I used to believe that technology enabled criminals to do things better than they used to. Phishing scams, online pedophiles and pyramid schemes seem to just work better online. With the recent reports of the Lakeland, FL teens beating a girl on camera along with the many episodes of Dateline NBC that have been televised where pedophiles getting nabbed I’m beginning to think technology catches more criminals than it creates.

There are new reports of people getting caught every day. Here is South Dakota a report just came out about an 18 year old text messaging a 12 year old for a sexual encounter from his cell phone. It even says in the report that the offender knew what he was doing was wrong. I also watched World’s Dumbest Criminals this weekend where a family actually recorded themselves committing insurance fraud. Another featured a woman stealing a dog in plain site of a clearly visibe camera.
I guess I never figured people were that stupid before. I guess anyone willing to commit a crime isn’t that smart to begin with. But they take it to a new level to do their crimes where everything you do is recorded. Simply stunning!

While in Chicago 2 weeks ago, I visited a place that has so far survived the shakeout of record stores from the commercial landscape, Rolling Stone Records. It was one of the only places on the Northwest side of Chicago that for many years you’d be sure to find that single or album that you just had to have. They used to have everything in stock whenever you went there. An old album by Elvis? Sure! Guns N’ Roses’ latest? Absolutely!

Sadly, things have changed. I went this time only to find they seem to only carry are a few of the latest CD’s along with some greatest hits albums from the older bands. If you wanted older albums from the Smashing Pumpkins or Green Day, you would be out of luck at Rolling Stone now. And if you want a single? Ha! No friggin’ way! Oh how I longed for the day when they had the single cassette tapes lining the wall near the cashier. Now it’s replaced with DVD movies.

This will probably be my last visit to Rolling Stone as it seems to be in a downfall. The place was a ghost town when I visited. I think the only other customer that came in while I was there was buying porn. I walked out with a Greed Day album that featured a live performance and a Garbage compilation. Truly it was all they had that I was interested in. I guess Wal-Mart, Target or Amazon are the only places you can surely get almost any album you want now. It’s a sad era indeed.

Here is another lesson in English. A coworker of mine today asked me “did you get my emails?” I corrected them by saying “You mean email?”

When you ask if the postman delivered the mail, you don’t use the word mails. The word mail is never plural. So why is email so often used in the plural form?

I just think email sounds better.  Now I wonder, should the word be hyphenated? E-mail?

I used to like The Sims Online. I feel it’s better than Second Life as it has a way more features. The game does get a little boring unless you have a social interaction with other players. Here is the email I received with details all about The Sims Online return.

Dear Former Member of The Sims Online

Luc Barthelet,
“MaxisLuc”. users for years (e.g.

It amazes me sometimes how lazy people are with their passwords, especially when it comes to email passwords. The password to your email account is possibly the most important password you could have. The passwords for all the things you use on the Internet can be reset and sent to your email account. Yet some people set their password to a simple single word without capital letters or numbers. They use the name of their wife, husband or dog which are all easy to figure out. It’s a hacker’s dream.

As a tech, people voluntarily give me their password to their email accounts all the time. It’s a good thing I’m an honest person. I could do many evil things with their information:

• Place orders on Amazon.com and have them delivered to any address I wish.
• Hijack domains and make them my own.
• Access bank account and credit card information.
• Access serial keys to software ordered online.

… and a lot more. Be sure to set your password to using numbers and capital letters. Also be sure to not use dictionary words. Make it as secure as you can. Change it regularly also, you never know when somebody has been looking over your shoulder and figured out what you are typing for a password.

Yes, I said it! Games that you play on your own are dead. You are witnessing a switch in the gaming world to everything becoming multi-player. Muti-player games add such a new experience to gaming that soon nobody will want to play games by themselves anymore.

When games like Pac-Man first came out, they were mainly 1 player. You could play 2 players and switch off when you lose a man, but hardly anybody did this. Then later games like Double Dragon and Rampage came out where you could play with multiple players simultaneously. Arcades later made a comeback based on the competition of mutliplayer games in the mid 1990’s such as Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter 2.

