Ever wonder what you googled a long, long time ago?
If you’ve signed up for a google account, you have that opportunity. I was curious as to what kind of dirt Google had on me, and it’s simple to check on.
From the google home page, sign in. Click on Account:
Under Services, click “Go to web history”
And lo and behold, every search you’ve ever done on Google since you created your google account.
How to keep off Google radar? Sign out of your google account before you search for whatever you’re not supposed to be searching for. And use a different browser in privacy mode: all modern browsers have that feature.
Internet Explorer has come long way since version 6, the super buggy security nightmare. Being a free browser it wasn’t considered edgy or avante garde enough for most IT geeks tastes. Most of you probably made the jump to Mozilla Firefox and never looked back.
As most IT savvy consumers, IT administrators and professionals would agree; none would be caught dead using a built in browser. Because there’s so much it can’t do compared to the free browsers out there.
So I’m here to point out a few things about Internet Explorer that most folks gloss over:
Most companies use IE because it can be customized from a GPO (Group Policy Object) at the domain level. This means custom safe zones, ability to pop in proxy servers, and control over who can install active X components. It’s no surprise that IE is the go to browser for business, it offers customization and tracking. What company doesn’t want that?
2. Most web development firms use IE as their display of choice.
Web firms and design companies also understand that most businesses use IE, which means they have to program a friendly website that’s IE compatible. Mozilla Firefox, even offers a built in “IE tab” emulator for PC’s. Some code simply will not compile nicely with other browsers, so you’re back to IE when you want to see how a website is supposed to be natively displayed.
3. There’s more security updates for IE than any other browser.
Opera, Firefox, Chrome (and derivatives) and sometimes Safari are months behind when it comes to security updates and exploits. Internet Explorer certainly isn’t bulletproof, but it offers built in updates with the Windows operating system updates; so you get to kill two birds with one stone.
4. There’s quite a bit of functionality behind IE
Internet Explorer has a nice tab feature that’s color coded: with each new tab opened under a ‘parent’ tab, the child tabs are color coded so you know which tab is related. Pretty cool? How about the ability to pin Favicons to your taskbar?
HTML5 promises to do many things; among them is replacing Adobe’s flash player. HTML5 also can do a multitude of other things such as enable DirectX video acceleration and full text rendering. Javascripting and and CSS are and will be faster than the free browsers. IE is embracing modern web standards, and is helping to make the internet a prettier place to be.
What does this mean to you? Internet Explorer was once the poor man’s choice for browsers – you want something for business with built in support for such things such as Citrix Xenapp clients, VPN Active X runtimes, Java integration and web design comfort, IE is your best bet.
If you’re in the IT industry, there’s a certain expectation of you. This expectation trickles down to all the folks of a company, and evetually the questions start to surface. At one point, I’m sure I was even guilty of these things, assuming my IT administrator knew what to do. But at the end of the day, I’m just another Joe, just like you. And I’m not a genius. But I have to act like one sometimes.
Knowing every little facet of every software product. EVER made.
This one is annoying because some client will walk up to me, start blabbering about why their real player files won’t convert properly into iTunes, then ask me to convert those files for them. Usually for free, because, “hey, this is the IT guy, he probably knows what I’m talking about”. This isn’t the case folks. I don’t use the same software as everyone, in fact I like using software that’s easy to manage, easy to understand and doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles. In other words, I don’t obfuscate matters by getting some mundane software that requires a new plugin for every file, or visualization feature. And there’s no way I could understand why or what you’re doing with whatever freeware you’ve downloaded online will do with your machine, or how it will perform with your other programs. Seriously, most reputable freeware downloads offer a Q+A section, or a forum, or a ‘How To’ portion of their website, dedicated to click-happy people. This leads back to “If you don’t know, what makes you think I do?”
Backups happen MAGICALLY
I can get my word doc’s off this, right?
Situation: you create a word document on the server at 8:00AM. You nuke it at 8:30PM because you didn’t like it. You come to me at 9:00AM asking me to restore it. This is where my frustration begins, because people can’t seem to fathom the idea that Backups and storage space is somewhat limited. There are times when backups happen, say at night when things are slow or when you’re supposedly not working. Shadow copy is an option, and for the most part I can get what you need, but c’mon. It’s not like I have my finger precariously hovering over a button marked ‘restore’.
