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, .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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Well, that month passed by fast. The weather has gone from hot to cool, with a bit of 'partly cloudy'. We even had some thunderstorms early last week, although quite tame by John Dominik's standards. This one was a bit more enjoyable than most. Nice flashes all around, rolling 'boomers' lasting for 10+ seconds, but no rain, at least at my house. I enjoy a good thunderstorm, as do one of my neighbors. We were both outside in the dark enjoying the show.
Nothing out of the usual here. My son-in-law's HP laptop has developed what appears to be a bad hard drive. I ended up doing a full reinstallation of XP/Home. It's feeling a bit better, but I haven't figured out why it is taking 30 minutes to do a Windows startup. And the length of time for the startup makes troubleshooting it a bit harder.
I did some light yardwork on Saturday. You three regulars might recall that the back yard is mostly concrete patio, with just plantings around the perimiter.There is a full drainage system all around, with a 4 inch wide gravel area at the patio edge to help channel the water to the drains. I've been working on replacing the gravel part, which is a bit cluttered with dirt. The old gravel is 'hoed' out, new gravel (small river pebbles, according to the label on the bag) is put in place. I'm putting the old gravel at the property edge to help control weeds travelling from the neighbors place. I've also been spreading a bit of new shredded redwood bark to control the weeds.
The front yard is in pretty good shape, thanks to the efforts of the lawn guy that sort of came with the house when we bought it. He comes by once a week for a quick 'mow and blow'. He does a nice job, with two passes of the mower, and edging. Then a quick 'blow' of the back yard to get rid of dust and the small amount of leaves. His prices are quite reasonable ($65/month).
Notice that Microsoft will including a 'save as PDF' in the next version of Office. That will be useful for many. Although I've been doing that for years with a nice program called "Win2PDF" (http://www.win2pdf.com). Works as a printer driver, so is quite easy to use. There are others out there, but I've had good luck with this one, and the cost was only $35.
A reminder about the Microsoft Office Service Patch 2: Details and KB references are in the "Internet Storm Center" analysis: http://isc.sans.org/diary.php?storyid=710 .
There are fixes for Word 2003, graphics (JPEG) processing, WordPerfect conversion, Visio 2003, Project 2003, and updates to the Outlook junk mail filter (including one that blocks any links that might connect to unsafe/fraud sites).
That last one is interesting....I believe it is related to the new anti-phishing/fraud features that are in the beta of Internet Explorer 7. It's enabled by default.
On my system, the Outlook junk mail filter seems quite efficient, except for the inabiliy to block the "419" and "lottery" scam mails (not many email filters can catch those). But I don't get as very much unsolicited mail.
Users that have their Automatic Updates set should have recieved SP2 by now. Those that don't should visit http://www.microsoft.com/protect and follow instructions there. That site also has some good consumer-level (non-techie) tips for computer security and safety. You might want to send "Aunt Minnie" there.
Pretty quiet around here. At work, just looking around for improperly configured systems, scanning for 'bad stuff', watching the web and email filtering software. I'm about to embark on some experiments with forensic analysis. Need to get a few more things in place first. Should be interesting, through. I'm going to take some decommissioned computers and poke around to see what I can find out. It may be a useful skill to develop.
Pam and I are going up to the cabin tonight. It's getting time to close it down for the winter. The cabin is at 6000 feet elevation, so the pipes need to be drained to prevent freeze damage. It's hard for us to get up there this time of year, since it's a busy time for Pam as her group is working on closing out the fiscal year. That requires a lot of Saturday time for her.
No Interweb access up there. We're taking a bunch of DVDs up there, along with some books. Our plan is to relax most of the time. We'll be back Sunday afternoon, but it should be relaxing.
This is the weekend of the DARPA off-road challenge. Fully unmanned vehicles roaming around the desert on a specific course that is not known until two hours before the race. You'll find full details in this 'wikipedia' entry, or the "Grand Challenge" site here. I hope there are some video reports available next week. Even the text stories on the race and the participants is interesting.
... more later ...
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