave today that the Microsoft Windows 2000 Security Rollup Package automatically includes the Outlook 2000 Security Patch that gave people problems when they discovered the could no longer run any executables. You might want to keep that in mind. Looks like the AOL cat and mouse with Trillian took the weekend off. I guess no one capable of making a decision at AOL works weekends, eh? *L* Where's Scoble been lately? His blog hasn't been updated much at all, hope everything is ok! It appears that Blogger Pro is going through some sort of growing pain at the moment, and my posts are not being published over to this site. Hopefully I'll be able to get this posted to the site fairly soon! Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 4:49 PM | 0 comments |
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