Ed Stoffel

Vista and I have gotten along well for the past few months, but all that has come to an end this week. Vista was installed and running fine until the failure of the computer two weeks ago. Around the time of some critical updates, the system just stopped working. Was this an OS failure, a motherboard failure, or a bad processor? The hard drive tested fine with Spinrite. Installing that hard drive in another computer still wouldn't boot the OS, and using the Vista install disc to attempt a repair failed to cure the problem. Was that because it was now mated with a different motherboard/processor combination? I don't know.

I purchased everything to build a new system: new Nvidia motherboard, Nvidia graphics card, an Intel Quad-core processor, a pair of Seagate SATA hard drives, new case and power supply. After installing Vista, the first problem I noticed was that it is painfully slow. This shouldn't be, with an Intel Quad-core processor, but it is. Things weren't slow with my previous Intel single-core 3.33Ghz processor. Vista turned my DVD-RW/CD-RW drive into DVD only, and failed to recognize my multi-media reader. Installation of a network drive failed (Netgear SC101), using Netgear's latest firmware and management utility version for Vista. The install disc for HP's office printer took over an hour to complete, and Quickbook's online update feature took nearly 3 hours to complete.

But the biggest, most frustrating problem was that Vista literally wouldn't let me do two things at once. With an internet browser open (either Explorer or Firefox), clicking on any link when the machine was otherwise busy would produce the (not responding) error to appear on the browser's title line. This even occurred when viewing a disk directory in Windows Explorer. If I clicked again, Vista produced a white-out mask across the screen, further indicating that the application was too busy to respond.

I was able to somewhat speed up Vista by following the recommendations of Black Viper to turn off unnecessary services. Problem is, it is difficult to be certain which services I really don't need.

After stewing about the problem overnight, I decided to pull the hard drive, insert a new one, and install Windows XP-SP3. It didn't take long to get the OS up and running, and I immediately noticed how fast all the applications installed themselves... much faster than with Vista. My DVD/CD drive works again, as well as my multi-media reader. I'll miss Vista's sidebar gadgets, but this machine now flies along with XP. I'll pack away my Vista OS disc, and we'll see if Microsoft ever gets the operating system working well before the emergence of Windows 7.

While I was out Thursday, our maids were cleaning in my office, vacuuming, and moving things around. After knocking my keyboard and mouse cables out, they plugged them back in, but crossed them into the wrong sockets.

When I returned, I found my keyboard and mouse both unable to wake up the computer. So I tried to reboot. The PC wouldn't respond to holding down the power button for 7 seconds... what I usually do if the PC freezes up. So I switched off power in the back and turned it back on, finally causing the PC to begin the rebooting process. Windows began to load, but froze part way in. I attempted a safe boot, but this too froze up.

I tried installing my hard drive in an old Dell computer, but Vista wouldn't boot there, telling me I needed to run recovery from the original OS disc. After several minutes of this, it told me it couldn't recover anything.

So I installed this hard drive as a secondary drive on an XP system. Here, I was able to view the drive just fine, and ran Spinrite to see if the drive was failing in some way. After running in recovery mode overnight, Spinrite reported that there were no problems with the drive.

Back in its original case, I attempted to boot the system, and it loaded the desktop, but after running the processor at 100% for about 30 seconds, it froze up again. I'm thinking it's a heat-related problem since it went further booting from a cold machine... but after warming up, it still failed. I removed the processor's fan and applied new thermal grease, but the failure still occurs.

Could the maids' plugging my keyboard and mouse in wrong have shorted out the motherboard? Could plugging in a vacuum close by have caused a fatal power surge? I have the equipment in a UPS, but if they also plugged into the UPS, a surge could have occurred inside of the protection, therefore reaching the computer.

I picked up a new power supply, jumping from 300W up to 450W, to see if it just needed a little more juice. That didn't solve the problem. I don't think it's an OS problem because sometimes, it won't even power up unless I wait a bit. That seems like a heat related problem, not a total failure. This is occurring even before the computer starts loading the OS.

I've ordered a new barebones kit with a new motherboard, processor, memory, and video card. I've also picked up a new SATA hard drive, and will use Seagate's disk wizard utility to clone my existing drive onto the new one. If that works, then I'll have my primary system up and running later in the week. Will it work to clone the drive and use it with new hardware? Or will Vista fuss about the change of a motherboard? Will it deactivate itself? I'd rather not reinstall everything if it can be avoided, but will do so if I must.

Then, I'll experiment to see what it takes to get the old one going again later. If a new processor doesn't do it, I may just scrap the computer, along with its video card and memory, which are incompatible with the new system.

Researchers at the University of Maryland have developed software to aid in the prediction of terror behavior around the globe. The SOMA Terror Organization Portal (STOP) uses existing data to get ahead of possible future events...

SOMA has generated tens of thousands of rules about the likely behavior of each of around 30 terrorist groups, including major terrorist outfits such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and Hezb-I-Islami. In addition to offering accurate behavioral models and forecasting algorithms, STOP can act as a virtual roundtable for terrorism experts to gather around and form a rich community that transcends artificial boundaries.

