Soil from Stone

…so why not pass them on?

Andy Carvell writes, “A small industry has grown to support the needs of those wishing to make arrangements for [online] friends to be contacted in the event of their death.” One site lets you create multiple emails to be sent in case you don’t log into the site every so many days. But what happens if you’re hospitalized or otherwise unable to get to the Internet for an extended period? Another site lets you designate a “trusted contact” who is authorized to trigger the mass email. That makes a little more sense. Personally, my plan is to make sure that my passwords are accessible to someone I trust. It’s not foolproof, but I think it’s good enough. And it doesn’t cost me anything.

EUROCOM PHANTOM-i7 provides workstation and server-caliber capabilities with 1.5 Terabytes of storage with three physical SATA-300 hard drives and RAID 0/1/5, super-powerful 3.2GHz Intel Core i7 Processor Extreme Edition I7-965; 3.2GHz XEON X5580 processors running at 2x 6.4GT/sec bus speed or 2.93GHz Intel Core i7 Processor I-940 running at 4.8GT/sec with 8MB L3 cache, Gigabit Ethernet port on-board, HDMI, eSATA, DVI ports, with a 17″ WUXGA LCD display and full size keyboard.

Talk about over-engineering! There are two serious drawbacks: the battery life and the weight. It still makes me wish I had money.

If you try to transfer a large amount of data to a usb device and the device keeps spontaneously disconnecting or if your iPod/iPhone errors out while syncing (Attempting to copy to the disk “YOURDEVICENAME” failed. The disk could not be read from or written to.”), there are two probable solutions:

1. In Device Manager, open the properties for the USB Root Hub. Uncheck “Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power” on the Power Management tab.
2. Switch the device to a USB 2.0 port. Older USB ports are too slow to handle the transfer rates required for gigabytes of data. If your computer is like mine and doesn’t have any 2.0 ports, you can install a PCI to USB card. They’re cheap (<$10) and well worth it for the extra speed and reliability.

I needed a tool to quickly scan customer computers to determine the type and amount of RAM installed and installable.

First I tried crucial.com’s System Scanner. Apparently it works for a lot of people. Not for me, though. It correctly identified my current hardware but incorrectly reported that I am already at the maximum memory capacity.
MemoryStock.com’s SysInfo just errored out. Don’t bother.
Orca Memory Scanner got it right on the first try. I’ll keep going back there if it works consistently. They are in the UK, however, and they’re prices are a little high. It still works. You just have to take their findings somewhere else.

Before making any significant purchases, check the store’s prices online. If there is a discrepancy, the store should honor the lower price. I saved more than enough at both Best Buy and Walmart to make up for the extra hassle.

It’s kind of cool, but it’s not there yet. I tried it for a couple of hours before giving up. It’s great for casual web browsing, but it doesn’t handle a lot of Web 2.0 technologies very well. Pages with embedded video, whether running or not, load and respond very slowly. It doesn’t like interactive PHP applications, such as WordPress and phpBB, at all. Maybe I’ll try it again in a couple of months.

Update 1/23/08: Installing Chrome (or maybe uninstalling?) also broke hyperlinks in Outlook. Clicking on a hyperlink produced the error, “This operation has been canceled due to restrictions in effect on this computer,” as if a new security policy had been applied. In order to fix it, you have to reset the program associations in IE and make it the default browser. See this KB article at Microsoft.

1. Don’t download or install every widget that some web site says will make your computer run better. Most of the time it will only make it run slower!
2. Keep your antivirus software up to date. Most good antivirus packages will also help protect you from spyware, unwanted pop-ups, and other nuisance software.
3. Keep your email clean. Delete emails you don’t need to keep and organize the rest into logical folders.
4. Don’t forward chain emails. More than 90% of all email flying across the Internet is junk that is full of inaccuracies or rumors that nobody ever reads. That might seem harmless, but it bogs down email servers and prevents the detection of viruses, spam, and other malicious emails.
5. Delete unnecessary files such as old documents and downloaded installation files. Temporary files (temporary Internet files or Windows files in C:\Windows\Temp) are excellent candidates for the recycle bin.
6. Keep plenty of empty space on your C: drive. Your computer needs plenty of elbow room on its hard drive to store temporary files and to be able to move other files around. If you start running low on disk space (10% or less free), consider doing some serious cleanup.
7. Uninstall old programs that you no longer use. Why keep it on your computer, using up disk space and memory, if you don’t need it?
8. Empty your recycle bin. If a file has been in there for more than a week, chances are you won’t need to restore it.
9. Run SpyBot or AdAware. Spyware and Adware is everywhere and it will waste your computer’s valuable resources. 10. Reboot. Windows is feature heavy. That’s great for end users, but it means that a lot of junk accumulates in memory over days and weeks of constant running. Click Start, Turn Off Computer, then Restart.
11. Defragment regularly. Over time, files on your computer’s hard drive become scattered and fragmented. Defragging at least once a month (or after doing all the stuff above) will help your computer run more quickly.

They have the most unfriendly, error prone interface of all the job sites.

And why should I be required to select the industry in which I want to work? I don’t care. It’s the kind of work that matters to most people, not the industry of the employer.