With the Internet, you can play with thousands of other players. The dynamic that Halo 3 and World of Warcraft bring to your PC is unmatched by any single player game. The Wii is popular because it is mainly a party system that involves multiple players in your living room. This is the future. Soon games like Metal Gear will need to have some type of multi-player capability added to future releases or franchises like this will simply die.

Have you ever had a job interview that wasted your time? You know those interviews where the phone screening didn’t quite go so well, but they bring you in anyway? I just had one, and I am super annoyed by it.

I am currently living in South Dakota. I have been looking to make it back to Chicago for quite some time now. So I get the phone screening, and I just got a vibe that the dude wasn’t into me. So I wrote it off. To my surprise I got a call back and we discussed me coming into the office. So I drove to Chicago to have the interview. The dude again, just totally wasn’t into me. From the start of it all, he never was into me, and never will be. What a colossal waste of my time! This wasn’t a case where I was a bad interview either. I think I did just fine. The douchebag had his mind made up before he even made the first phone call to me. He probably had a guy who had a dumbed down resume that he felt was a better fit.  All of my talking wasn’t going to do anything to sway him.

I’ve had many of these interviews. Once I had 2 interviews with the same guy and he asked me the same questions and didn’t remember the first time I had been there. In another situation, I was shown around the office while the guy just talked, he wasn’t interested in what services I could provide at all, just wanted somebody to talk to.

So after $160 in gas, $30 for parking and about 6 hours of my time preparing and interviewing and 2 vacation days off work, I am left empty handed. How fun! Here’s an idea. How about not being a jackass and just letting a guy know you’re not interested instead of just bringing people in for a show? It will save everyone a whole lot of time and trouble.

We all know that Firefox is a memory hog. Add-ons and themes can cause these types of problems, but I also discovered from a friend of mine that the amount of sites you have visited can cause issues with memory too. This means every time you visit a different page, you can always click the Back button to go back to a previous page. Firefox keeps saving those pages in memory, thus taking up more and more memory with the more pages you visit. This can add up quickly if you have several different tabs with different histories.

With this tip I started making sure I closed my browser every few hours or so to start with a clean slate. Sometimes the simple stuff makes a huge difference.

I haven’t blogged here in a few days. The reason is because my eyes were strained greatly for the past 5 days. At work I was was responsible for email support for a week. This meant hours of reading and writing email to our customers. By Friday my eyes didn’t want to focus on anything. I was dizzy and my eyes were dry and in pain. I decided to just ease off. I took my contacts out, went around blind and did the best I could without focusing on too much. This also meant no TV.

Let this be a reminder that you should take regular breaks when using your computer. My sister’s work advises a few minutes of focusing your eyes on something else every 7 minutes of looking at a computer display. This can be hard to do for techies such as myself. But if you don’t want to be shut down for 5 days like mine were, you might want to make an effort to give your eyes a break.

While the arcade itself may be dead, arcade games seem to be making a comeback lately. Classic games like Pac-Man and Galaga are available on the XBox 360 and Wii. People of all ages are loving these games, and it seems to be feeding the need these days for a game that you don’t have to sit in front of for hours on end to enjoy. Long 20 hour epics such as Zelda sprung up long ago when it was realized that video gaming in the home was different from that in the arcades. People desired a deeper story with their games, and it was exciting to play into the night trying to find that magic sword or hidden room.

As gamers are growing older, they have less time to devote to gaming. I myself don’t have the time to devote to games like World of Warcraft or Zelda. I spend a lot of my time on a train, bus or plane. This feeds my need for the 5 minute burst of entertainment that I get with an arcade type of game. I think many others share the need for these games so they can play for 5 minutes and just put it down and be done. Many cell phones have arcade type games available on them so that a player can play for a bit, put it down and be done while they are on the go.

I think in the coming years, we are going to find many more arcade “shoot-em-up” style cames making their way to consoles. We will be taken back to the years when games like Contra and 1943 was big in the arcade. Long live the arcade game!