 STOP Terrorism Software Developed, Techtree

On September 26th, I called DirecTV to upgrade our living room service to HDTV. They came to the house 2 weeks later on Friday the 13th of October, to replace one of our standard DVRs with an HD-DVR. They also had to replace our existing DirecTV dish antenna with their larger HDTV Slimline model. The new dish antenna incorporates 5 LNBs (in 3 lnb housings), and was mounted near the ground, on the side of my deck. The receiver is an HD-DVR, the HR20-100S model. The HDTV picture looks great... during those moments when it comes in clearly. Unfortunately, the picture keeps breaking up, exhibiting pixelation, a form of digital error.

Who comes up with these ideas? Folks at Ad-Air think it's a good idea to build giant video screens to display ads for plane loads of people to view as the planes come in to land. Yes, as pilots are focused on landing their planes, video ads will be flashing for attention. What could possibly go wrong?

Advertisers aiming to reach high-flyers with no alternative distraction will soon have a new method: adverts the size of three football pitches seen by plane passengers coming in to land. UK-based Ad-Air launched its new service in London on Tuesday, offering brands the chance to place huge adverts near the runways of some of the world's busiest runways.

 Giant ads set for world's busiest runways, Reuters

I got a strange impulse yesterday to download a ringtone to my Sony Ericcson W600i cellphone. So I went online to the AT&T website and browsed through the available ringtones. Finding one I liked, I clicked to purchase and download it to my phone. That sent a text message to my phone to click and pick up the ringtone through the cellphone's browser. Problem is, I got a message saying there was an error processing the transaction, and to call customer service, telling them it was error code 63490. I called customer service, and was on the phone with them for over an hour. They tried unregistering and reregistering my AT&T MediaNet ID. They had me try my phone's SIM card in another phone, and I tried another phone's SIM card in my phone. I tried ordering through the computer, and ordering exclusively through the phone. I tried different ringtones. None of these allowed the download of a ring tone. In the end, they said they suspected there was something wrong with my phone AND its SIM card. That sounded like a guess to me, but I smelled an opportunity. I asked when I could upgrade to a new phone, and they allowed me to do so immediately, rather than waiting the standard amount of time.

So I hopped in the car and drove to the nearest AT&T store, only 5 miles away. I've been looking online at phones with iTunes in them. Motorola's website says iTunes can be installed on the Razr, Slvr, and always comes on the Rokr. I asked the salesperson if it was available on the new Razr V3xx, and she said it could be downloaded to it. So I got the Motorola V3xx and a nice case to protect it. I asked about cables to allow file transfer, and audio hookup. She had nothing in stock to help in this regard.

Once home, I went online and purchased a USB cable, and audio cables (one from the phone to RCA, one from the phone to 3.5mm stereo) from the Cellphone Shop and Wireless Market.

I then went to MemorySuppliers to purchase additional storage in the phone for music files. I was able to get a 2Gb MicroSD memory card there for $39 including shipping.** (They told me I would get a credit for this link, but they never paid!

Checking out the phone features, I found that iTunes is NOT already installed on the Motorola V3xx. Instead, it has something called AT&T Music. This seems to be a basic music player with lots of links to buy music services. It does not appear to be something that will sync with iTunes on my computer.

Going back to the Motorola website, it appears that iTunes is only available on the V3xx in some foreign countries... not in the U.S. There are some hacks around to try and install a form of iTunes, but at your own risk without support... and doing so could crash the phone.

So the way to put music files on the phone seems to be using a USB cable for file transfer onto the phone. If I find that iTunes does sync to the phone, or install on the phone, I'll post an update.

Oh... one more thing. I went back online to download that ring tone to the V3xx... it wasn't compatible. None that I like are.

Having recently moved, my wife and I changed our cellphone numbers to our new local area. Only two days later, we've begun receiving marketing text messages from AT&T.

First, my wife got one. I called AT&T to find out if I was being charged for receiving such text messages, and how to shut them off without it also costing us money. The message says to stop receiving them, text "STOP" to 3713. The AT&T rep said that the incoming messages were free, and that sending a stop request should also be free. Then doing so, I received a text message back saying that I had opted out of marketing messages, but that it would take 10 days to update my marketing preferences. I decided to do the same thing on my phone too, and while I was composing the text message to prevent the spam, I received the first spam message. They don't waste any time.

It's not easy being a broadcasting dinosaur. While loosing market share, big broadcasters are being pushed to convert programming to HDTV. So given choices between investment in people or equipment, the new technology usually wins...

Major trends include desktop-based editing and graphics tools that enable journalists to do more and provide built-in functionality for automatically repurposing content for the Web. Device-automation systems that allow software to replace people for certain newscast functions, such as camera control or graphics output, are also gaining popularity (with management, at least) as broadcasters either cut staffs or reassign personnel for new-media production.

And Pharoah said, "Less straw, more bricks!" (Ex. 5:5-19)

 Continue Reading: Newsrooms Go Multiplatform, Broadcasting & Cable

I got file sharing working on my desktop computer finally... by formatting the drive and reinstalling WinXP SP2. Otherwise, how many days was I going to spend trying to solve the problem? As I reinstall all my applications, I'll be watching closely to be sure nothing turns file sharing back off. My shared documents appear on other machine's "network places" and I'm now able to ping the desktop machine, even from itself.

