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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, March 02, 2002
It's a small world afterall.. Now that I've probably gotten that song stuck in your head for the rest of the weekend, (and mine!!!) I was struck this morning by feedback from fellow bloggers who, it turns out, I have something in common with! First came the comment from Gary Petersen that he discovered blogging at Gnomedex last year too! Then I opened up my email to find an note from Marie McBride, (which also happens to be my grandmother's name) a blogger from the DC area. Maybe we're related in some sort of bizarre way? *L* More new blogging friends! Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 1:18 PM | 0 comments | 
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Friday, March 01, 2002
When did this become a community? Mike Sanders, blogging's philosopher in residence, has been having cross-blog conversations about "community". Being in that same thoughtful mode I was yesterday, (What can I say, my work is lacking in the intellectual challenge department right now!) I would like to add my thoughts on community: When I first discovered the idea of "blogging", it seemed like something I wanted to do for two basic reasons. Like most humans, my reasons were split equally among selfish reasons and altruistic reasons. On the selfish front, I wanted to be able to keep a log, or record of things I read, sites I came across, etc. Sometimes, in my job, I find myself needing information that I know I saw somewhere last week. Well keeping a blog where I could note those things seemed like a great way to do that. Also, it seemed that, rather than keeping those notes in a Word document or something like that, it would be infinitely more useful to throw it online and share it with other people who probably have the same problems! OK, cool, off I go! (By the way my first encounter with blogging came via Robert Scoble's presentation at Gnomedex last year!) So, you see, at first, I really wasn't conscious of the "community" aspect of blogging. I noted things that I had learned, or resources that I thought were useful, and those were my first blog entries on this site.(since gone) I began to read other blogs, and note things I read there that were interesting, etc. I started getting traffic, just a handful of people per day, and that was fine. I hoped that they were getting something out of these notes. Eventually I put up a comments system so they could let me know if they did find something useful, or even suggest something I had missed. I was acutely aware that I could not cover all of the internet by myself. And trying was just going to lead to making my new bride angry and miserable, not really something I wanted to do! It seemed like just a little thing, but I enjoyed it, and was learning all the time from it, so that was all good. Then came Dec 4, 2001. That was the day Chris made mention of the blog in Lockergnome. (for the first time, as it turns out I've been mentioned again, as you know if you were here earlier this week!) That brought instant traffic and some level of notoriety, which I was woefully unprepared for, but which, IMHO, I dealt with fairly well. I vowed to work hard on this blog and keep it informative for the new folks who came and liked what they saw, especially the one's who took the time to leave me comments or email me to that effect. Obviously the traffic levels didn't stay that high all the time, but a decent number of folks (25-30 maybe?) started to become regular, if not in leaving comments, at least in reading. (I've seen your IP addresses, I know who you are, sort of *L*) That number started going up, other bloggers started to stop by, and link to me, even engaging me in cross-posting conversations. (Blogversations?) Before you know it, I was part of a blogging community. What does it mean of be part of a blogging community? Well it's just like other communities, it has it's good points and it's bad points. There's an inate pressure to keep going, getting better, becoming more relevant, because now people are reading, people want to know what I think, what I've seen, what I've learned today. I've not always dealt with that sort of pressure well, (I'm not exactly the picture of confidence and self-esteem!) but I am trying! But overall, it's a plus! I love sharing ideas and getting feedback from people, agreeable or not. Let's face it, hearing just your own commentary, day after day, gets a little old. We all need to be challenged to hear different voices, mull over different ideas. I love that about the people who have become part of this community. No, I'm not an A-list blogger, and I probably never will be, but that's hardly what I set out to do, so I can't be overly disappointed by that. But I have found a niche, a growing niche even, of folks who are excited by learning about technology, share my frustrations and joys of working in IT, folks who I can share my knowledge with, and who freely share their own with me. It fills a void in my life, because, as the title suggests, I don't have a network of peers at work. I miss that, badly! It also gives me the opportunity to make friends with some folks. That's never a bad thing. Especially to someone who is, well "socially awkward" might be a good way of putting it. It's a level of shyness beyond just "shy", ok? ;) And even though I may never meet any of you in real life, (although if I do get to make my Des Moines/Fargo/Denver drive this summer, and someone wants to put me up for a night or offer a place to grab a shower and a hot meal during the trip, I'm listening...