Not understanding Scope of IT contract
Where’s the section for hookers and blow?
It’s Sunday night, you get a virus pop up onto your computer. You call your IT guy in a panic. You describe the situation in great detail, something akin to: I was innocently surfing this particular website with slave Leia costumes when BAM! You just downloaded a virus. Now you can’t go onto Ebay to check hockey ticket prices because your IE only has pop ups instead of the usual dicking around you do. After the lengthy explanation, I log into your Antivirus server and notice there’s no new infections on your work machine. I do a lengthy check, update dictionaries, run a malware scanner in the background and you’re still okay. It is around this point that you mention this is your home computer. I somehow gather the strength to bite the insides of my lips in silent rage and calmly tell you that just because you do work on your home computer, it does not mean that I am, in any way, an adminstrator of your home media machine. There is a very clear example I want to use: If your Ford car breaks down, do you take it into the Chevrolet dealership and demand they fix it for free?
Using your gray matter effectively
“Please push all buttons at once”
It’s no secret that some people are just a little more gifted than others. At one point in time I seriously thought the ‘lights out’ conversation between a support guy and a less than intelligent lady was false. Boy was I wrong. If something isn’t working properly, or isn’t starting like it usually does, do a little detective work. It certain saves the time it takes for me to respond, by coming down and turning on your fucking monitor or hitting the red button on your power bar. Just little things like that, or if your mouse isn’t working, try plugging it back in.
Expecting change to happen instantaneously
Is it hammertime yet?
Machines are built to do one thing: take instructions. But that instruction set is bogged down by many contraints: such as availability of memory and hard disk space. Clicking a thousand times in the same ‘OKAY’ box doesn’t help. When your screen doesn’t refresh and dragging a window creates a ghost image, what else do you do? You panic. If you bothered to look at your task manager and found out that itunes was chewing through all your memory, you’d realize if you stopped a few programs you’d actually be able to get some work done. Just give your computer a minute to catch up; take this moment to stare outside or refocus your eyes on something that’s not refreshing every .05 of a milisecond.
If you’re a Chrome user like me, beware of the latest Google Chrome update preceeding 16.0.912.63. This version has a problem with the way the database is sorting through web traffic. It was putting over 20 GB of data of .sst files in
SST files from my experience is like a developer’s placeholder file. Something that acts like cache and gets destroyed as soon as you’re done with it. However, in this case the file never gets destroyed and actually multiplies.
Personally I didn’t even notice until my antivirus seemed like it was stuck in the same directory for over 4 hours. It was then that I noticed the size it was chewing up on my hard drive.
Here’s what didn’t work:
1. Uninstalling – even removing the registry keys with Revo uninstaller for 64 bit machines
2. removing Google sync services and re-applying as I figured it was trying to grab my bookmarks and history
3. Moving the directory elsewhere -it’s not the size of the volume that’ the problem it’s the number of files. Each one being around 2KB, it calculated it would take close to 8 hours to move.
Here’s what did work:
1. Uninstalling Google Chrome
2. Manually deleting the files via an elevated command line (akin to del *.sst)
It does take some time, mine was little more than 4 hours on a Solid State Drive, but it did all eventually disappear. On the new Chrome releases it appears okay. So hopefully this fix saves your bacon and hard disk space.
It would so seem the writing is on the wall for the once cutting edge company. I could cite numerous times the company tried to climb out of the hole, only to fail hilariously. But I’m not. I’m here to actually say some good things about the company.
I”m certainly not a life long blackberry user. I only use one because the company I work for provides one to us at no additional cost. It’s not a terrible phone, but it’s lacking in a few areas that the ‘other’ guys are pioneering.
RIM put smart phones on the market, and at one point were the go-to guys for mobile communications for business; at a time when data on phones was more of a novelty, they took the idea and gave the power to the masses. Data for Blackberry unfortunately only meant emails and eschewed things like texting in favor of updating their Blackberry Email Server for the I.T Manager at all the small to enterprise level companies.