As I continue to search for the answer to my file-sharing troubles, I came across the article Establish the correct file-sharing permissions in Windows XP. It seems that there's a difference between network permission and file access permission, and this article explains the difference. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem that file access is my problem.

I did try adding another protocol - View Network Connections | Local Area Connection | Properties | General tab | Install. I added the "NWLink IPX/SPX/Netbios Compatible Transport Protocol" and now my machine name appears on my own network neighborhood as well as my laptop computer. But the laptop still cannot browse my desktop computer, and I still can't ping my desktop machine from itself or any other machine. Could it be the ethernet hardware adapter itself?

With the emergence of Google Earth, designers are rethinking those ugly rooftops. This has me wondering about the impact on satellite imagery for intelligence purposes.

 Architects change their view of the lowly roof, LA Times

I'm continuing to work the problem of not being able to file share from my desktop computers to other computers on the home network. I've narrowed it down to the fact that I can't ping my own machine.

I can ping the loopback on 127.0.0.1, but not the IP address issued by DNS (192.168.0.3). I can ping every other machine on the local network, and they can ping each other, but not this machine.

I tried uninstalling Zone Alarm, and made sure no remnants were running (Start | Run | Msconfig | Startup) but nothing was left behind. I've made sure XP's firewall is off. I also went through Admin Tools | Services to compare what services are running on this machine compared to my laptop -- nothing different that should affect this.

I hate the idea of having to reinstall XP just to solve this, but it may come to that.

I tried a few other things today to get file sharing to work on my desktop computer. I read that I have to include the subnet mask in the firewall rules so I entered the IP addresses of machines I want to share files with individually using Zone Alarm's "Subnet" tab. That didn't solve the problem.

So then, I tried just pinging my desktop machine from my laptop... and it won't answer the ping. I tried pinging the desktop machine from itself, and it still won't answer the ping. I turned off its firewall - (Zone Alarm and confirmed that Windows firewall was also off). I made sure that "echo" was turned on in two places. It still wouldn't answer the ping.

Since my laptop computer will share files, I've gone through everything I can find under Networking to make sure both machines are the same. Next, I will go through Administrative Tools > Services on both machines, to see if there's something that's set differently on the desktop that's keeping it from sharing. I don't believe it's a hardware problem with the ethernet adapter because I can get on the internet just fine... but I'll try that later if I have to.

Permission to Use Network Resources

Awhile back, my ability to share files on a local network ceased... from my Windows XP Home desktop computer. When I try to "View Workgroup Computers" inside "My Network Places", the I get the error message: "\\xxxxx is not accessible. You might not have permission to use this network resource. Contact the administrator of this server to find out if you have access permission" where xxxxx is the name of my local workgroup.

The other computers on the network share files just fine including my laptop computer. A search of the phrase "permission to use network resources" turns up lots of comments about the problem but few solutions. Microsoft's Knowledge Base has one article instructing a change in the registry, but that bit was already off on my offending machine. Another KB article suggests starting the computer browser service. It was already running. The article also suggests running Netbios over TCP/IP. I already was.

I've also set a trusted range of IP addresses in Zone Alarm's firewall on each machine. I have file sharing turned on, and the workgroup name is the same on all machines. I even tried David Lawrence's suggestion of naming the user on two machines the same.

Maybe those articles will help you, but the search for my solution continues...

Eating while you work? You may want to think about what you're doing. That phone, keyboard and mouse you're using at work is probably more germ-covered than you'd think, according to recent studies:

Several studies conducted in the past few years at the University of Arizona found that telephones are the most germ-infected objects in our lives, followed by desktops, water fountain handles, microwave door handles, keyboards and mice. Here are the relative germ densities of frequently touched office equipment:

• a. Phone: 25,127 germs per square inch
• b. Desktop surface: 20,961 germs per square inch
• c. Keyboard: 3,295 germs per square inch
• d. Mouse: 1,676 germs per square inch
• e. Fax machine: 301 germs per square inch
• f. Copy machine: 69 germs per square inch
• g. Toilet seat: 49 germs per square inch.

 Continue Reading: Why phones, keyboards and mice make me sick, Computer World

Our DirecTV receivers were SO OLD that they received local channels in the 900 range, and had to wait for the data stream to get authorized and identified each time we changed from non-local to local channel numbers. They were the original Hughes receivers given to us in exchange for our old Primestar receivers when that company went under and sold their accounts to DirecTV.

I've been thinking about the fact that our subscription would be worth more if we actually got to watch some of the shows that get broadcast but missed by us for various reasons. I've been watching and waiting for the specials that DirecTV offers from time to time, giving away DVRs to existing customers... but rebates and specials are like a watched pot that never boils... the specials abruptly ceased once I started watching for them. Truly, I saw a special and called, and found it had just expired. So I've waited... and waited. Finally, during the delay one day when we were waiting for our local channels to authorize, I got to thinking about how nice it would be to actually see the channels we're paying for when I enter them in my remote control. So I called DirecTV to order a DVR.