*L*) I do consider the input you have here, and the stories we all share on our own little corners of the web, to be just as interesting, and fun, as sitting in a pub drinking a pint of Guinness and sharing stories in real life. (Yeah I'm Irish, I like Guinness, so what?!? *L*) Thank you all for making this so much fun! Here's to years and years together, and more and more additions to our "community"! *lifting my pint* Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 3:43 PM | 0 comments |
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Morning news Security holes found in PHP scripting language -Gee and it's not even a Microsoft scripting language? Just goes to show, totally secure, bug-free stuff is not that easy! Britney Worm warning -It's not very widespread now, but I'm willing to bet the same idiots who were dying to get a pic of Anna are the same ones opening and running this one hoping for a glimpse of Britney. Have iPod, Will Secretly Bootleg -Man if this really happened where a kid walked into a CompUSA with his iPod and starting copying software off the display Mac's, computer stores have a problem! Geocites to end FTP service for free users. Great, now I've got to figure out some other way to have a blog on my Child Abuse site. Like Yahoo hasn't become enough of a pain with their non-stop invasive advertising, now this? The details are in and the new site for Gnomedex 2002 went live last night. It's all being held in downtown Des Moines this year, no more shuttle bus! Although that does mean we won't get to enjoy Nathan's driving this year. I'm seriously hoping I can get there again this year, it's still too far out to tell for sure. But if it's anything like last year, you need to get there! Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 9:22 AM | 0 comments |
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Thursday, February 28, 2002
Just thoughts and stuff This post by Meryl Yourish, called Yes, I am a Jew is really powerful stuff. It also has left me feeling rather melancholy, and thoughtful today. (Scary isn't it?) Not that I'm Jewish, nor have I ever dealt with people who hate me for no reason than my ethnicity. But it does have me wondering about how people hate things they don't understand. Or are afraid of things they don't understand. Plenty of people don't understand computers, or the internet, and hate them based on that alone. I deal with people at work every day who are afraid of the PC sitting on their desk. Not only are they afraid of it, but they're afraid of me, I think because I understand the thing sitting on their desk. I don't consider myself to be a very unfriendly person, or intimidating in any way, yet I'm constantly being told to try and be less intimidating to people here. Yeah I'm not an outgoing, always smiling kind of guy, but I'm hardly intimidating. But I honestly think that by virtue of being the only IT person here, that no one really understands what I do and how I do it, so that's scary to them. I could see why that would scare management, afterall if I go away, there's quite a bit of knowledge that walks out with me, but they don't appear conscious of that. Throw in the fact that I am responsible for monitoring and enforcing our security policies, especially concerning internet access, which is an intimidating position to be in, I guess. But none of it explains why people are afraid to come and ask me a question. If I had a question about an issue with our members, I would go ask the people in Membership who know more about that than I do, the same with a communication issue or a legal question. And everyone does that with everyone else, too. There's no shame in asking a question of someone who knows more than you do, but people don't want to come and ask me. Apparently they're afraid I'll yell at them or something. For the record, I have never yelled at anyone, I have been short with some people on rare occasions, but there were good reasons for that, and most of those people don't work here anymore! But I do demand that they get to the point when asking me something, and that they have thought about what they're asking before they talk to me about it. (You're not really in my office to ask how my day's going, no one ever does that with me, so if I know you're about to ask me something just get to it already!) Maybe being held accountable to that is scary to some people. Some have suggested that people are afraid because they don't want to appear stupid, and since they don't understand technology at all, they'd rather ask someone who won't know how little they understand...? Ok, I could buy that, but let's get this straight co-workers, I already know how little you know and I don't care! I don't think you're stupid because you don't know as much about technology as I do. I don't know as much about your job as you do, and I don't think I'm stupid. ;) Are there times that you do something stupid with technology