RIM also put Canada on the map as a tech leader – save for Nortel’s stock busting turns at technology.
Their service offering for government and legistative bodies was great (back then) as well. Offering management of devices that really no one understood was a blessing – the ability to brick a device with a keystroke was like a wand of power. RIM was paving the road for future mobile technologies.
Then Apple came around with something that changed the face of mobile tech forever. A smart, saavy phone that gave the user something Blackberry never could: an enjoyable experience. Then Blackberry tried to do something it had never done before either: Adapt to a market that was changing too quickly, that was so radically different from what their phones could do, and put more power to the user, than it did the Administrator.
Unfortunately, RIM can’t handle change all that well. So that’s where we are today; A former giant that’s making last minute plays in an attempt to save itself from a marketplace it once dominated.
If it weren’t for Apple making it’s venture into Blackberry’s territory, we’d all be having a very different conversation right now.
Blogging about comedy is hard. As any writer will tell you, there’s certain hurdles to face, namely deadlines.
So here’s the thing, I’m not by any means a professional writer. I’m an IT administrator by day. Which means I’m an IT admin by night when work needs to get done, somehow I try to be a father and husband when I get some spare time. This means maintaining a blog is extra difficult, but I want to make that commitment. That strive to write more, even if nobody’s listening. Because one day I’ll look and think;
‘Man I wrote a lot of bullshit.’
I’m writing this because I want to keep this blog alive, and I want to experiment with the format. I really wanted to keep this a comedy blog, but given my career path it was inevitable that some IT things were going to creep into it.
Which means more blog posts will arrive with some new technology, or just complaints about why things are the way they are. I certainly can’t offer to fix them, I’m not an engineer but I can offer some insight as to why things end up being the way they are.
Sounds philosophical when I put it down, but it’s the truth. Enjoy the updates.
Digital media is difficult to manage on the best of days. Organizing it in whatever format you decide to store, be it a Windoze box, a linux distro, or even a Macintosh is all your choice.
But what I’m asking for is how you play your files? The new de-facto standard seems to be itunes. Now, itunes has become the standard for mainly one reason: ipods and iphones automatically open that particular application because they were designed to work together. And because the parent company Apple likes it when their hardware and software talk with each other.
What everyone doesn’t realize is this: itunes eats up memory. LOTS of memory. When you think it’s just playing your songs, it’s doing other stuff in the background: if you’re using a smart playlist, it’s categorizing all other songs that fit whatever particular mood music you’re listening to. It’s caching all itunes store information in the background, putting up banner ads suited for you, checking and re-checking DRM purchases. It’s doing all this even when you put it into mini-player mode.
Here’s a solution: Use Winamp. I never stopped using this thing since my University days because it was free, and my ancient PC could still run it with little to no problems. And I always like the small footprint, it could sit at the very top of my screen taking up only a few pixels, yet managed to place as much useful information as a good old fashioned CD player could – with some added bonuses when you put the playlist beside it.
And there’s some really good content on the Winamp startup wizard; the store while lacking some features we’ve all grown accustomed to has the basic packages you’re looking for: including some podcast features!
So rage against the machine, find your old music roots in Winamp and take back that extra Gig of memory and play your music with something that’s small, easy to use and has more features today than most other crappy music players.
Here’s a quick handy pro/con list for anyone that doesn’t want to read the top 6 paragraphs:
Itunes
Winamp
Ipod / Iphone support
Yes
Some versions support it
Average memory usage
1.0 GB – 1.8 GB
Less than 10 MB
Playlists
Yes
Yes
Works on mobile devices
All IOS (naturally)
*All Droid phones
Wide Range of codecs
Yes (kinda)
Check out the forums – almost unlimited
Customizable?
Kinda
You betcha – Themes ahoy!
Video playback
Yes
Yes
Size of installer
170 MB + growing each update
10MB for full features, < 5MB for most basic pack
Annoying update engine?
Yes
Yes
Still better than RealPlayer?