I got passed off to some order-taking specialist in India, I think. After talking with them for awhile, I was transferred to someone else, somewhere else. This third person in the call-chain said that their order-taking system was down, and that they'd call me back as soon as it was restored. I waited and waited and finally called them back 10 days later. In the end, they offered me a free DVR, and I reciprocated by offering to purchase a second one.

Though they offered to do all the wiring, I prewired things where I wanted them to be in the walls - triple coax runs, two for each DVR and one for an RF return to share the love with the kitchen TV. I didn't want the installer drilling through my nice, hardwood floors. Now maybe their installer would have taken the time to fish the wires through the wall, but I wanted to be certain it was done right.

When Rusty arrived today, all he had to do was put fresh wire from my new wall plates to the DVRs, and install a multi-switch downstairs - converting a dual LNB signal to feed what amounts to four receivers. Each DVR actually contains two receivers and a hard drive, so you can record two things and watch a third, if it's already recorded. You could also watch one live event while recording another. You can even jump from watching a live event to "pausing" which begins recording so you can resume and catch up through time-compression or by fast-forwarding through the commercials. It even has a 6-second buffer for instant replays or those "what'd he say" moments.

The receivers also display incoming caller ID information on screen -- a nice feature. Of course, that gets subscribers to actually hook up the phone line so those PPV charges get sent home to mama. The first thing I did was to lock-out the PPV and raunchy channels (XM XLs). I wish the "Channels I Get" list were really just the channels I get, and not every conceivable channel I could get... that would have saved Charlene and I the two-hours it took us to go through and list all the channels to delete from our custom-lists... that to save us time on ordinary days from having to scroll through all the channels we don't actually get. Why doesn't DirecTV allow us to edit the "channels I get" list, or make it match the channels they actually authorized? Do other families spend a lot of time browsing through the channels they don't get? If so, why? I don't get it.

I couldn't help noticing that so many blogs are displaying lots of 80 x 15 buttons for services that seem to send visitors. While some are essentially blog directories, a number of them are blog promotion tools where you can either visit blogs in exchange for receiving visits to yours, or pay for them to bring you visitors. So over the weekend, I signed up for four of these and tried them out... using the method of visiting other sites to earn credits which should result in having my blogs visited. During the sign up process, you list your own blog(s) address(es). Each of the services requires that you visit their site to begin your blog surfing, and do so inside of a timed frame, which requires that you stay on each visited site for a minimum time period, usually about 30 seconds.

Blog Explosion has the best interface, complete with the ability to bookmark favorite sites, voting sites good or bad, and reporting problem sites. I did quite a bit of blog surfing with their service, but when I checked my stats, I saw that they weren't sending any traffic to my blogs, and my blog list said they were all 'Waiting for Admin Approval'. With a little digging, I found news that Blog Explosion was sold, and that "site administration may be delayed." Blog Clicker credits pile up fast, and their site indicates they've sent me a lot of traffic in return, confirmed by my own server's traffic stats. Their interface has a way to 'Report a Site', but doesn't allow you to indicate why you're doing so. Blog Soldier seems to have a number of problems including lots of downed sites, junk financial sites and bugs on their own site. It doesn't take long surfing before they're feeding you their own blogs, too. When I clicked their 'Support' tab, I got "Error: Invalid License Key (Time Period Expired)" which I assume refers to some of the software they're using to run the site. I couldn't confirm any traffic sent specifically from them, though I have received mysterious traffic from "stumbleupon.com" which might be them. Blog Mad gave me the most surfing credits and quickly sent matching traffic to my blogs, according to their stats and confirmed by my own. I like that Blog Mad doesn't block my browser's task bar url display when I point to site links.

In the end, I spent hours surfing other blogs and received back very brief visits from other blog surfers, none of which stayed for over a minute. So besides driving up my webcounters, what good are they? As I reflect on the amount of time it took to setup and experiment with these four services, I believe there is a better way to create web traffic... a way I found to bring lasting visitors to all of my sites. By examining all of my blog traffic statistics, the visitors who come and stay are those who read the content. So it would be better for me to spend less time with these gimmicks that produce shallow results, and more time writing thoughtful content that visitors find of value.

Franklin McMahon has posted a fantastic flash tutorial series on how to podcast... from recording the audio, to writing the RSS file, posting, and promoting your final product. Since it's flash, Frank is able to show you on-screen, click by click, how to use the software, and where to go online to find a variety of tools. This 3-part series makes it all look quite easy, especially for those who've resisted jumping into the RSS code. While there are a bunch of RSS tools available, Frank also just shows you how to code it yourself. It's really not that hard if you've ever tinkered with HTML. He even gives you a sample RSS file you can customize. The best part is that Frank shows how to do it all for FREE!