that makes me have to work to fix it? Yeah, and they aggravate me. But I do it too! In fact, when I do it, it's 10 times worse than when you do it because I have enough access to make grand fuck-ups that you can't even imagine! You may have to call me when a folder sits on your keyboards ESC key and the computer keeps beeping at you, (and I'll blog it and laugh at it, but I do that to mine too!) but have you ever had to restore the entire database from backups because you ran a modification script and put in the wrong variable, thus making the modifciation to every record instead of just a handful? I have. Have you ever spent a day dealing with a network server rebooting itself only to find that it was happening because you forgot to re-apply the service pack after setting up RAS? I have. Have you ever had to hand enter everyone's user information back into a server because the Emergency Repair Disk you had was corrupt and you hadn't checked it lately? I have. The bottom line, take yourself a little less seriously, we all screw things up from time to time. Laugh at it, revel in it, it can all be fixed, even if I do get annoyed with you for it! Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 3:25 PM | 0 comments |
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Bad Legislation Never Dies:
Senate group to consider copy controls Yes it's back! The SSSCA bill! Learn more about it here. If you want the government completely involved in making sure you don't break any potential laws with your PC, then feel free to ignore this. But if you feel like the government has gone too far in considering putting a trojan horse on your PC to monitor everything you do with it, it's time to stand up for your rights! Speaking of government intrusion, my wife tells me there was a good episode of Law and Order last night dealing with technology and privacy issues. It sounded pretty interesting, too bad I went to bed early. Did anyone see it, or were you all too busy watching Work lesson for the day, boys and girls...if you have a problem with the printer, especially if it's a network printer, it's not ok to simply reset it to factory defaults and try to print again! The factory default IP address is not available over our network. So now, no one can print to it, and your kind system admin is going to have to go through more documentation to figure out how to reset the IP address because he hasn't had to do it since they were installed back in 2000. What part of asking someone before you decided to do something as drastic as reset the default values for a printer did you not understand? OK it turned out to relatively simple using the HP JetDirect software, but that was a good 30 minutes that no one could print because of someone else's mistake. I just read that dooce.com got fired for stuff she said about co-workers on her website. Hmm, I might have to be careful about what I say here, huh? Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 9:03 AM | 0 comments |
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Wednesday, February 27, 2002
Wow.. Just when I spent last night thinking that my site traffic had slowed down somewhat since the outage this weekend, Chris mentions me in Today's Lockergnome along with seven other blogs that he visits but which aren't well known. (And are very good by the way!) Thanks Chris, and thanks for stopping by all you Gnomies, hope to see you in Des Moines for Gnomedex 2002! Should be a relatively quiet day at work today, unless something breaks, of course. It's not quite the end of the month, when I'd have to put my DBA hat on, so I should be able to have my Researcher hat on and check out the tech news online and what not. There aren't any outstanding projects that I'm working on, and no one is currently waiting on me for anything. This is, indeed, a rarity. How long before someone is down in my office with some bizarre request? Anyone want to start a pool? *L* Update : Not 20 minutes after I posted that, I got a request that requires me to go digging through some old printer documentation, so much for my quiet day, and the pool is off. ;) In that news I found these little tidbits: If Morpheus Is Illegal, So Is The Rest Of The Net - EFF -It's an interesting legal argument, obviously if the file-sharing software is illegal because it allows people to do something illegal, than Microsoft and AOL are obviously at fault too, because they provide the computers and the internet connection to conduct illegal activity. I think they might just have a point. Of course none of it matters because the record companies are going to go the "copy protected CD" route pretty soon anyway, so that'll make it harder for casual copying. They'll just treat all consumers as potential criminals in order to protect their $$. Steven gives us the Myth of Tech Support. How very true! Except he leaves out the bit about how your customer satisfaction goes up because you're making it appear that your tech support is better, so you sell more product which increases the number of calls you get to the point where your satisfaction ratings go down again and you get fired. *L* Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 8:42 AM | 0 comments |
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Tuesday, February 26, 2002
