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OK, what is with this link? I have had two messages in the last couple hours from people who apparently send me a link to

www.blockcheckercont.com

The site seems to be some kind of spam and I don’t trust the spyware that it may give us on our computers.

update: I have confirmed that neither of the people that have sent me this message actually sent it. It seems to be truly spam autogenerated from peoples machines

I have struggled with Twitter for about a year now. I am not sure what it is for and I have no idea where it is going. Essentially Twitter is  just a box on a web page that will send out a max 140 character message out to the cosmos. If people are wollowing you then they will see that “Tweet” but otherwise it is just another random message along the Twitter timeline. Of course the simplicity of the Twitter service is something that gets geeks  crazy. There are all sorts of ways to expand Tweeting with Twitter.

I just ran across an article on Read/Write Web that shows their choice for the top 10 Twitter apps. A list like this is good as it will allow you to see the expandability. You can send others messages so why not send messages directly to a todo list? Send tweets to your calendar? What about syncing others links sent through Twitter to your Delicious?

Anyway I am on there too. If you want to follow me on Twitter I am at http://www.twitter.com/billnad

This weekend I have setup Windows Vista on my secondary computer and although it is a tad slow the computer is usable and allows me to run Vista and learn about our next favorite OS.

One of hte things that I do with my Windows XP machines is to use Tweakui to map my favorites folders in IE from one central machine and therefore any changes that my wife makes on one computer gets changed for all computers.

I looked for tweakui for Vista but it does not seem to exist so in my searching I found a way to get tweakui for Windows XP to work in Windows Vista.

I am just copying and pasting these instructions from a guy named n8barber. I wish I knew who n8barber was so that I could give him better credit but he seems to just post in forums rather anonymously. Here are the Tweakui for Windows Vista instructions. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the things that has always driven me crazy is the way that in our minds we can decide what is right based on a number of factors but when you try to get that down on paper it is really difficult to judge how to make a decision when there are a few factors, not all important and different roads that we can go down.

These decisions come up at work, at home, during sports events, anywhere where things can change and that it is hard to make an easy decision

Finally a few weeks ago I found a great way to make this work, and work really well. First if you look at the pic of a spreadsheet below you can see how this works.

The example that I am using here is a rudimentary one where my wife and I were trying to decide weather to move away from Calgary or not and if so where. When deciding to move I wanted to figure out where in Canada would work and at the same time I wanted to weight each city based on jobs (for me), home prices (need a roof over our head), schools and education (for the kids), and weather (to stop shivering in Winter). Read the rest of this entry »

I am not a big gamer at all in fact I hardly play any video games at all. I do occasionally spend an hour playing Call of Duty 2 on the laptop but even that is not enough to make me any kind of gamer, in fact I watch movies a lot more.

A couple of years back people told me how great modded Xboxes were for streaming movies to the TV and since I have a “couple of movies” on my PCs and some music as well I though it would be nice to steam from the computer to a Xbox. The wife though is not a fan of any video games so I had to rely on my two young kids to get me there at some point.

My son is now 4 and my daughter turns 8 in a week and true to form my young son has taken to video games like any young boy does so I have an ally. I did borrow an Xbox last year from a guy at work but it did not go over so well at home. Read the rest of this entry »

Wow I just saw on the Firefox download page that they have passed 500 million downloads today. That is a helluva lot of installs. The number is a bit warped becuase some people like me have downloaded it 10 times or so to different computers but still according to my stats around my different websites Firefox is being used by about 20% of average visitors (this is on non techy sites).

I have mentioned before how much and why I love Firefox but the extensions are great, the adaptability is great and the security to me is not really an issue but everyone raves about it anyway.

I do use Internet Explorer still to access out Sharepoint portal but other then that Internet Explorer on my machines tends to be only for the Microsoft Updates to XP

Two news stories today about the HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray war and it does not look good for HD-DVD.

First this morning I saw that NetFlix is going to move to Blu-Ray exclusively in their online DVD rental system by the end of the year.

and now

I see that Best Buy is going to prefer Blu-Ray over HD-DVD for movies

We were talking in the office today about how Blackberry email service wesnt down yesterday but the phone themselves still worked. Those phones are rock solid they have been around for 50 years.

This made me wonder about email. Email has been around since 1971 according to this page.  Of course before that there was text messaging, people could send a message around to other users on the same computer since the early 60’s(remember there were no PCs at that time).

So thinking back, I have been using email since about 1992 when I was on BBSs but I was wondering when all of the emailing between people started and found this quote buried in the email article on Wikipedia:

In 1988, Vint Cerf arranged for an interconnection of MCI Mail with NSFNET on an experimental basis. The following year Compuserve e-mail interconnected with NSFNET. Within a few years the commercial traffic restriction was removed from NSFNETs AUP, and NSFNET was privitized.

So maybe 1988 is really when “internet” email got started although there was probably a few before that that I am having trouble finding.

It looks like there is a strange vacuum in the history of email that was not documented because it did not seem overly important at that time.

Every year as my seven year old daughter starts school and we meet the teachers I always have to ask if she needs a Mac. I have always wanted to try using a Mac and as a tech guy you would think I would have a closetful. truth is I have never used a Mac for more than 5 minutes.

A couple of years ago Apple announced and then moved over to the Intel platform, a platform that PCs use and now that there is familiar and easy to get hardware the computer modders of the world started getting to work to build a Mac out of generic hardware instead of buying a Mac made by Apple.

The modded PC hardware that turns into a Mac is called a Hackintosh, literally a Hacked Macintosh Read the rest of this entry »

Exciting times, Friday morning on the way to work I heard the message on the radio that in fact Microsoft was going to buy Yahoo, this story was out last year but ended up as nothing until Friday, to me the rumors had all even disappeared.

Then  the rest of the stories all trickle out.

As we all know google owns the internet right now with something like 65% of the search volume and Yahoo and Microsoft through their properties own much of the rest with Facebook, My Space and the rest of the social media getting the rest. You can really break all of this down in two areas, advertising depth and online pageviews and influence.

Advertising Depth

Microsoft is a very powerful company when it comes to advertising and marketing but they have not been able to won the internet, very strange to me but I am sure there are people that have a  really good idea why being an only somewhat late entrant has costed them so much on the internet, I can not imagine how. Google and the Google AdWords and now Doubleclick networks are easily the number one company on the internet as far as control over advertising and marketing goes and Microsoft in buying Yahoo gets a network to ad to the MSN AdWords type network in Yahoo’s YPN network. This is a real chance for Microsoft to finally get in the game.

Online Pageviews and  Influence

Search is not everything but Google owns that market as I said. As far as content goes you could say that Microsoft and Yahoo own more content then Google but that could change very rapidly. Google at this point is giving us all the services inline that we need be it Google Reader for RSS Google News for getting individualized news, GMail for email and many more things. The big content that Google has of course is YouTube. What we will likely see in the nearer future though is a real push for an office suite that is bigger than Google docs and spreadsheet and of course Google has the datacenter to house all of the data that they need.

So now that  there is probably going to be a merger the fun part left is to watch what each of the companies does with the influence that they have and watching the spin that Google and Microsoft, and even Yahoo throws out there.

In the end the internet is not much different then any other medium that we have had be it books, newspapers, radio or TV in that there will eventually be some kind of consolidation and hopefully enough competition so that hte marketplace does not stagnate as we probably had with Microsoft and the OS and Office suites. We need this competition for innovation but at the same time too much fragmentation on the internet stops the industry from having a big gun or two to have the money to make big change for us. Both Microsoft and Google do have big money.