 The Free Tutorial: Learn to Podcast, Franklin McMahon, Creative Cow

This week, I've noticed a huge increase in messages to my spam folder. Most of them appeared to be delivery failure notices from a variety of places, as well as Out of the office notices. I had it setup so that any email sent to any of my domains would auto-forward to an email address I setup at Gmail. Opening several of the bounced messages (careful not to open attachments or launch any scripts), I saw that someone has been using one of MY domain names to send spam. HOW RUDE! They were making up the name and username of the email address with my domain name, so recipients would think the messages were from me. So first thing, I've shutdown the catchall addresses for all of my domains so that email to any of them will now bounce. Secondly, I've posted disclaimers on my websites telling folks that any email appearing to be from my domain names (stuffiveheard.com, edstoffel.com, etc.) are actually fraudulent. In the future, should I wish to use my domains for email, I'll probably adopt one of the methods of digitally signing emails so that folks can know messages from me are genuine. But currently, none of the digital signature methods is easy enough for most people to use and understand (PGP, PrivacyGuard, DomainKeys, etc.). If some method is eventually widely adopted and built into most email clients, that's what I'll use. In the meantime, I just won't use my domains for email.

The water at our house has too much calcium so I just bought a water softener that is on sale at Sears. I had some help on my last plumbing project - moving the laundry room to the main living level of the house. Having watched that person sweat copper pipes, I thought I'd try doing so for this project. I bought everything I'd need including a propane torch, plumbing solder & flux, and all the pipe, adapters and valves. I designed a 3-way valve so that I could easily engage or bypass the water softener. At each connection point, I sanded the outside points, and steel-brushed the inside points, and dry-fitted things for sizing. Then, I fluxed and soldered together what I could before cutting into the main water supply. I turned off the water, and cut the main supply where I planned to attach all of this, and noticed that although the water was off, it was still sitting in the pipe below my cut. How was I going to get that out of the pipe, I wondered? I tried using flexible tubing to syphon out the excess water and then finishing the job. But from that point forward, the solder just wouldn't take. What was the problem?

I called a plumber for help finishing the job, and learned what I'd done wrong. Since we're on a well, he had me turn the well-pump power off, drained the holding tank, and then opened the shutoff valve. He explained that any water or steam in the pipes prevents proper soldering - the water cools the heat necessary to solder, and steam pressure blows out the solder. Watching his technique, he soldered much faster that I had, heating the fixtures (not the pipes), and touching the solder to the opposite side of the torch, allowing it to run quickly into the seams. Then, he painted the job with a little more flux, wiping it clean with a rag. It all works well now, and I got a $200 plumbing lesson... for about the same cost of a 2-hour flight lesson.

ASCAP, BMI and the RIAA make sure broadcasters pay royalties to songwriters, composers and publishers. They also know what to charge businesses that play music for their customers. But what should they do about podcasting? Podcasts can be downloaded, copied, distributed and played an unlimited number of times without the podcaster's ability to count all of this. So instead of figuring out a good fee schedule, the organizations have done nothing to allow podcasters to use music under their control. So what are podcasters who want to include legal music to do? An entire industry of private music is emerging. It's free for podcasters to use, and great publicity for musicians to get known. One source of legal music for podcasters is the Podsafe Music Network:

What is Podsafe music? Podsafe music is described as a work that meets all of the following conditions: Works submitted to the Podsafe Music Network are the property of the artist, and all rights to these works, including lyrics and music, are the property of the artist; AND All works contain no recordings, lyrics, copyrights, or other elements that are the copyright of any other artist, except under the limited provisions of the Creative Commons License Agreement; AND Despite any recording contracts with RIAA, ASCAP, or BMI, or other recording industry entity, the artist retains ownership of the works, and is free to distribute, broadcast, license or sell these works at the artist's discretion. Only registered podcast producers can download music.

The site allows musicians to submit music, podcasters to download music for use in podcasts, and all others to listen and buy music from the site.

When it comes to the church sound system, I strive to make it so that the elements of each worship service can be clearly heard without any distraction of the equipment itself. The pulpit has a mounted mic; the pastor wears a wireless mic which transmits to its base on several available frequencies; and the piano is miked for the benefit of our ensemble orchestra across the room, so they can play in sync. We record the sermons direct to CD audio, and duplicate copies during the week for those who wish them. We also convert the CD audio to MP3 files which are available from the church website, heard as streaming audio, downloadable MP3 files, or podcasts. But then, some are still left out. Some in the pews may have difficulty hearing, so we've installed an assisted listening system which broadcasts the service to small receivers with earplugs. Our greeters make these available to people during each service on request. Still others may be homebound and unable to attend our services. So we've had to consider whether it's possible to make the services available for them. Keep in mind that these are most often our senior members who aren't likely to be connected to the internet or rocking to their iPods.

For those who wish to listen from home, I've arranged to send the audio of the service to them by phone. I picked up several Gentner telephone hybrid devices (a.k.a. phone couplers) to push audio across a phone line. Line level audio from the sound board is plugged into the device as well as a phone line, and the device is set to auto-answer. (Since one of our phone lines is also used for a fax line, it was necessary to add privacy blocks to each device on the line, to prevent the fax machine from picking up and chirping during the service.) To mix the service for phone feeds, I've selected all the audio sources to be heard on an aux channel. In addition, I've placed an extra mic in the room for ambient pickup of everything that occurs off-PA-mike during the service including singing and the ensemble... and that's added to the aux channel pre-fade. If we were a church that mixed audio for broadcast, I'd place mics to cover everything that occurs during a service, mixing for both PA and broadcast.

