Digital Choke Daynotes |
What's a Daynote?"Daynotes" are daily (usually) journal entries of interesting happening and discussions. They are not 'blogs', which are often just a collection of links to other information (although we do include links occasionally). Daynotes are much more interesting (we hope). These "Digital Choke Daynotes" were inspired by the collection of daily journals of the "Daynotes Gang" (see sites at .com, .org, .net), a collection of daily technical and personal observations from the famous and others. That group started on September 29, 1999, and has grown to an interesting collection of individuals. Readers are invited and encouraged to visit those sites for other interesting daily journals. If you have comments, send us an email. A bit more about me is here. You might also enjoy our little story about the death of the 'net. |
Reports
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Do you feel safer? Story is here.
"Canada's 89 federal airports experienced a security surge this weekend after an investigation by CBC News found more than 1,000 uniforms and security badges from federal airport screeners had been lost or stolen during the first nine months of 2004."
I was working on a PDF document for a web site. The document is created in Word 2003, then uses Adobe's "PDFMaker" add-in (from Adobe Acrobat full version) to create the PDF file. Inside the Word document are bookmarks. The options for PDFMaker are set to enable bookmark translation. But if you view the PDF file, there are no bookmarks in there. Even though the bookmarks are in the Word document, they don't appear in the PDF file.
I've done a few searches on the 'net and on the support areas of Microsoft and Adobe, but no solutions yet. Not giving up on that one yet, though.
I was also working in Outlook 2003, setting up some recurring appointments. One of them is on the 5th Sunday of the month. Not every month gets a fifth Sunday. You can select a recurring first/second/third/fourth Sunday, or even the first or last Sunday, but not a fifth Sunday. Did some searches on that one, but no joy yet.
I did get Intellisync/PDA program to work with our mail system at work (GroupWise), syncing to my HP iPaq PDA. I've only got it set to sync one way (GroupWise to PDA), which is OK. Then the ActiveSync (Outlook to/from PDA) takes care of getting the work appointments into the laptop. I have to manually assign the GW appointments to a 'work' category to keep them separate from other calendar categories. But that seems to work for now; although I'll have to keep an eye on it.
I also wandered over to the Cyberguys site to order a 4-port KVM for the second group of computers I am setting up at the office. (Cyberguys has great prices, good service, and some interesting items. Their "Extreme Geek" part of their catalog has even more interesting and geeky stuff. A good place for some holiday and computer stuff shopping. )
When the KVM arrives, that set of computers will be my security auditing setup. I need to move the Bindview auditing software off of an older laptop. Then I'll set up the laptop as a testbed for other functions, including scanning tests.
An interesting thing...
"Coming soon to dozens of military bases around the country: radio signals strong enough to jam nearby garage-door openers." .... a Denial of Service? (see here)
I spent some time looking through the Windows Help screens. It's getting better with each version of Windows. Not perfect, but getting better. Although I do a lot of help searching via Google, the Windows Help search engine is a bit more targeted. There's more to this story, but it will have to wait.
A busy day yesterday. I worked on a 'state of the state' type of security report. And worked on it some more today. It's a good idea to review things, and the end of the year is a good time as any.
I made some changes to my report on "Simple Steps to Protect Your Computer' . If you follow those steps, your computing experience will be less stressful. Even though I am a heavy 'net surfer', those practices and protections have protected me (and my computer) from damage.
Another good thing to do is to check your credit report. There's a new law in the US that makes it much easier to see the contents of your credit report -- and it's free. Go to the "Annual Credit Report" site (http://www.annualcreditreport.com ; they don't allow links, so cut/paste to get there). If you live in the western US, you're eligible for a free credit report from each of the three agencies, one free report from each agency each year. So get one every four months, rather than all at once.
It's not too hard. Although each one will try to sell you additional services, the only worthwhile one might be to get that "credit worthiness score" that everyone uses to rate your credit. The cost is only about $7.00, and might be useful if you are thinking about a large upcoming purchase.
Although available only for residents of the western US for now, the rest of the country will get free access next year. You can also get a free report if you were denied credit. Or you can pay around $10 to get one from each credit reporting company.
You'll find some interesting information on there. Mine printed out at 20 pages, and I haven't gone through the entire thing yet. It may be that you might find out something you didn't know -- about your credit or your spouse's.
And get the free one for each member of your household that has credit. We'll be getting one for Pam later on. I suspect she has better credit than me.
A note about the free credit report link. They don't allow access via a link, you have to type in the address manually. And the link yesterday was wrong; thanks to Paul H for the alert note. Just type in www.annualcreditreport.com in the address bar.
I did a computer security presentation today; it went well. Then worked on the security report.
After work, some holiday shopping. A trip to Best Buy is in order. Too much good stuff there.
... more later ...
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