The Many Faces of Mike McBride

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Saturday, May 18, 2002

Andy Rooney?

My wife, after reading that last post, came to me last night and said "That was a little too Andy Rooney for my tastes, what happened to my husband?". Ouch! OK, I admit it, I've been taking life a little too fucking seriously. Time to crank up a Too Much Joy CD and remember that life is nothing, if not entertaining!

Of course being at work on a Saturday doesn't help me take life less seriously but the 4 hours I get to take off to drive to Cincinnati for a concert on Tuesday sure will!

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Friday, May 17, 2002

Thoughts for the weekend

Random cantankerous thoughts that I've thought this week:

People who feel the need to remind you how open minded they are, aren't.

It's probably time to bail when the association you work for decides that the very core of what it does, isn't something they can sell to people and their own marketing people start looking at "revenue we can get from advertising on our site and in our publications" instead of spending time trying to sell memberships based on what we actually do.

There was a time when advertisers said that "half of all ad dollars are wasted, we just don't know which half." I think they will soon come to realize that it's much more than half. Case in point, we bought a six pack of El Salvadoran beer a few weeks ago based on a coworker's recommendation. I've never seen any advertisements for it. I see Budweiser advertisements everyday. I don't remember the last time I bought Budweiser.

As much as blogging makes instantaneous publishing easy, there's something to be said for processing your thoughts into a cohesive pattern before writing them down. That's why, when I'm at Gnomedex I won't be updating on the fly. I'll be taking notes with pen and paper and typing my full thoughts out later that night.

How many people have written about the "evils" of Hollywood and the Recording Industry? How many times have you seen talk about how they just don't "get it" and we were going to band together and make them see that we wouldn't stand for what they are trying to do? How many of those same people lined up like good little sheep Thursday for Episode 2? Proving that living up to principles really isn't all that easy when it interferes with a good time, right?

Speaking of the movies, how much can bootleg movies on the internet be hurting your business when you rake in 27 million dollars in one day? Which is what we really should be asking of Hollywood instead of making boycott threats that they know we wouldn't follow through on.

As a last movie note, I don't really care if Natalie Portman is "hot" in the movie. If a "hot" actress was the main attraction to a movie I might have actually liked Eyes Wide Shut, which I didn't.

Lastly, just about everyone agrees that the way to end any dispute is to sit down and listen to the other side and understand them. What happens when the other side's opinion is that you are evil and must be destroyed? Do you agree and let them destroy you, or do you kill them before they kill you?

Ok I gotta get some sleep, enough ranting for now :).

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About that patch

Re: The IE patch.

According to Brian's comment , the IE patch for version 5.X doesn't actually fix one of the vulnerabilities. As well, Chris mentions that the patch may break Pane views in Outlook 2000 & 2002. Which just goes to prove my theory that anything MS or any other company releases should be given a few days or weeks, to let other people be the guinea pigs. :)

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Interesting. Not true, but interesting.

I don't usually step up to defend Microsoft. I don't usually bash Microsoft either. I try to basically stay out of those arguments. But when an article comes along trying to use the new licensing program as a way to bash Microsoft by not telling the truth, I have to say something. I have to say something because I've taken the time to learn about the licensing program and talk to some of the MS people about it, and these statements are just not completely accurate:

"According to Gartner research from May 2001, released soon after Microsoft first detailed its Software Assurance plan, some enterprise customers who typically upgrade their Microsoft Office software every four years would pay an estimated 68 percent to 107 percent more if they switched from their current upgrade licensing plan to Software Assurance. "

That is accurate, but the people I talked to, even the sales people at MS told me if we planned on doing it that way we'd be better off not using Software Assurance, that we'd spend less money by skipping upgrades and buying the latest version at the full price when/if we were ready to upgrade again. They were much more interested in making sure we had something that works for us than they were in trying to force us to sign up for SA, because it didn't make sense to if you only upgrade every 5 years, like we have.

"People will find themselves in a quandary. They will have to upgrade before they are ready, and that will cause some problems," said Dan Kusnetzky, vice president of systems software research at IDC.

No, not really, once an upgrade is released that you're eligible for, you have rights to that version forever. There's no rule that says you have to upgrade to that version right then and there. But you do have the licensing rights for that version for whenever you do want to upgrade, and you have rights to run any previous version in the meantime.

Dean Sheley, network administrator of Southeast Technical Institute in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, said the school recently made the switch to Office XP and is already planning for its server migration to Windows .Net when it is release later this year.

As an academic institution, Southeast Technical gets deeper discounts from Microsoft than most enterprise customers. Nevertheless, Sheley described Microsoft's licensing system as "a pain," and said he has considered replacing some Microsoft software with alternatives such as Linux.