For each person wishing to listen to the service, we equip them with a speakerphone and a speed-dial button programmed for their hybrid's telephone number. So each Sunday, they can sit down in their favorite chair, press one button, and listen in on our church service.

One of the best places online to jump in and begin playing with Ajax for free is Protopage. You don't even have to sign up to begin playing... just go to the front page and start dragging the boxes around. Type things into the various boxes, or change the wallpaper. To understand how to load the RSS feeds, it couldn't be easier than clicking the "ADD TO PROTOPAGE" button on this site. If you decide to register, you can get a permanent page there, for you to use publicly or privately. Some are using it as an extension of other pages, whether blogs or personal profiles. For my own uses, I just wish there was an easy way to import all my links from another page. I heard about the service from Amber McArthur's Inside the Net podcast.

If you use an image from someone else's site, should you link directly to it (to give credit where it comes from), or copy and use it, so you aren't using their bandwidth? I'd recommend putting the image on your server so that 1) you aren't continuing to pull bandwidth from the source site, and 2) you will always know what's being loaded on your site. Exceptions would be when you have an arrangement to load an image from somewhere else, and you trust the source.

In the very week when the Windows MetaFile crisis is here, you wouldn't want to give someone else the ability of putting a malformed image onto your website. Malformed images can contain executable code, which runs when your browser (or shell) can't display it normally, and that's a backdoor to anything invading your machine, as well as anyone who visits your website - yikes!

For more on the WMF issue, see Steve Gibson's Security Now, Episodes 20-21
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I love my iPod mini, which I bought only 3 months ago. My daily route trip commute takes 3 hours, so I listen to lots of audiobooks from Audible.com. I used to burn them onto CDs, but after several hundred of those, I decided to try the iPod when the iPod minis became available for $199. It's been working great until yesterday when it became less responsive to button presses. While listening to one book, I wanted to go back a few minutes to relisten to the passage. But when I held down the back button, it cued the book to a point about an hour prior. The rewind and fast-forward buttons would no longer skip back or ahead a minute at a time. How long is my iPod warranty good for, I began to wonder? Probably 90-days since that's how long it's been and the problem just started. I looked through my saved emails from Apple but couldn't find anything about the warranty. Then I checked the website, hoping something would be there. But before finding warranty information, I saw a link to solving iPod problems. This handy information explains how to perform a reset of the device, and that did the trick. (For my iPod, I hold down 'menu' and 'select' together for 6 seconds.) My skip ahead/behind buttons work just fine now. And it turns out, the warranty did just expired. I could have bought the Applecare Protection Plan for an additional $59, but I've always disliked those extended warranties. I would rather choose to buy quality products which last on their own, and refuse to return to brands that don't. I don't like buying things that sit in the service shop. Make it right and I'll be a loyal customer.

I also woke up this morning to find my laptop screen's video has shrunk... no longer filling the space to the edges of the screen. Changing to the highest resolution expands the video to the edges, but the setting I prefer (1024 x 768) no longer does. It used to. Now why did that suddenly change? UPDATE: The fix was to right-click on desktop, graphic options, panel fit, enable.... this after playing for awhile with screen resolution and refresh rate. It was just the "panel fit" needing to be enabled; not sure how it was disabled.

In the world of blogging, there is a practice of offering reciprocal links to sites which promise to link to you. I get emails regularly from folks who want to do this. But most often, I don't really want to associate with them. Often enough, they might have some relation to the content of my pages, but it is rarely a true match. Often enough, there is also an issue of content quality. Many are offers, not from the sites themselves, but from middlemen, who are obviously charging for site marketing. And I've received reciprocal link offers from sites which appear to have NO CONTENT AT ALL. They're just pages consisting of links to various sites, and loads of advertising. That's it. There must be books out there telling people this is a formula for making money on the internet... getting traffic to your site through reciprocal links, and placing ads for visitors to click. What a scam!

Now if I actually wanted to respond to some of these link requests, there's still the question of benefit. Do their links drive any traffic to my site? There are a couple of services which answer this question by automatically displaying who actually links to me, such as those from Referer.org and True Fresco.org. But they have problems, too. Namely, you'll start to see Spammer Links appearing on the list... links to sites you don't want to refer your visitors to. Both of the ones I mentioned have ways to ban the links... Referer.org allows you to list the banned sites right in the code, while True Fresco gives instructions on modifying your .htaccess file to accomplish the same thing. But both take constant maintenance to weed out the undesirables. There are also server-side modules you can install if you're running Movabletype, Wordpress, or some other active pages.

The other thing is that they don't really display what I'd want to show. True Fresco tells visitors that you get a whole lot of visitors from Google, and some from a few other search engines. Good traffic from high traffic sites are more rare, unless your site is hugely popular. Referer.org blocks search engine hits, so you're left with actual linkers... some good, and some bad. The service WhoLinksToMe tells visitors who links to my site including search engines, but by link count, not actual traffic. It's also likely to show your own cross-promotion more than the all my true outside referrals. This service requires curious visitors to click the "WhoLinksToMe" link to see the information.

