I know I have several journalistic people on my friends list, so I thought I'd pass this along. John C. Dvorak is a technology journalist who also hosts a podcast called "Cranky Geeks". Generally it covers techie stuff, but this week's episode was a theme week covering journalism. His guests were John Markoff (Senior Writer of the New York Times), Gregg Zachary (Journalist for the New York Times) and Sebastian Rupley (who is on all CrankyGeeks episodes). They are covering topics surrounding journalism, including "the on going death" of newspapers, determining if bloggers are journalists, and how "news robots" are used -- and if they can replace journalists.

I found it interesting and a divergance from their normal talk and thought that you who are actually in the business might find it interesting as well. This is episode 131 and can be found here and is available in iPod, Quicktime, Windows Media Player, Flash, and MP3 (audio only) formats. It is approximately 30 minutes long.

Seems I'm all over the place these days...

LiveJournal
Twitter
FaceBook
MySpace
Blogspot
LinkedIn (for business use only. No linky here)

...and most of these have the exact same content. I've been using Ping.FM to post status updates, which then replicates to all but LJ and LinkedIn. However, I have LoudTwitter combining my tweets (which primarily come from Ping.FM) into one daily LJ post. I'm pondering killing that and letting Ping.FM handle that. UPDATE: Just did that.

My problem now is that I have different things to follow in different places. I am still interested in LJ, but also now FaceBook and Twitter. Most blogging will get shoved into my RSS reader of choice (Google Reader) I'd really like to have something like that for these other social networks, instead of Twhirl/Twitterberry for Twitter and using the actual web sites. Anyone have any ideas?

(BTW, if you want to try out Ping.FM, let me know. I have a code for that.)

DirecTV, Thomson Roll Out New Technology to Draw Apartment Dwellers

This is actually a really smart, technical move on DirecTV's part. It gets people get familiar wth the service, whcih they would probably feel more comforatable if/when they move into a house. They apartment complex doesn't have to deal with all the dishes, but would potentially have to deal with wiring.

Follow-up on item Q from my alphabetics - quechup.com. Seems they have some issues in regards to invading people's address books. I seem to recall several other companies a few years back like this that did the same thing. I stopped doing business with a few individuals using those services because of privacy concerns.

Besides, this isn't Quechup's main business. Their main business is dating. quechup.com is owned by idate.com.

“This download installs Microsoft® Windows® Script containing Visual Basic® Script Edition (VBScript.) Version 5.7, JScript® Version 5.7, Windows Script Components, Windows Script Host 5.7, and Windows Script Runtime Version 5.7.”

Windows Script 5.7 for Windows 2000 (Yeah, I am surprised by this one myself…)
Windows Script 5.7 for Windows XP
Windows Script 5.7 for Windows Server 2003

I do not know what additional functionality this new version provides. I have not seen this updated on WSUS either. EDIT - It's worth noting the there is no Vista update, because Vista already have WSH 5.7.

I have been testing a few comic collector softwares, mainly to inventory my collection but also to possibly sell some things I no longer feel the need to keep. Fine. There are three bigs in this field from what I can tell -- the new Comic Collector Live, Collectorz Comic Collector, and ComicBase. So I've been playing with the evaluation versions.

Last night, I had ComicBase installed and decided it wasn't for me. I went through their uninstall and everything turned wonky on my machine. Seems ComicBase, upon uninstall, takes out *any* font it thinks it installed, whether the font was there already or not. So it ripped out Tahoma, which is the font Microsoft predominately uses in Windows XP for the system. Many other applications also rely on this system font, and this stupid stupid comic collecting database program went and unistalled it without a care in the world.

Thankfully, either XP or Office detected that the font was missing and reinstalled it on my system in a manner of minutes. But HELLO! This is version 11 of the software. While I realize that this started on Macs, you've been doing Windows versions for some time now. Don't you think you ought to figure out how a Microsoft Installer package works?

ComicBase -- off the list.

iGoogle? They renamed the Google Personalized Homepage to iGoogle?!?

How stupid.

OMG Pointcast Redux! (click on screensaver...)

I wrote previously about mailshell.com, my now former email provider for my domain. If you'll recall, I got fed up and transferred everything over to Google Apps for Your Domain and have been awesomely pleased. Well, today I got an email from mailshell.com. Basically, they said that the email service was just something they had underwritten, but their core business was OEM licenses of some anti-spam software. A small number of rogue users have abused and flooded the infrastructure, and they had enough. So mailshell.com is dropping all email hosting service, effective February 28.

