Talk

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 [...]

I need to use a Dell laptop at work, and this has everything to do with the fact that I need to run “Windows only” applications. Yes, I know you can use parallels and Boot Camp, but we are not ready for the Intel Macs.
So, I’m stuck with Windows for the next couple of years. [...]

Yes, my Gnomie friends, summer is officially here. And in Chicago, that can only mean one thing… CONSTRUCTION! But seriously, every year in the weeks leading up to summer, I promise myself the same things over and over: that I’ll be more active, exercise more, and enjoy more of what the city has to offer. [...]

In general, it has been my experience that locking things down for the home user can be a lot more challenging that it is for the enterprise user. Unfortunately, it is often times the home based PC user that needs the iron fist of common sense.

One of my business clients called me in dire straits - his two-year-old 12″ PowerBook G4 wouldn’t boot up. Turns out if you let it sit for a while and cool completely down, you could boot it up, but it would run only for about 10-15 minutes before just freezing up. It sounded like it [...]

This past Wednesday was a big day for me. I’ve been building up to a big network migration for a business client for several weeks, and Wednesday was the day I pulled it off. OK, not really that big, it’s only a four-person office. But heck, it’s big to me. Let me ’splain.
I’ve already written [...]

I recently visited China for an eye-opening whirlwind tour and adventure. You can read some of my comments in the IS China 2006 report. It has been a wake-up call for me to the realization that indeed we are on the verge of a new era of globalization. Unfortunately for us in the west the [...]