Communicate! Just had the telephone vendor out to do some analog line installs. Our graphic designer asked my wife about what we were doing to the phone line in his office. She told him we were putting in a modem line now, so if the T1 connection ever goes down he'll be able to get a dialup connection in his office. He walked down to my office and said "I had to ask Angela to find out what's going on around here." Me- "My boss told me to put it in, that your boss had asked for it." Him- "Oh they never mentioned it to me." Me- "Of course not.." *rolling eyes* Is it just me or was yesterday's Foxtrot strip too geeky for general newspaper consumption? How many people in the world could that have appealed to? Dan Bricklin has his own venture into the articles about weblogs fray. It doesn't suck, probably because Dan is actually a blogger. :) Teens drink quarter of all alcohol consumed in US . "The Columbia center's director of policy research, Susan Foster, said the group would recommend an end to all television ads for alcohol, which would include beer as well as spirits. But she acknowledged NBC's decision complicated the situation. "It's certainly going to be an uphill battle. But what we hope to do is break open a national dialogue," Foster said. -What do you think the chances of that dialogue including someone who thinks the drinking age should be lowered back to 18 will be? Yeah I doubt it too, but if you take out 18-20 year olds, I wonder how much the overall numbers become much less of an issue? Plus it's hard to take such a stupid law seriously. How do you take an 18 year old kid, who can vote, get married, own a house, join the military and die for his country and tell him that it's wrong for him to have a beer? Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 3:54 PM | 0 comments |
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Every Day Annoyances Here's a couple of online annoyances: First, I forgot to grab the classified section from Sunday's Columbus Dispatch on the way to work yesterday. So I wander over to their website, go through the classifieds section, get to the employment section and tell it to show me all the Computer-type jobs from Sunday's paper. Of the 25 or so jobs that were in the paper, only 5 of them were in the online list. Why bother having your job search stuff online if you're not going to include all of the stuff that was in the paper? Item 2: Verizon Wireless sent my wife a direct mail piece, offering her a new service plan. Included on the flyer was the instructions to visit their website for more information on this plan. When you get to their website and go to the page they tell you to go to for this information on this plan, the information consists of a .pdf of the same direct mail piece she already has. How is that "more information"? It just goes to show, clueless marketing people are still out there and still running too many places. In other news: If things continue to be a problem with my current host I might have to think about moving over to Christine's new enterprise, Blogomania. She's offering web hosting now, at reasonable prices. The best thing about it, though, is that you'll be hosted by someone who "gets" blogging and would have some knowledge of how various blogging software needs to interact with the host server. Of course my plan is prepaid so moving would actually cost me even more money, on the other hand they are talking about switching everyone to Linux servers which would kill my asp comments system and my asp stats, so there'd be a whole lot of work for me to do anyway if they do that. Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 8:50 AM | 0 comments |
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Monday, February 25, 2002
AIM/Trillian insights? Can AOL Make Money from IM?. In light of the ever-continuing fight between Trillian and AOL, let's look at some lines from the story: "The three -- America Online's AIM, Microsoft's MSN Messenger and Yahoo!'s Messenger -- have all started adding display ads to users' buddy lists" -but only one is actively blocking other IM programs from using their service, MSN and Yahoo obviously don't feel like they're losing enough in ad revenues to make it a worthwhile fight. "The America Online Internet division, which runs the AIM service, has reported flat revenues in the fiscal fourth quarter -- $2.26 billion, up from $2.06 billion -- mostly from subscription, advertising and commerce revenues. Against that backdrop, many believe the division's priority is to turn the AIM platform into a profit center" -The question is, how? "The most significant sign of AOL's plans for the IM infrastructure came when the company teamed up with New York-based ActiveBuddy to launch a comprehensive marketing campaign for New Line Cinema's The Lord of the Rings trilogy" -So the cross-promotion using bots is how they plan on making money off AIM, but why block part of your audience for that cross-promotion? Wouldn't trillian users be just as likely to use the LOTR bot to learn more about the movie? ...a bunch more stuff about cross promotion and then this line, almost as a throw-away: "Because the bots can actually be programmed to initiate a conversation, they are potentially a valuable tool for AOL's e-commerce partners to direct shoppers and Web surfers to Web sites" -Could it be that Trillian users would be able to connect to AIM and AOL would not have the ability to initiate "spam" conversations using bots? Wouldn't AOL sending you instant messages from bots irritate the hell out of you? Wouldn't you then switch to Trillian if you could connect to your AIM buddy list and not have to put up with the spam-bots? Could that be the real reason for the AIM blocking? It seems to me, however, that AOL would be able to initiate a conversation with you no matter where you logged in from, people on your buddy list can when you use Trillian. But then I think about the Yahoo features that don't work when you use Trillian, because it doesn't know you are online.... so maybe not? Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 2:12 PM | 0 comments |
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Monday morning quarterback So what did I miss over the weekend? Angela enjoyed her birthday weekend. Thanks to the handful of folks who got through the site troubles here to wish her a happy birthday. I appreciate it! She had her own thanks to them on her site, but I wanted to thank Steven, Josh, Frank, Gene and Rogi for going over there and leaving comments. Yes, the movie was that bad. It didn't even make sense! For once, I agree with most of the critics who roasted this movie. *L* Today was a staff meeting Monday, and as usual, it was useless. The President thanked everyone upstairs for their hard work in getting their offices packed up and then unpacked in the context of their getting new carpet, no mention of all the PC's and printers I moved for people. I know it's petty, but I was the only person who worked on all of that who didn't get new carpet for my efforts, so a thank you was not out of line. It was a simple, small thing that would have made his one and only IT person slightly more happy about working here, and he couldn't be bothered to do it. Also not out of line would have been checking your facts. He also announced that a consultant would be taking up what is now our "member office" (An open office that our members can use while they're in the building on our business.) and that our member office would now be in another space, which is "fully-equipped" the same way. It's not, there's no analog line for use with a modem in the new space. Since most of the time the member office is being used by people to connect to the internet or their office's network, a modem line is sort of important. I guess I have to call the telephone vendor to get one installed, since management couldn't have been bothered to inform me of the decision, or check about what is actually there. Again, it's small and petty, but it's symptomatic of how little respect I get here. Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 10:51 AM | 0 comments |
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Sunday, February 24, 2002
Movie time Angela and I capped off her birthday weekend with a trip to the movies today. Queen of the Damned was the choice for today, and let me tell you, it was not a good one. First off, let me say this, Aaliyah as Akasha and Stuart Townsend as Lestat were very good. Much better than I expected. Too bad they got wrapped into such a horrible story! Now let me preface this by saying I have read the Vampire Chronicles, and this is not just a "the movie wasn't as good as the book" reaction to the movie. No, I expected that going in, it's true 95% of the time so it wouldn't have surprised me if it were true in this case. But most of those movies take one of 2 plans. Either they keep the story in tact, or they pick out parts of it and only show that. In this case, one of those would have been preferable to making references to storylines that you don't go on to explain. When Akasha says she is going to see Maharet to "settle an old score", you would expect the movie to describe what that score is, wouldn't you? You'd be wrong, in fact you'd be wrong if you were looking for any explanation of where Akasha and Maharet came from. They are just "there". As are a handful of other 'ancients" who show up towards the end of the movie with Maharet but are never explained nor introduced. For those of you who are fans of the books, let me tell you that most of the story is taken from The Vampire Lestat, not what you would think from the title. Very little of the movie's story is taken from The Queen of the Damned, just the character of Akasha, in a very superficial way. The rest of the history of the vampire race, is referenced in some off the cuff comments, (like Akasha's above, or the coven line "All of the ancients were burnt up years ago") but completely ignored on the whole. That's rather lame, because it was that part of the story that I truly wanted to see, and which most Anne Rice fans will want to see. That will be disappointing to them, and the hard core among them will be truly angry over this portrayal, I imagine. I'd advise you to pass on this one, it will only leave you disappointed. And I'll tell you that in this case, not only is the book better, but the book is the only story that makes any sense, so read that instead. Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 7:41 PM | 0 comments |
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