Talk

Now and then I get to rant.
I am (once again) on an airplane, on my way to some upper Midwest city for the day, heading right back home this evening. You get real perspective on airplanes, you know. Perspective on things like heights and time - and on people, too. People you know you’ll never [...]

Today my ex-wife emails me asking if I might know why in the world the online antivirus she had decided to use was not working as it should. I replied back with the question as to whether or not she had been using a properly installed and up to date program such AVG or Mcafee [...]

By “unconscious,” I don’t mean fall out of your seat, donut rolls out of your hand unconscious, but rather a state of mind. To be more specific, I am referring to the phenomenon where somebody uses a computer (in this case, an older WinXP PC), but really doesn’t pay attention to the landscape in front [...]

Although I will actually have some downtime on Labor Day itself (Monday), I spent Friday night, all day Saturday, and part of Sunday working hard on an e-mail migration for a small business customer of mine. And it’s still not complete. Functional, but not complete.
I’m becoming a one-man e-mail migration maven, as I’ve got so [...]

I had a fun little gig last weekend. One of my business clients just struck out on his own as a Financial Advisor. I’d already helped equip and setup his new office, with great results. But he discovered that he could really use a second display on his desktop. On one, he could keep his [...]

It seems like lately I’ve morphed into the pied piper of e-mail. The MAPI Man. The Exchange Evangelist. Don’t get me wrong, e-mail is different things to different people. And I’m no Microsoft zealot - quite the opposite. I’m fully aware of the Open Source alternatives out there. There’s just been a convergence of sorts [...]

Allen Writes:
Personally I would think twice about recommending SpamBayes. Its false negative rate has been REALLY bad for me. It’s just too easily fooled by chucking in a bunch of random words. At the moment I’m just too lazy to find something better though.
SpamBayes has processed 15355 messages - 14754 (96%) good, 361 (2%) spam [...]

I was at a family gathering just the other day (my wife’s family, to be concise). One of her sisters was celebrating a birthday, so we all converged on another sister’s house nearby. It’s a big house in an affluent suburb of Chicago. Two words: Cha. Ching.
Anyhow, the man of the house (TMotH) has [...]

There is a very good chance that the majority of the people relying on IT in their businesses were tempted to answer “yes.” How come one of the industries responsible for many of the achievements of our civilisation has become the object of such widespread distrust and cynicism? It is so common these days to [...]

Recently one Lockergnome fan wrote in:
Hi, Matt.
I don’t know if I’m emailing the right person or not. I’ve been a long time reader and fan, and have learned a lot! However, I am looking to take my old VHS movies and tapes and want to make them into .AVI or mpeg or even QuickTime. [...]

It’s been a couple of weeks since my lost post… and for good reason. I am just now able to cool my jets and write something coherent. And speaking of cool, God bless central air during this withering July afternoon in Chicago.
So as my opening implied, it’s been non-stop action for me these past couple [...]

There is a cancer in cyber space that has shown no sign of slowing down anytime soon. Yup, those old Nigerian 419 scams have not only gained steam, they’re practically exploding into inboxes everywhere. With the ever-growing fear of identity theft, the last thing that the common computer user needs to be stressing about is [...]

Hello there Gnome-land, how are you today? Did you have a good weekend? My weekend was pretty darned laid back. I managed to squeeze in a few gigs, but they were easy pickin’s and didn’t get in the way of an otherwise enjoyable weekend.
Saturday started out with a cleaning crew in my townhome. For a [...]

How big of an influence can a tech conference have in the world? Can it transcend political bickering and income boundaries? What if a tech conference could reach across an entire continent, say Africa for instance? Think it could never happen? Think again…
My new friend Colin Daniels flew to Gnomedex 2006 all the way from [...]

I had the honor of taking my father’s ashes up to the cemetery in his childhood home of Ayr, Ontario this past weekend. Ayr is about 90 minutes west of Toronto, one of my favorite cities. As somber a task as it was, my wife and I made the most of it, seeing the theatrical [...]

I know we’re already ankle deep into July, but did you know that June was Backup Awareness Month? OK, so it’s a trumped-up marketing ploy by Maxtor and Seagate, but cynicism aside, it’s a good way to promote the concept of PC and Mac data backups.
As an IT professional, every month is backup awareness month [...]

I came up with an idea some time back that I want to share with you. I thought it might be fun to shine the light on you for a change, give you a moment in the limelight if you will. ow about we start a program in which you tell me about a story [...]

I was offline for a couple of days due to the fact that I poured some iced tea into my brand new Dell laptop. Can you imagine telling your boss that your new Dell laptop is, uhhh… sticky and doesn’t work anymore? You really don’t want to do that! This laptop turned into a semi-working, [...]

Winners are not determined by who gets the last word or who attacks whom.
Or as one common user just said: “What I see here is ego overcoming ego.” Could not be better said. The ego in this room is suffocating. The thought leadership is suffering as a result.
Typical of me, I didn’t realize the first [...]

I’m not sure about other carriers, but Cingular just upgraded its BlackBerry Internet Service from v1.8 to v2.0. You can read more about it here. I decided to go ahead and upgrade my service to this new offering.
So far, what I enjoy about it most is the way it manages e-mail you’ve integrated into [...]