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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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| Friday, November 07, 2003
Tech blogs In response to that last post, Craig emailed and asked if I would recommend some tech blogs that are good for keeping up with the news. Well, since I know darned well that if I started listing tech blogs I'd leave somebody out I figured I'd do two things. First, I'd point you to the blogroll to the right. If you're reading this in an aggregator or in email you'll need to swing by the page to get a look at it. Secondly, I've uploaded the OPML file that includes all the feeds currently sitting in my news aggregator at work. Go ahead, grab it and import it to yours and see what the differences are between what you read and what I read. Leave a comment if your OPML file is online as well, so I can grab it! (Or email me if you want to submit one and I'll post it on this site.) Between these two lists, I think I've got just about everything that I read on a daily basis, and then, of course, I follow links to interesting stuff from these all the time as well. Happy reading! Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 1:08 PM | 0 comments | 
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The power of blogs in small business Yesterday, late in the day, I got some email from a mailing list I had joined a couple of years ago and that I had pretty much given up for dead, since it's been a few months since I heard anything from it. The list is a listserv discussion list run by a statewide organization that is designed to let the tech folks for the various associations within the state to discuss tech issues. The first email was from someone worried about virii. Seems he had been inundated recently with the fake MS security patch emails, and undeliverable mail messages. Now he didn't run any of the attachments and had his Anti-Virus up to date and ran it over everything so he was fairly sure he didn't have a virus, but he couldn't really explain all these "bounces" from messages that he hadn't sent in the first place. Immediately on the heels on this message came two messages from other folks telling him that if he was getting bounces, he probably had a virus. Now how involved these folks are in day to day IT operations is debatable, but by nature of being on this list, I would assume they are somewhat involved and somewhat responsible for the technology in use at their various offices. I crafted a response to his original message, explaining to him how some of the latest variants of virii out there were "spoofing" the From field and how they were doing it, and why his address would show up as the sender, and how mail systems where the mail was undeliverable or had a virus attached would simply respond to the message, thereby sending the bounce or warning back to him, etc. I resisted the urge to tell him, and all the others on the list to read some tech blogs once in a while so they could keep up with news like this! That's how I do it, and I was completely prepared to deal with this exact situation when it occurred here. Just a thought.. Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 8:36 AM | 0 comments |
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Thursday, November 06, 2003
Sam's Club The wife and I were tripping through one of the local Sam's Club's last night, and as usual, I decided to skip over to the computer area and see what they had going on. (Especially in light of the fact that a certain holiday is coming up and I need to start looking for gift suggestions for folks to get me.) I noticed that they had a few items where you pick up the little piece of paper with the product id, description and price on it and take it to the check out and then they'll go get the actual merchandise for you. Except there was one item where they were out of little tags and so I wasn't even sure how much the item was, although my theory that they were out of tags because the item was very well-priced compared to normal pricing was borne out when I took a look at their website this morning. How about a Western Digital 120GB USB 2.0 external HD for $179.83. Considering that the last time I went looking for this type of an item I spotted a 40GB for around $150, this doesn't seem like a bad deal at all. Update: Oh yeah, my wife's comment reminds me about the other odd thing at Sam's, but since it didn't involve any technology, I completely forgot about it! She, being a complete sucker for all things Christmas, decided that we needed to stroll through the display of Christmasy-type stuff. As we strolled through we came upon a very nice manger scene complete with all the characters from said scene, Joseph, the wise men, the animals, Mary holding the... Wha??!? Mary holding nothing? Someone stole the baby Jesus from the manger scene! Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 1:03 PM | 0 comments |
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Wednesday, November 05, 2003
What's this? A technology company engaging in anti-competitive behavior. The installation for their software makes sure that their peripheral will only operate with said software and disable it's ability to communicate with the competitor's software. Why that no good lousy, Bill.. What's that? Oh it's Apple. Nevermind.... Yes that was sarcasm, personally, I don't use iTunes or Musicmatch, and don't own an iPod so I could really care less about what Apple does with this stuff. Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 2:20 PM | 0 comments |
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Another thing Oh, in addition to what I said below, lying to your IT person about what you may have done to create a problem, is also not a good idea if you want cheerful service! Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 1:23 PM | 0 comments |
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A note to end users Now, normally the things I write about here are for other IT folks, sharing information, commiserating about work, or software companies, stuff like that. Today, however, I want to take a moment to talk to the end users and offer up some advice. Now I offer this advice for a very simple reason. When other people in your group make a mistake, you should all learn from it, so please, understand that this is being written in a spirit of cooperation, sharing, and a desire to see you get the IT support that you want. When you need help with a computer problem, you are probably not going to get the best service your IT person can give you if, in the process of asking for his help, you refer to that help as "all that technical bullshit". I'm betting that if someone, say, at a party, referred to what you do for a living as "bullshit", you might be a little peeved, irritated, or maybe downright angry, right? If I wrote something about all the legal bullshit, or all that medical bullshit, I'd probably have an online army of lawyers or doctors making their way here to royally flame my butt, and I'm betting that if one of them happened to be my doctor, he might not be very cheery the next time I'm in for a check-up. I can pretty much guarantee that calling what they do "all that technical bullshit" is not going to get you a very cheery response from your IT folks. Keep it in mind... Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 9:30 AM | 0 comments |
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Tuesday, November 04, 2003
Trillian funkiness I've been having on and off problems connecting to Yahoo using Trillian, looks like maybe Yahoo is playing games with trillian users now. I've had to switch to different servers twice in the last 3 days, and I'm not holding out much hope that this is going to stop. There's more in the trillian forums If you usually contact me through Yahoo, you might want to look for me on MSN or ICQ instead. . Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 8:53 AM | 0 comments |
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Monday, November 03, 2003
Lockergnome I said earlier that I was reserving judgement on the new Lockergnome layouts and things until after I've used them for awhile, and I intend to do just that. However, one thing that is irritating me (And today, everything is irritating me, so maybe it's just my mood.) is that the RSS feed for the IT Specialist content always shows up as new in NewsDesk, no matter that it hasn't been new since last week, and that I've marked it "read" in NewsDesk time and time again. Update: Once I got a comment that confirmed I wasn't the only one seeing this, I went ahead and dropped an email to the feedback address for their site. Meryl was kind enough to let me know that she would pass along the info to the proper "behind the scenes" folks to get it corrected! Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 1:39 PM | 0 comments |
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De-Spam I've already spent a good 30-45 minutes going through all the spam that my boss collected over the weekend. She seems to get more than most folks here, or at least seems more irritated by it, so I tried to go through it all and come up with some Outlook rules that will make things a little bit better. I think, given the inordinate number of emails for online prescription drugs, that the keyword filters I've put in place should definitely help matters. We'll see. It was definitely a situation to note for moving to Outlook 2003 with it's built-in spam blocking tools, but that's a discussion for a later time, by far. Not exactly how I wanted to start my Monday morning though, weeding through spam! Let's hope the rest of the day is better, especially since it's time to run all those month-end reports! Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 9:44 AM | 0 comments |
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