Digital Choke Daynotes

 Wednesday, September 28, 2005       mail    link   the story

The recovery efforts in the Gulf Coast area continue. If you dig around on the "Interweb" a bit, you can find more information that you'll find on the main news sites.

And I've mentioned in the past what my church has done: locally, we put together a bunch of "Hygeine Kits" to hand out in disaster areas. And the church as a whole has sent out many dozens of trucks and lots of volunteers to help out in the disaster area. For instance, the weekend of Sept 17-18 saw 8,000 "person-days" of work in one area.

A press release about that relief work is here: http://www.lds.org/newsroom/showrelease/0,15503,3881-1-22217,00.html . The thing that caught my eye, other than the massive amount of work being done, is the technology behind managing all that work. Here's an excerpt:

Before a crew heads out to cut trees or remove mildewing drywall and insulation, an advance team generates a work order. To launch the process, Church leaders send volunteer work crews to the 350 to 600 homes in their local congregations to assess their needs. They record those needs on individual work orders, noting the size and quantity of downed trees, other yard debris needing cleanup, flood and roof damage and any lack of food, water, clothing, cleaning supplies and other essentials. Telephone calls from members of affected communities who are not affiliated with the Church have led to many work orders in addition to those generated for members’ homes. Assessors have also contacted hospital, law enforcement and emergency response workers in each area and written work orders for their homes.

With a work order in hand, command-center volunteers feed the address into software that maps the location, prints a map, matches it with the work order and sends it to the staging location nearest to the work site. Staging centers are in Covington, Gulfport, Hattiesburg, Pascagoula, Slidell, Waveland and Biloxi. When crews arrive from Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina or Florida, they receive a stack of work orders with instructions to go to the members’ homes, complete the work orders and then do work for any neighbors in need who live on the same road. Often they return to the staging center with more work orders than they left with, as members of the community ask for help.

I am sure that other volunteer organizations are doing similar work. But I found the application of technology to the process interesting. And note that the work is being done for everyone, not just members of our church, with no administrative overhead charged against donations.

Microsoft released a service patch for Office 2003. Some important updates in there. Those of you that have set up Automatic Updates, and have upgraded to the "Microsoft Updates" so that you get application updates as well as operating system updates, should have already had it installed.

Finally, file this in your 'emergency situation' file:

There is a way to get out of quicksand, according to some researchers at the University of Amsterdam (published in Nature magazine). "Stay calm and eventually you'll float. Stretch out on your back to increase your surface area and wait until your legs pop free. [Researcher] Bonn also suggests moving your legs around at this point, to stir in water, which will help you float. " Link (abstract): http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050926/full/050926-9.html

Be careful out there!

 Friday, September 30, 2005       mail    link   the story

Microsoft has released several updates to Microsoft Office applications. Some are rollups of previously issued patches into a Service Pack. One is an update to the Outlook junk mail filter. My personal email load is quite small (thankfully), but the Outlook filters already catch most of the junk.

If you have upgraded their Windows Update to Microsoft Update, and have enabled Automatic Updates, will get the updates automatically. Those of you that have not yet done that are encouraged to do so by visiting the Microsoft Update at Microsoft has released several updates to Microsoft Office applications. Some are rollups of previously issued patches into a Service Pack. One is an update to the Outlook junk mail filter. My personal email load is quite small (thankfully), but the Outlook filters already catch most of the junk.

The Internet Storm Center folks have noted that there is a new option to the Outlook Junk Mail Filters. See the info and screen shot here: http://isc.sans.org/diary.php?storyid=711 .

I wandered into a new/not-yet-released Microsoft site that had a screen about a "Microsoft Anti-Phishing" product. It may have been related to a feature in the beta Internet Explorer version 7, which you can read about here http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/IETechCol/dnwebgen/msphishingfilterwp.asp . But the web site looked like it was about a separate product. And I can't find it now (my History files are automatically erased when I close my browser). But it did look interesting.

Anyhow, about the Office update. If you have upgraded your Windows Update to Microsoft Update, and have enabled Automatic Updates, you will get the Office updates automatically. (The new Microsoft Update includes updates and patches for Office and other products.) Those of you that have not yet done that are encouraged to do so by visiting the Microsoft Update at http://www.microsoft.com/protect . You may need to do the Windows authentication thing, but that is quite easily done (and benign).

And if readers have not visited the above site, there is a lot of good information for protecting your computer, much of it very non-technical, but well done.

You might also want to take a look at the new "OnGuard OnLine" site set up by the Federal Trade Commission, Homeland Security, US Postal Service, and Dept of Commerce. It's here: http://www.onguardonline.gov . Another resource for "Aunt Minnie".