The funny thing here is, this is exactly the sort of place that benefits from SA, but they don't even see it. I mean really, if you're going to be making every upgrade, isn't it easier to know you're going to pay XX amount every year and have every upgrade than it is to budget for upgrades only after they come out?

No it's not for everyone, but, at least the people I've talked to recognize that and are more than happy to tell you not to sign up for it if it doesn't make sense for you. If you're going to critique it, complain about the fact that outside of SA you're paying full price for upgrades, there is no upgrade pricing anymore. (There really isn't upgrade pricing within SA either, your "discount" really depends on how often MS upgrades.) That's an accurate critique, but the article doesn't talk about that, instead it talks about how MS is forcing everyone to sign up, even when it's going to cost more, and that just isn't true in my experience. How about, instead of interviewing people who obviously haven't studied the program, you interview people who understand it and have legitimate complaints? Wouldn't that be novel?

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Thursday, May 16, 2002

In the news:

So the government is pushing smart cards as a way to protect against terrorism, right? Well they should read this story, Smart-card security needs an upgrade. -seems those little wonders are easily hacked into. How nice would it be to have someone steal your smart card ID and have easy access to your identity?

Microsoft has released a new "monster patch" for IE. You can read about it here or get the patch here. -BTW, the story actually has a link to the advisory on TechNet, exactly the sort of thing we've been complaining about them not doing here. Maybe someone at C-Net or Yahoo is reading this blog? :)

I've actually seen this virus hoax come into our work email. You would think that after Sulfnbk.exe was proven a hoax people would think twice about deleting a file just because some dude said to in an email. Luckily my users knew better and checked with me first. Good little users, for now!

My wife's site, for those of you who may be wondering, is experiencing some technical difficulties. Her free hosting provider, aka her brother, is, apparently, out of town. I'm sure she'll have plenty to blog about when it comes back, but I cannot say when that will be. Hopefully soon!

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Wednesday, May 15, 2002

Let's hear it for Compaq!

Ok at least for today let's hear it for Compaq getting that hard drive to me by 9:30 this morning and allowing me to get the machine re-imaged and updated and patched and ready to go by 2:00PM. That rocks. The only bad news was that the .pst file got corrupted in the move and I wasn't able to import back in the old email to the new drive. After I ran the Inbox Repair Tool, there was nothing left to import. I hate it when that happens! (I still think we need an Exchange Server so we don't have this problem. Can you believe we still use MS Mail?) Oh well, not having the messages can be overcome, she was just happy that I got the contacts imported correctly. That would have been work!

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Murphy get's even

Things had been running so smoothly around here lately that I was actually beginning to think that when I do decide it's time to leave, (probably next year, I get fully vested in the pension at the end of this year) it probably won't be too big a deal. Then yesterday afternoon happened, and I was proven wrong. First we had a machine that needed to be rebooted because of some memory issues. Upon reboot the user got an "imminent hard drive failure" message. Sure enough she's got the combination Compaq Deskpro with Fujitsu drive that has died on 5-6 other machines in the nearly two years that we've had them. I was able to get her restarted right after lunch (How? I have no idea!), knowing that I'd better call Compaq and order the replacement drive because it was probably only a matter of days. It turned out to be a matter of two hours. Blue screen and a memory dump, restart, works for a few minutes, blue screen and memory dump again. OK, we'll just have her use an older Win98 machine that I've got laying around until the new drive gets here and I can replace it. I go and check on that machine, yeah everything on it works, no problem. Unplug it and haul it up to her office, it won't start. Try again, it freezes during bootup. Try starting in Safe Mode, that works and everything seems ok on the diagnostics, restart, freezes again. Try a step-by-step confirmation startup, freezes looking for a vxd, I think it was. (I didn't write it down that's just what I seem to recall a day later. *L*) So I spend about an hour using a 98 bootdisk and the 98 CD repairing the Windows installation, knowing full well that this is probably going to cause other software not to work and I'm going to be here into the evening reinstalling software, right? Well, actually no, installing the Windows files over top of the existing Windows directory solved the boot problem and didn't appear to break anything. Again, I have no idea why it didn't, I was fully expecting it to. But I'm not complaining.

Hopefully the drive will arrive today so I can get it fixed before she finds something is broken on the 98 machine. :)

Some interesting ideas in the comments this morning, Gary, don't worry I can configure the feed to be the whole post, I was thinking of doing that anyway once it goes into production, because I'm not completely hung up on traffic numbers. :) Keep using the old feed for now, but when I dismiss that one I'll be sure to configure this one to be the whole feed. I like it because it uses the titles, the old one used the first 25 or something characters of the post as the title, which is confusing.