Well, thanks for telling us -- OVER A MONTH LATER -- what the issue was. I will gladly take my refund now, you jerks. And I laugh that they are focusing on their anti-spam software, when they themselves could not stay off blacklists themselves. Their filtering was, at best, mediocre. I wholly expect that this company won't exist for much longer in any form.

Mailshell served it's purpose and never matured. Good luck and good riddance, Mailshell.

I've written before about Google Reader (link) (link). That's right -- I dumped using LJ as my feed reader. Anyway, through Google Reader, I found an article giving tips about ... well, Google Reader.

And as promised, the blurb about my email. I have used mailshell.com as my email provider for my domain since the domain's inception in 2001. At the time, I was getting a heck of a deal, with a 50 MB email storage and disposable email accounts aplenty. Fast forward to late 2006 to an era where Google released 2 GB mail accounts, forcing Hotmail and Yahoo to bump their storage up. And how did mailshell.com respond? By doing absolutely nothing. Still have the same old 50 MB storage.

Not only that, but mailshell.com had been blacklisted somewhere along the line for spammage, so many of the emails I would send would end up in people's spam filters, especially with Postini. They also had issues with Verizon. See, while I have the master domain email, I set aside jen@ for my wife, and had anything that came in to that address sent directly to her Verizon based email, which has it's own 10 MB storage space. Well, twice in 2006, there were issues wherein everything from mailshell.com sent to Verizon would just be hard bounced. After a week or so, this would be cleared up, but in that time frame, no one could basically get a hold of my wife via email. It got bad enough that I ended up registering a different domain for my wife, and had all jen@ emails go to that domain's email box instead of Verizon.

Through all this, the people at mailshell.com were no help whatsoever. They do not have a phone contact, and they would not respond to email. I sent multiple request for this issue, and never heard anything from the multiple requests.

Then, in early December, mailshell.com unexpectedly went down "for maintenance". At first, it was two days, then operational. While they were down, mail queued, so at least I didn't lose email. I just couldn't get to it, and nor could Jen because he mail was stuck in queue. The service was restarted, and email came through. Well, until they had more "maintenance" issues, on and off for about week. Then, they were up for a day, and then down for a week. And again, no way to contact mailshell.com. This irritated me, but since I had already pre-paid with mailshell.com for some time, I didn't want to just abandon them.

Until ... Ben Cordingley showed me how he has registered his domains with Google Apps for Your Domain. With this, you can basically get Gmail accounts for each account you want, with each account having 2 GB storage. EACH. You can also have unlimited aliases, which makes it basically like disposable email accounts. Oh, and the price was right -- FREE.

So I willingly jumped ship from mailshell.com and their HORRIBLE service and moved my email over Google Apps for Your Domain. I still have about 2 years worth of service pre-paid at mailshell.com, which I now have to attempt to get refunded. This is, of course, assuming I can get in touch with them, considering they are once again down for "maintenance" and have been for several days now.

So here's the lesson - mailshell.com is very bad, and Google is really impressing me.

Did I mention that I'm not a fan of mailshell.com?

What sort of directory structure/naming scheme do you have for your mp3s? I will, over the course of a finite period of time, be ripping all of my CDs to electronic format, and would like to have some consistent structure to it. Rather than reinventing the wheel, I figure I'd ask you, who probably went through this already.

My inital thoughts are \Artist Name\Album Title\Track number - Track Name.mp3
...but what do you do with multiple disc albums? (Disk 1) and (Disk 2)? And then there are those wonderful compilation albums with a different artist for every track.

BTW, it looks like the Googlification of my email has been made more complete. I got my first comment from LJ to the new system. I'll probably post something about this separately, especially now that I can see the comments being made and I'm on vacation...

I migrated all the feeds that I use to read here on LJ over to Google Reader recently. The interface, to me, was much better and had less issues than LJ did interpreting some feeds. One of the benefits of this is that I can share selected items that I read, which is shared via its own feed.
If you want to subscribe, use this link.

Eye appointment on Wednesday went okay. I can wear my contacts again, but only for limited times. I go back to see the doctor again in three months to check performance of my eyes. In the mean time, I have to put eye drops in my eye every two hours when wearing contact lenses, every four hours when I'm not, and LacriLube at night. Joy.

