Well, in all honesty (apologies for the Grabber headline), it is not really going to MIT… You won’t get a degree from MIT, but they have made a significant amount of free course-ware available for free download. You can find the details here…
So, go ahead and do some free learnin’!
Russ
Dan Fogelberg died yesterday. I don’t normally morn the loss of those that I do not know, but through his music I did get to know Dan, at least to some extent. There were many bad times that I used Dan’s music (among others) to get through, and I am sad that he has passed.
Goodbye Dan. You will be missed!
When you are prompted by Internet Explorer or Fire Fox as to whether to save a password for a site, do you say “Yes”? If you do, your passwords are at serious risk…
This article details how to access them, but the summary of it is that all the passwords you store in the browser are easily accessable to anyone having access to your machine. The other thing to remember, that is not mentioned in this article, is that malware can potentially also access and deliver these passwords to someone somewhere else without you even knowing they are gone.
I recommend that no one store passwords in anything less secure than a password vault. A password vault is a piece of software that runs on your machine (or on a server if you are on a network) that stores your usernames and passwords for different sites in a secure encrypted manner. There are many available and rather than recommend one particular package I suggest that you do the research to find the best one for you.
Hi All,
Or at least the one or two people that actually read my blog 
Here is a good summary article from Microsoft about how to backup your data on Windows Vista. Backups are always a good idea, but from my experience with Vista, thus far, it is especially true
In all honesty, Vista is really no worse than any other inital OS release I have seen in the last 20 years. Initial releases always have bugs that are fixed in patches, and some engineer (or engineers) finds out that the users really have a much different view of what “User Friendly” means to them.
So…If you are using Vista, enjoy the good things and realize the bad will be patched in time. If you aren’t, and you can wait; wait until the first service pack comes out, at least, before switching over.
Russ
Oh bummer!!…First you get laid off just as the holidays are coming up (That really did happen to me once), then you hit Monster.com to try to find work just to learn that some hacker has hacked Monster and you end up with a computer infected with malware. You can read the full article here Monster Hacked.
Oh well…Take a good dose of Norton’s, sleep late tomorrow, eat way too much, and start fresh on Friday
Happy Thanksgiving…Russ
Do you use Gmail as your primary email account? If so, you may want to check out this computer world article (Go to Article). It seems that some users are losing their stored emails. The article also says, that at this point, Google is not taking responsibility. Remember, BACKUPS ARE YOUR FRIEND!
Russ
Someone finally did it…They wrote a manual on how to handle your nerd. The last time I took one of the geek quotient tests I scored in the 87th percentile. I would say that puts me pretty high on the nerd scale too. So, for the benefit of those that know me (especially my wife ) I am putting this link to the Nerd Manual up. Enjoy, and remember, Nerds Need Love Too!
http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2007/11/11/the_nerd_handbook.html
Russ
“No matter how long I do this work, I will never know everything”…That was probably the hardest life lesson for me to learn. Once I did learn it, I found that I could “know” a lot more by learning how to find what I needed to know rather than trying to “know” (remember) everything. To that end, I spend a lot of time reading industry news, technical articles, reviews, write-ups, etc.
If you are particularly interested in Malware, here is a site at Microsoft that should give you enough information to keep you busy for a while…Microsoft Malware Protection Site.
Have you been out to a site lately that has those oddly distorted letters in a box, and you have to enter their value into a text box to proceed with whatever function the site provides? Those weird text images are called Captchas or “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”. Their purpose is to stop machines from using other machines, typically in an abusive manner. One such use is spammers creating hundreds, or even thousands, of accounts on the free email systems for the purposes of sending you and I junk, or even malicious emails.
Well, it seems that Captchas have worked so well that the spammers have to resort to using human power to interpret these oddly shaped characters. How are they doing this with any amount of volume? Do they have sweatshops where children slave over dimly lit CRTs, entering the oddly shaped character values to create spam email accounts for just pennys a day? Well, no. It seems that the clever spammers are relying on a base level desire of most human males to generate the necessary keystrokes, and they don’t even have to spend pennys a day. The spammers have come up with a program that has a young women offering to strip in return for the viewer solving several Captchas. The more Captchas you solve, the more of her you get to see. It appears that the program is really only in the testing stages (full article here), but there is a great likelihood that, when it is released into the wild, there will be keyboards smoking all over the world as unwitting men try to get these women naked.
Now, envision for a moment a world where the very intelligent people (the spammers) applied their knowledge and creativity toward solving some of the world’s ill, rather than helping create a new one….
Take Care…Russ
I have had more than my share of contact with seemingly crazy people (that’s another days entry ), and now I know why some of them were that way. It seems that lack of sleep can be a cause (or at least they think it can) for psycologoical issues. This article on Scientifc American’s site (Sleep Deprivation Article) says there is a link between lack of sleep and some psycological issues…So go to sleep and quit reading this blog entry …
Russ
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