So in the end, I'll stick to installing actual links to sites I actually like... and leave the rest for the other sites to do. No spammer sites... no get rich quick schemes... and no listings of search engine links. Just links to actual sites I recommend you visit.

Well it's finally happened. As I speculated back in July, ever since AOL bought Mailblocks, they haven't seemed to really want it to survive. Almost immediately, they stopped allowing new subscribers.

Today, they announced the discontinuation of the Mailblocks email service, saying that they've incorporated many of the Mailblocks features into their new AIM Mail service. They began the message with this:

AIM Mail has been available for awhile now, but it is lacking many of the features that made Mailblocks a good service. I don't see anyway to setup rules to sort incoming mail into folders. Yes, you can set levels of spam protection, and create safe lists. But I'd like to pre-sort incoming mail into different folders.

I don't see anything called "Challenge-Response" in the AIM Mail settings, so I'm not sure why they even wanted Mailblocks. Then again, the whole "Challenge-Response" approach to fighting spam is really irritating. Maybe they ran focus groups and figured that out.

On the positive side, AIM Mail is an IMAP service, which is nice if you check your email at work and home... much better than POP on two different computers, making you wonder which one has your messages, or making you download things twice which means you get to handle everything twice... not very efficient.

So I'll try AIM Mail again... maybe just for junk subscriptions. We'll see how well they actually fight the spam.

I've switched to AQ Host for all my domains after being with Ipowerweb for years. Problem was that Ipowerweb wanted to start charging ongoing additional fees for additional domain names, even if they only consisted of one or just a few pages. I've tolerated setup fees, but once they started regular ongoing fees per additional domain name, that was enough. There are LOTS of web hosts that don't do that.

AQ Hosting has a number of hosting plans, but the ones that got my interest include Movabletype preinstalled and updated as needed. My very first MT installation at Ipowerweb was done for me, and I've taken care of updates since then. But they're always a little tricky, remembering things like setting permissions on files, and remembering to delete setup executables, for security reasons. So when I tried starting to use Movabletype from scratch, I wasn't sure what to do with the default username --- so I added my own name, but couldn't delete the old one. I tried reducing priviledges for the default name, and at that point, I couldn't do much else. What I should have done was to EDIT THE DEFAULT USERNAME, password, etc. So then, I tried my hand at deleting the MYSQL database, and recreating it. From that point forward, I couldn't get back in. Turns out, the database password needs to exist in a password file for that. I also tried moving MT into CGI-BIN where MT recommends it live, but the webhost says it can't live there on their servers. I did notice that doing this caused me to recover all the space it took up, and CGI-BIN file space wasn't counting against my usage limit.

So the nice people at AQ Host reinstalled Movabletype for me, and I was up and running in no time. I had to create each blog on the new server, load all templates, style sheets, supporting files and an MT plugin called "otherblogs" which I use for cross-promotion of blog content. Then I was able to export each blog's content from the old server, upload the file to a folder named "import" within MT, and then import the content.

So now, I'll be able to use all my domain names again as real pages, instead of just forwarding them to other pages. Goodbye Ipowerweb.

For more on how to do this, see:

 Moving Your MT Blogs to a New Server or Web Host, Learning Movable Type

A couple of months back, I picked up the latest version of Pinnacle's Studio MovieBox Deluxe for DVD authoring, which comes with Pinnacle Studio 9 and Hollywood Effects. It was highly recommended in the reviews that I read. I need to find a better source of reviews.

I just want to dub my old VHS tapes to DVD, and thought that since I have a DVD drive, this was going to be easy. NOT! The process takes 8-10 hours to complete the recording and burning of one movie --- capturing the audio/video, processing the data, and burning it. I'm not even trying to do anything fancy... just give me a freeze-frame of the movie title, and then the whole movie. No menus, no special effects... just the movie.

But the worst thing about it all is that the files created during the process of making even one movie takes up so much space on my hard drive. Studio 9 wouldn't even run on my 60Gig hard drive (because I do use my computer for other things too), so I bought a brand-new 120Gb drive. The problem is that Studio 9 creates HUGE HUGE files somewhere, and doesn't tell you WHERE they are. After making one movie, there's not enough room left to make another. And if you select a higher-quality version, it won't fit on a standard DVD.

I tried uninstalling the software to erase the previous movies, but that only cleared about 100Mb, and the drive is still 99% full. Typing "erase" or "delete" in the help file index did no good. I also tried looking for answers on the Pinnacle website about where these files are stored, but found none. I looked in the "Pinnacle" program folder, "My Documents/My Videos", "Application Data", "Windows", "Temp", and a bunch of other areas.

I eventually found the movie files within "Shared Documents/My Videos"... someplace I never go. This should have been a user-defined location, and easily found under an "Options Menu". Being able to recover hard drive space is essential!

I have my hard drive back, but I won't be reinstalling Pinnacle Studio 9. It just takes too long and too much hard drive space to make a simple DVD. I can't dedicate my computer for an entire day for this. Instead, I'll be checking out stand-alone DVD recorders.

So what's up with Mailblocks? Ever since it was bought by AOL, it seems to have gone downhill. They no longer accept new subscribers, and I'm wondering if AOL is going to dump the service.