Yes
Yes
*too bad for us blackberry users. Then again, RIM is in trouble anyway for missing the boat on every consumer front possible.
Be Grateful for a few moments. Seriously. Most of my day is filled with people screaming at me because they’ve lost some important document, or they’re stressing out because they can’t do something. On most accounts, the issue is frivolous and unimportant.
Not being all worldly, or trying to sound smart, I want to ask you guys: what’s really important in your life? Your family, your friends, your hobbies, your job? You ever catch yourself wondering how things could be so much better if you did something, or won the lottery or something? Did you ever think about the other spectrum and wonder how much worse things could possibly be?
Just something to think about before going into the weekend. Be grateful for all that you have. Because there’s plenty of those who have much less.
Time Travel has fascinated countless writers of science fiction, this might be the first time a romance writer takes a stab at it, and the end result is surprisingly good. This is much more romance and matters of the heart than it is the actual science behind transversing time and space. All the physics geeks (and yes, I was part of that group as well) might have trouble the bending of the laws in order to make the story work.
Hey, there is actually something out there called the Clock Gene, but I doubt it has any bearing in transporting a entirely naked Eric Bana across space and displacing all his molecules perfectly together in another time. Hey, if you can believe that he can interact with his younger self, thereby violating the basic principle of time travel, well, you can just suspend your belief.
The movie isn’t about going around from place to place in any sort of awesome way, it’s about Claire’s (Rachael McAdam’s) very creepy love affair with the sometimes old, sometimes young Henry (Eric Bana). Who first appears to Claire at the tender age of 6, gym fit and buck naked he continues to visit her until she catches up with him while still in College and he’s a research librarian (too bad he can’t go back and get some real dirt on the Spanish inquisition). She falls in love with him even with his ‘Chrono-impairment’ which causes him to miss birthdays, holidays, and even a portion of their wedding. But don’t worry, an older Henry takes his own place.
The wardrobe costs for this guy must be killer.
You’re telling me you’re in the Sherlock Holmes sequel?
There’s a lot of naysayers out there, mainly the Internet community which I happen to be a part of that didn’t feel any emotion and figured Claire was a damsel in distress, constantly having to love someone that wasn’t there. Hey, it’s romance guys, this is what chicks dig. And for me, it was somehow soothing. Forlorn love, difficult decisions, and kids. Kids just make me well up these days. Damn those cute kids and father figures they’ll end up missing as they grow up.
Hitting thirty reminds me that I’m officially old. It’s one of the scariest numbers to hit, a major landmark in the scheme of only knowing twenty nine years of angst, revolt and perhaps a healthy regard for misbehaviour. My entire life up until twenty-five, was about waiting until I was old enough. Now, I wish I could go back. Back to a time of care free weekdays, getting scolded for trying to eat another cookie. They’re all distant memories now. Thirty was the age of people you could no longer trust, those old farts were part of the system that was ‘keeping you down’. Now I am the system; I’m the grumpy old bastard silently cursing teenagers with blue hair and no respect for their eardrums. Hey, that’s part of growing up, right? Realizing you’re doing things you despised your parents for saying or doing. At least I’ll always be younger than my folks.
There have been so many milestones in my life, becoming a father, a husband, being laid off, enduring a strike, building a house, and a becoming a student of cancer are some of the most memorable. And those all happened in the last five years. My memory becomes a little hazy trying to go backward to a time of living with parents, of getting my first job, of thinking I knew what love was. Those were milestones that seem not as significant these days. But being a father puts all that into perspective. Now all my kid’s major milestones will be important to me, she’s going to forget them, but I’ll hold onto them.
Life is funny that way.
I’ve had the good fortune of understanding that life can be trying at times. Sounds odd that I’m saying that. But it’s really those tough times that define a person. Who you are going into rough times is certainly not the same person who emerges out the other side. The learning experience firsthand is incredible. And I can look back and say ‘I did that, I survived it’. Not everyone will be given the same opportunities. I certainly hope many don’t. But I’m glad I did.
So I’m happily not freaking out over the whole ordeal. There’s lots I haven’t accomplished yet, but I’ll get around to it.
