Well, I talked about about a Virus and it hunted me down…I am home for the third day now sick with H1N1 (Swine Flu) and it brother pneumonia. I guess I should be more careful what I talk bad about
Swine Flu is no joke though. Since my last post it has become very serious. I still think people are over reacting. I saw a guy at work take paper towels for the faucets and the soad dispenser BEFORE he washed his hands. Does he think those hold special soap resistent bacteria!? Why not just wash and be done with it (the faucets are the auto-shutoff type so he didn’t even need to turn it off.
What if people spent as much time actually paying attention to what is around them as they do to the news? My office put out bottles of hand sanitizer all over the building so people could “prevent swine flu.” This was all a reaction to the news reports about this pandemic. Now I don’t want to under state the possible seriousness of a major disease outbreak, but for God’s sake let’s get some reality around this…
Pandemic is defined as “an epidemic that is geographically widespread,” so that truly does apply to the swine flu. However, in my state there have only been 10 cases, spread through our 3.5 million population. Anyone want to do the math?? How much did my company spend to try to “make people feel better?” What are the odds that I will come into contact with someone with swine flu…pretty small. Yet, I see people every day that are worried to the point of distraction that they will die from swine flu. You probably have as much chance of being struck by lightning, and you definitely have a much better chance of dying from cancer, heart attack, car accident, or even choking on your dinner.
Lighten up! Look around you and enjoy the good things in life instead of trying to find the next over-senationalized news story to be stressed about. In fact, you would be much better served to turn off the TV, the computer, cell phone, MP3, etc. etc. etc. and go for a walk and listen to the birds chirping in a springtime morning.
Well, I have been a derilict about posting, so I am sure that I have lost my reader
Seriously though…I changed jobs and had some other things come up so I have been away from the site for quite a while. But, now I am back. I hope to get out here a couple times a week to do updates, post some photo albums, samples of some of my work, and etceteras. Please drop me a note at any time with questions, comments, concerns or complaints.
Well, in all honesty (apologies for the Grabber headline), it is not really going to MIT… You won’t get a degree from MIT, but they have made a significant amount of free course-ware available for free download. You can find the details here…
Dan Fogelberg died yesterday. I don’t normally morn the loss of those that I do not know, but through his music I did get to know Dan, at least to some extent. There were many bad times that I used Dan’s music (among others) to get through, and I am sad that he has passed.
When you are prompted by Internet Explorer or Fire Fox as to whether to save a password for a site, do you say “Yes”? If you do, your passwords are at serious risk…
This article details how to access them, but the summary of it is that all the passwords you store in the browser are easily accessable to anyone having access to your machine. The other thing to remember, that is not mentioned in this article, is that malware can potentially also access and deliver these passwords to someone somewhere else without you even knowing they are gone.
I recommend that no one store passwords in anything less secure than a password vault. A password vault is a piece of software that runs on your machine (or on a server if you are on a network) that stores your usernames and passwords for different sites in a secure encrypted manner. There are many available and rather than recommend one particular package I suggest that you do the research to find the best one for you.
Or at least the one or two people that actually read my blog
Here is a good summary article from Microsoft about how to backup your data on Windows Vista. Backups are always a good idea, but from my experience with Vista, thus far, it is especially true
In all honesty, Vista is really no worse than any other inital OS release I have seen in the last 20 years. Initial releases always have bugs that are fixed in patches, and some engineer (or engineers) finds out that the users really have a much different view of what “User Friendly” means to them.
So…If you are using Vista, enjoy the good things and realize the bad will be patched in time. If you aren’t, and you can wait; wait until the first service pack comes out, at least, before switching over.
Oh bummer!!…First you get laid off just as the holidays are coming up (That really did happen to me once), then you hit Monster.com to try to find work just to learn that some hacker has hacked Monster and you end up with a computer infected with malware. You can read the full article here Monster Hacked.
Oh well…Take a good dose of Norton’s, sleep late tomorrow, eat way too much, and start fresh on Friday
Do you use Gmail as your primary email account? If so, you may want to check out this computer world article (Go to Article). It seems that some users are losing their stored emails. The article also says, that at this point, Google is not taking responsibility. Remember, BACKUPS ARE YOUR FRIEND!
Someone finally did it…They wrote a manual on how to handle your nerd. The last time I took one of the geek quotient tests I scored in the 87th percentile. I would say that puts me pretty high on the nerd scale too. So, for the benefit of those that know me (especially my wife ) I am putting this link to the Nerd Manual up. Enjoy, and remember, Nerds Need Love Too!
