Archive for March 2005

The DDR craze has arrived in my household. The kids’ uncle loaned them a PS2 and we’re kickin’ our heels with Dance Dance Revolution. DDR Extreme 2 is great. We wanted to get another to have more song choices, so I shlepped to a few stores and only one was available—DDR Max. I’m disappointed in it because the beginner (light) level is much harder than the one on DDR Extreme 2. Is there a different one we should’ve gotten? I went to Konami’s site and tried to search DDR sites, but they don’t give enough details to determine what would work for us lowly beginners. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Whoa, dude! I had no idea that we couldn’t rely on Microsoft Word to take care of the grammar and spelling problems for us. Oh man, all those yours, you’res, theres, and theirs have been wrong all this time. Theirs know substitute for people editing. I use the checker to catch obvious things, but not for the final editing. In some cases, the checker is wrong. Thank goodness for editors and second pairs of ayes. No, I didn’t use an editor for this entry. Why do you ask?

I’ve returned full-time in my day job. The only problem I am having with the adjustment is extreme fatigue. I’ve been exercising, watching what I eat, ensuring I get the needed sleep, and taking vitamins. But I continue to trudge along and fall asleep whenever my body gets the opportunity (like resting on the sofa watching a good movie or laying down in bed just for a minute only to fall asleep for hours). Any suggestions? I do have a doctor’s appointment scheduled and will probably get a blood test.

We’re doing more with less. It’s a phrase that won’t go away and we have to accept it. Many are stuck in jobs longer than they wish because of the economy and highly competitive job market. It’s not surprising if many are at the point where they’re sleepwalking while working. In Part I of Work Doesn’t Have Much Meaning Anymore, tells you how to change this in 15 minutes by exploring the questions to ask and inner fulfillment. The 15-second summary gives you the problem, solution, and results.

Got another 15 minutes? Part II walks through a sample worksheet addressing four considerations and closes with another 15-second summary. Ready? Set. Go!

Users of Yahoo’s free email will soon receive one gig of storage, four times more than the current 250 megs. This move helps Yahoo! match up with its competitor—Google’s Gmail.

SBC Yahoo customers will get two gigs of storage beginning in May. Two gigs equals “enough to hold up to 22 million pages of email, more than 20,000 photos or 4,000 songs.”

I’ve used Adobe Reader for Palm for the last few years. But it doesn’t work well anymore. Whenever I try loading a PDF file to read on my Palm, it errors most of the time. I’ve been to the discussion forums and have yet to find an answer that works or others have asked the same thing and no one is responding. Tried searching the net… no luck there either.

I know there are other PDF readers, but they’re not free. It’s not that I am cheap, but rather will I use it enough to make it worth the bucks? Plus, Adobe Reader is free… why should I have to pay for something else? OK, so it doesn’t work right. Anyone have success with it?

How many times have you heard someone say, “Trust me”? Those are empty words unless the person has proven trustworthy through past actions. When you get a newsletter from the first time, it’s rarely possible to decide whether or not you want to continue receiving it. If it’s a bad issue—well, everyone has off days. If it’s a good one—could be luck or could be simply a grand newsletter. So you save judgment ’til after receiving a few issues.

Email newsletters help build trust—not alone, however. The company’s Web site, customer service and general all-around handling of business build trust. Trust can’t be bought and sold. For example, I shop Land’s End once in a while. They carry quality products, but I’ve sent back a couple of items because they weren’t comfortable. My daughter had a backpack with wheels from the company. I hated spending that much, but the company’s quality guarantee pushed me to buy it. Read the latest issue of
eNewsletter Journal.

By the way, the link to the Web Credibility article from the feature broke and we could not find where the recent study report went … but all of the stuff from the group is at Web Credibility Project.

Sadly, spyware distributors have found another way to infilitrate computers through what people perceive as a safe environment—blogs. You won’t get any from this one. It comes through bloggers downloading free music and media for visitors to their blogs to download. Another way spyware makes its appearance is through pop ups. Dodge these pop ups and avoid clicking on them. Continue to run your anti-spyware program on a regular basis. Verify your browser’s security settings are where they should be.

How do these distributors prey on bloggers? Like the article says, not all of them tech savvy. My daughter interacts with a popular kid Web site where they add backgrounds, music, and images to their profile and “store” pages. She doesn’t understand the concept of spyware just yet, so she would be an easy victim. We check her computer to ensure it stays clean, but many are like her and may not have parents who know how to help. [Source: Investor's Business Daily]

More resources on the topic:

* eWeek

* Tech Republic

I’ve been getting hit with ping spam for the past week or so. I’m deleting every one of them with Blacklist. The eWeek article discusses comment spam (scroll down). In this month’s issue of Shavlik’s The Remediator Security Journal, readers tackle spyware and Mary Landesman writes about “Sly Wares.”

Sapphire Intrigue is a new blog with writings and poems. So far, three intruiging entries have been posted. Ms. Jones said she would like honest feedback. No, it’s not me.

CTO of Opera Software and father of CSS, Håkon Wium Lie, has publicly announced a challenge to Microsoft through a test suit known as Acid2. Lie and the Web Standards Project are developing a test page that uses features such as fixed positioning of elements. The purpose of this effort is to encourage Microsoft to implement CSS 2 support in IE7.

It’s no surprise the article has hit the blogosphere streets at Slashdot and ZDNet. As a member of the Web Standards Project, I’m eager to see what comes of this.

Uber blogger and Microsoft employee, Robert Scoble, speaks up about Acid2. His initially posted this entry and then followed up with another. Click on Comment (this is a usability issue as it implies you’re posting a comment rather than there are multiple comments to read) at the end of the post to read the interesting responses especially from setmajer.

It is important to understand this is not about Opera. Hakon just happens to be CTO of Opera. The focus is on standards.