I originally got the service when it was new, its founder was still alive and running the business, and Mailblocks was recommended by radio host David Lawrence (who only recommends things he believes in). The Mailblocks service was a great concept of email aggregation, spam protection, and more. It has the option of setting up challenge-response to validate email from unknown senders, but I never used that part of the service. I didn't think it was other-people's work to establish permission to email me... it's just as easy for me to build a white list of approved senders, and black listing known spammers. I also liked using Mailblocks to collect all of my email from various accounts including all of the domain names I own or manage.

But on a regular basis, connecting to the service with Microsoft's Outlook Express has been problematic. The server connection frequently times out. And on three separate occasions, I've lost the use of my account for days. This week, their email server was down for FOUR DAYS! (Monday-Tuesday, then Thursday-Friday). That's unacceptable.

Last month, I noticed my orthopaedic surgeon was handing out a brochure listing a domain name... that didn't go anywhere. I asked him why, thinking his service was letting him down. He told me that the company he was with wanted $250 just to update his address and phone number. I gave him a whole new site for a little less than that, and he seemed happy with that arrangement.

Meanwhile, our church's website was in limbo, while some considered design changes. After settling on a graphic for the header and a basic layout for the front page (one that fits completely in a visitor's first screen), I designed something new and put it online.

I'm still going to tinker with it, updating the navigation bar with something from Button Generator.

You've probably heard the news this week that CitiFinancial lost records of a million customers, complete with social security numbers and lots of sensitive information, which could be used for identity theft among other things.

I received a letter from them informing me that I was one of the unlucky customers who's data was "lost". They were using magnetic tapes to transport the data to a credit bureau each week, and shipping it UPS.

So I'm asking myself, 'Why are they still using mag tape, and why aren't they encrypting the data?' Well apparently, they've been asking themselves the very same question. In the letter to me, they've assured me that beginning next month, they're switching to encrypted satellite transmission of the data. They've also offered me a few months of credit bureau monitoring, just to keep an eye on my credit, to make sure no one runs out and buys things with my name.

Phishing is getting sophisticated... so much so that more and more people are being fooled. This particular email came to me today, and when you point to the link, it appears to be linked to Paypal. But look closely -- it's not going to Paypal:

http://www.paypal.com-submit.info/webscr.php?cmd=LogIn

It's actually going to the domain com-submit.info, which is registered to:

Greg Goris
307 Bay River
Sacramento, CA 95831

The words "choice" and "temporarily" are misspelled in the fake email, shown below:

I sent a copy of this phoney email to Paypal, and they confirmed it was a fake.

 How can I tell the difference between a real PayPal email and a fake one?, Paypal Help Center

Internet low-life continue trying to take people through the process known as phishing. In the typical messages I've received, they try to convince you that your bank or other financial account isn't going to continue working unless you login and update or verify information on file. Problem is, banks and other companies don't ask you to do this. It's the 21st century version of the scam where they call you on the phone and say anything to get you to give them your credit card number. The email below is just a sample of the many I've received. I don't even have an account with the named institution. The link they want me to click doesn't really go there, but actually goes to the address shown in the bottom-left of the picture. Always point your cursor at a link before clicking, to see whether it really goes where it says. In the case of urgent emails like this, they're always fake.

 How Not to Get Hooked By a Phishing Scam, Federal Trade Commission

 Anti-Phishing Working Group

I awoke this morning to three more fake messages --- all from a bank I've never heard of. The twist on this one is that when you point to the link, it appears to be the same at the bottom of my browser. It even appears to be the registered address of VanCity Credit Union... a different name than Charter One. Now why would they send you to a different domain name, when they have their own? It still smells like the same old phish scam.

Here's the latest phishing attempt I've received --- a common phishing email pretending to be from the eBay billing department. They claim to be informing me that there are problems with my account, and want me to log in within 48 hours to verify my account information. But when I point to the link the email provides, a DIFFERENT address appears at the bottom left of my browser, a numeric address. That DNS is registered to:

HINET Network-Center, CHTD, Chunghwa Telecom Co., Ltd.
Data-Bldg. 6F, No. 21, Sec. 21, Hsin-Yi Rd., Taipei Taiwan 100

That doesn't sound like eBay, does it? The word "information" is also misspelled in the last paragraph. The real eBay doesn't send misspelled emails asking you to tell them this information again. It's a scam!

For more, see:
 Email and Websites Impersonating Ebay, Ebay

For starters, there are online directories that tell you where to look, based on your zipcode. For the most part, they'll direct you to restaurants and coffeeshops. (WiFiHotspotList, WiFinder, WiFi411, WiFiFreespot.)

But if you want to do your own looking and investigation, check out the keychain sized tool at Wifiseeker. This handy device is directional, and it's LED bar graph will help you walk in the direction of the signal. Price starts at $29, and drops when you buy more than one. It's only going to show you direction and signal strength... it's not going to tell you whether the network is open or not.

For a WiFi sniffer that tells you more, check out Canary Wireless. This device tells you the network SSID, signal strength, channel, and whether it's open or encrypted. That's much more helpful at $49.