Well, not my family, but my work family. A co-worker’s house caught on fire yesterday morning severly damaging it. Luckily they were out getting family pictures, and only the dogs were there, who were rescued. You can read more at our local newspaper. My company will be starting to take up a collection here to help out. They’re currently staying at the husband’s parents house, but unfortunately, they have very little of anything left. Please keep them in your thoughts.

Update: It has been asked where you can submit your own donation if you feel inclined. If you wish, please send a check / cash / money order to:

Integrity Technology Solutions
Attn: Julie DeMay, Fire Donation
816 S. Eldorado, Suite 4
Bloomington, IL 61701

If you choose to submit a donation through PayPal, please send it to mhawley AT integrityts DOT com with the subject of Fire Donation.

Again, thank you to all who do donate, our co-worker and her family of 3 (will soon be 4 as there’s one on the way) will greatly appreciate it.

Everytime I need to find something in a wepage, I hit Ctrl-F. Most applications have a dialog that opens up and allows you to search for the word, phrase etc. However, Firefox took an old feature and made it awesome. See what I mean by opening up Firefox and clicking Ctrl-F ... don't see anything? Well, look towards the bottom of the browser. A new toolbar opens up allowing you type your search phrase. The really awesome part is that as soon as you start typing, it starts finding all instances and brings your browser to the first instance. Cool man cool.

BTW - clicking enter will "Find Next" and clicking Shift-Enter will "Find Previous".

So, here's the oddity of the day for me:

Now, I didn't go to C:\Windows and press delete, I noticed my recycle bin was full. So, Right Click -> "Empty". Boy its a good thing I don't want to delete that... "No".

Opening the Recycle Bin shows absolutely no files or directories. Could this be a message to switch to Linux? Gosh I hope not, I couldn't do any programming with VS.NET anymore.

Update: It seems to have fixed itself. Now I can successfully empty my recycle bin. Still a little leary about rebooting though.

Which File Extension are You?

I'm catching up on my Dilbert Desktop calendar and today's is going to be a keeper. Unfortunately, I can't scan it onto my computer (I think it may be copyright violation as well), but the strip is just great:

[Tour of Accounting]
Accounting Troll: "Over here we have our random number generator"

Number Generator Troll: "Nine Nine Nine Nine Nine Nine"

Dilbert: "Are you sure that's random?"

Accounting Troll: "That's the problem with randomness: you can never be sure"

Thinking back about this, its so true. A random number generated at this exact moment can theoretically be re-generated at a later time, how random is that. However, your odds increase as the number of random numbers that can be generated increase, though I'm sure all of you know this by now.

I'm doing some digging in my control download stats just to kinda see how things are going. Some of these results may be suprising, others just borderline insane.

Total downloads: ~37000
Total unique downloads by email: ~21800
Total Calendar Popup downloads: ~17500
Highest Download Day: 9/26/2003 with 271 downloads
Lowest Download Day: 4/4/2003 and 4/5/2003 with 1 download each day
Average downloads per day: ~65
Most commonly used Fake Email address: a rendition of "a@a.com", w/ ~310 downloads

Pretty cool stuff that I've collected over the last year and a half. I love looking at these types of things, they're so cool.

Aside from Rory's occasional run to Starbucks, I wonder what he pounds down that makes his posts so darn funny. If you've not been reading his blog today, he's let a slew crazy ass blog posts about SellsCon 5 (or if you're really picky, Applied XML Developers Conference (I just like the other title better (assuming that Chris doesn't try and con anyone about XML (but who would do that?)))). I especially love the "Space Hamster" picture...

While the Google Desktop application is quite a feat by Google, I just think (like many others) that there are too many security risks and flaws in the current version that just render it useless.

After reading Franci's post I quickly realized all of the security holes that the Google Desktop opens up and uninstalled the software. In reality, I didn't even use it...I still opted for Lookout to search my email...why? Well, because its not browser based and its right there in the application I need to search email for.

I would suggest that everyone take a step back and determine if the security risks are worth the ease of searching. Personally, I don't.

So about a month ago, my NVidia graphics card went out on me and I set out to purchase a new graphics card. Since I don't do much computer gaming (Sims 2 being the really only game), I figured I wanted a graphics card that had a TV tuner on it as well as dual-monitor support.

So, off to Circuit City I went, and picked up an ATI All-In-Wonder 9600 graphics card. Brought it back, and after 2.5 days of screwing with things as well as rebuilding my machine about 5 times, I finally got it working!

Well, last week, I was introduced to a product called MaxiVista. Basically it allows you to have dual monitor support via a network connection if you have a spare PC or laptop laying around. Totally awesome product and concept indeedy. I promptly got it running at work with my spare laptop and started enjoying the dual monitor life.

Yesterday, during the day, I decided, hey I've got 2 PCs and a 19" and a 15" monitor, I'll get it MaxiVista setup at home too. Ahh, so it was great, but after about 3 hours of using it (and after watching the Cardinals get shutout by the Dodgers (Lima pitched a great game, however I'm sure Cardinals will kill them tonight (and advance on, of course))) I remembered, Hey! I have dual monitor support on my home PC. DUH!

So, I promptly removed MaxiVista and hooked my 15" monitor up to my 2nd monitor output cable...works like a charm, just like MaxiVista! However, I was a bit dissapointed with my 15" monitor, only being able to get a max of 1024x768 (remember the days when that was just AWESOME!) and it couldn't compete with my 1600x1200 resolution on my 19". So, I figured, hey I'll just go and buy another monitor.

And so, on this Columbus Day weekend, I ventured out to Best Buy and purchased the Samsung SyncMaster 997DF monitor. Came home, ditched the 15" monitor, hooked up the new monitor as my primary and my older one as the secondary, and WHAMMO! Dual monitor support with 2 19" monitors. Yes, I'm officially a geek (like I wasn't before (even though my girlfriend (and myself (and my dad)) think so)) now, both with dual monitors at home and at the office.

Ohh life is great. Now, how to get my company to purchase MaxiVista for me....

<rant>

Well, I've been attempting to use Xdrive.com's service the past week for online backup of my databases, however their service just plain sucks. I'm sure it works great if you upload files manually, but they have a new "feature" that allows you to automatically backup your files to their server. Well, for the past week, IT HASN'T WORKED! I had a long conversation with support through email, what did they say - "try our latest software being released today, it should solve your problem." Well, hmm, actually it made it worse, in fact my scheduled backups NEVER ran at that point, at least before they were almost all getting uploaded...but not now!

So, after 3 emails just recently sending my log files and them saying "recreate your jobs", I've given up hope. Their support is terrible, and gave me no reason or solution to the problems I was having. I realize I was still in their trial period, but hell, they already charged me $9.95 for my first month (I sure as hell better be getting that back!) so I should get the same support as everyone else.

Err! I'm so pissed at them, and will be looking at alternative solutions that will work for my needs. Note, I didn't link to them, because I didn't even want to give them a popularity boost through Google.

So, if any of Xdrive.com's staff is reading this, you should fix your problems and have a hell of a lot better support staff. Get your support guys able to answer problems rather than just asking to see the logs then saying "I showed the logs to the engineers." Lastly, don't ANYONE use their service, I wasn't even happy when I used their desktop software on my main machine to upload some other stuff - it just plain sucks.

</rant>