Paul, you're right, having all of the discussions take place in the forums and not in the comments would speed up the page loading, but I'm not sure that enough people would trek over there to actually get a conversation going. I'm having a hard enough time keeping flow to the forums with discussions that aren't part of the regular blog. Making blog discussions go over there would just make it harder for people to leave a quick comment like they can here. I don't want to make things harder for you guys.

Did you know Network Computing has a blog? I didn't until I saw a reference to it at nf0's place this morning.

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Tuesday, May 14, 2002

This is a test, it is only a test..

This is not actually a production feature yet, but take a look at the Beta RSS feed for this blog. How does it look in Radio, and other feed readers? I think it's a little neater than the other one I have going. The one downside is that the links are not the same as the permalinks, so if you point to an entry on your blog using the RSS feed link, once the post moves off the main page, your link won't work any more. You'll have to be careful to come here and use the permalink instead.

I'm not getting rid of the other feed just yet, this is still a beta and while I'm testing it today, I may not continue updating it all the time with the new entries. I'll be sure to let you know when it moves into the production servers of Blogger Pro.

Speaking of RSS, YACCS had to change the URL's of their RSS feeds because someone was spidering the feeds. If you use YACCS and subscribe to your comments feeds, you'll need to grab the new URL's from your control panel. I handle the commenting for a few people's blogs with a YACCS account and use the RSS feeds to keep up with comments easily. It's not a bad feature.

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Hmm is it just me?

For some reason, I seem to be having fits and problems when it comes to the asp parts of this site rendering properly this morning. Apparently I'm the only one, as I've had others test it. So it should be ok for all of you. Let me know if it's not for whatever reason, k? The ASPmail component is not working either, which is what makes me suspicious about whether it really is just me or not. Usually whenever someone leaves a comment, a copy of it is emailed to me, but I haven't gotten any email for the last 2 comments that were entered. Of course, our internet connection is also being flaky this morning, so I'm not sure what is my problem and what isn't anymore!

According to Evan, that earthquake last night was his fault. I think it was nature's way of telling Ev to get to work on finishing the Beta testing of the new BloggerPro publishing engine. :) By the way, they are also Beta testing the RSS feed with the new publishing engine, so the feed address will be changing, hopefully, some time soon. As will the layout of the feed, I hope!

We've already seen the Geek to Gnomedex campaign, which appears to be going along quite nicely, by the way. Are we going to have to start the Robert Scoble to Gnomedex campaign? I sure hope Robert can be there, he was a speaker last year, and was really just an all around nice and fun guy to have around. Robert, what do we have to do to get you back again this year? After the year you've been having since last year's convention you deserve to be there having fun again!

The folks who run Privacy Digest have started a Discussion Board. Obviously people haven't really started using it, but if/when they do, there should be some good ideas floating around in there!

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Monday, May 13, 2002

Is it really Monday again?

Anyway, the search for blogs to link to the Child Abuse blog continues, I added a couple today, but it doesn't seem like blogging the details of everyday life for abuse survivors or people dealing with depression or other obstacles has caught on quite the way I would have thought. Submissions are always welcome, and thanks to Jeff for the link, but we'll move on here for now, k? The search will continue and be documented over there from now on, thanks for your attention! :)

Medley is blogging in response to a discussion going on over at Burningbird's. (Follow the links, get the whole picture.) The Bird's problem with Google is that it can be influenced by weblogs. She sees that as a bad thing, because we could, and sometimes do, contrive to push one side of an issue up the rankings by the way in which we link and write about it. I see that as democracy at it's finest, because unlike network news, or talk radio, (which is just as biased as any blogger may be, IMHO) everyone can get a weblog and contribute to the information Google is indexing. Google isn't a perfect solution to fairness and equality but I don't believe it ever intended to be.

Speaking of free speech, and someone I usually don't agree with, did you catch the latest Dennis Miller rant about freedom of speech? He nails it pretty well, in my opinion. (via Frank McPherson)

Finally, on the workplace front, I'm officially going to be working about a half-day sometime this weekend. I need to purge the database of old records, which is always fun. Actually it's not, it's about 4 hours of the most mind-numbingly dull work you can possibly imagine, since almost all of that 4 hours is made up of making sure no records got marked for deletion that shouldn't have been. The actual purge script takes about 20-30 minutes to run through the whole database, but I've got to be sure it's backed up and double checked to the best of my ability before I run the script. On the plus side, however, I can exchange the 4 hours, and take off on that Tuesday afternoon, the 21st, to get a head start on getting to Cincinnati for the Midnight Oil concert! Sometimes being the IT guy and having to work odd hours to do odd projects does pay off!

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