While talking with the doc, I found out that lasik is definitely not an option for me. She also mentioned Conductive Keratoplasty (CK) surgery, or possibly Verisyse implantable contact lenses. Neither of these is covered through my docotor, so I'd have to bear the whole cost of the operaton. Not thinking anything more about this until after the new year.

Had my interview yesterday. I think generally it went well. There are a few questions that I might have answered differently in retrospect, but hey, that's life. I won't konw for at least two weeks, probably more.

There's a woot-off going on right now too!

If you haven't gotten a RSS/Atom/feed reader yet, and don't use LJ for this, you might want to check out Google Reader. I personally found the interface very comfortable. But I've gotten very used to reading everything here on LJ, so going to yet another web site to get this info isn't likely to happen for me. But if you people out there, I'd recommend it.

Started getting calls today for people whose Internet Explorer suddenly closed without error after launch. After a bit of troubleshooting, I was able ot determine that the Yahoo! Companion Toolbar is causing this issue. Solution -- uninstall Yahoo! Toolbar.

Just thought you should know, in case you having this issue. Of course, you likely aren't able to read this if you are having the problem...

So, uhm, yeah....

blah blah blah Gameshow Marathon on CBS 8 pm ET/PT blah blah blah Roomba hacked into slightly cruddy musical instrument blah blah blah Really cool technology with the MSRP of .... $18,500?!? *faints*

I was very amused¹ by your interpretations of the techie term "bounce the box" yesterday. I never realized how that sounded to someone who had never heard the term before...

A box² is a computer. Bouncing is rebooting. Flattening is rebuilding, including reinstalling the OS.

Sometimes, I have to bounce the box. With some viruses⁴, I have to flatten the box.

¹ As you can tell from my current mood^7
2 Oooooh^3
3 Yeah, inside joke that only a few of you (any GSC4 attendees?) understood.
⁴ Please note that the plural of virus is not virii but viruses.^5
5 Footnotes are fun.
⁶ Self referencial footnote.^6
7 I just renumbered everything to put comment in first. Kinda reminds me of Choose Your Own Adventure^TM

I just got a request for an emulator to run Lotus 1-2-3 version 3.1 for DOS.


Yeah, seriously.

As some of you have seen, I have been posting a few items about problems and solutions that I've had with a product called Windows Server Update Serivce, or WSUS. (link for the terminally bored) I figured that, if I had these problems, others would too. Information about this is not the greatest, and sometimes inconsistent, so if I can help others out, why not?

What's really cool is that I am actually helping. I've gotten two comments based on this one issue alone (one in private email, one to the post). And, yes, I'm vain enought to look on the net for links to that article... and found one I couldn't understand at all. Still, frackin' cool. I like being able to help!

</geekism>

In other news, I didn't lose my cell phone in Vegas. *glares knowingly at you know who*

http://blogs.technet.com/msrc/archive/2006/01/05/416980.aspx

Mike Nash, who is Microsoft's Corporate Vice Preisdent responsible for security, has posted to the Microsoft Security Response Center Blog (yeah, they got one!), as noted above. It's an interesting read, though I disagree with a few things he says - namely that there was no "imminent threat" when exploit code had been out for well over a week. I can tell you that I actually had an attempted infection on my machine last week, and was very fortunate that I was using Firefox at the time. I fat-fingered a web site, resulting in going to a site that wasn't kosher, and a WMF was attempting to download. If it could happen to me innocently, it can happen to others a lot easier.

Also, because of the computer security press, I agree that an out of band update was warranted. Normally, yes, I would have preferred to wait until next Tuesday. But there were a lot of emails internally at my company, between the Network Operations Center, Information Protection, network, me … Pretty much anyone who got any sort of email about corporate computing was getting bombarded with info about the exploit that Microsoft hadn't patched yet. It was even starting to leak into mainstream press. Even if the actual exploit numbers were going down, talk was increasing, and there was only one solution -- release the update out of band.

Just an FYI -- At about 2 pm PT today, Microsoft will be releasing MS06-001 to finally address the WMF vulnerability that has been exploited over the last two weeks. Because this vulnerability is already being exploited, it's highly recommended that you apply this as soon as possible to your Windows 2000 and XP desktops.

Oh, and MS is still going to be releasing their regular security updates on Tuesday as well.

Good thing I just fixed my WSUS server...

EDIT: Wow. It's already available on Windows Update site for WSUS and SUS. KB912919 for W2K SP4 (598 kb), XP SP1 and SP2 (710 kb), Windows Server 2003 RTM and SP1 (714 kb).