You may be wondering why I have a Windows Millenium Edition computer at home. Because that’s what came on the computer (Pentium III-733) when I bought it in December 1999. My newer machine I got a few years ago is running Linux (was RedHat, now is Debian). And my next home computer will be a Mac, so that the windows ME computer can also become a Linux machine.

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I have finally removed Internet Explorer from my ancient Windows ME machine at home. Mozilla Firefox is enjoying its new home.

And why have I taken this bold step? Because the US government told me too. Kinda. See CERT Vulnerability Note VU#713878.

I just got some junk mail from the University of Phoenix. It was sent to me at work, with one the web sites I manage as the company name on the address label. Wow, I am so excited! I can now get my Bachelor’s degree. Wow! I guess my Masters Degree doesn’t count for anything. What a lame company, to manualy scrape web sites looking for recruits, and totally ignoring the facts that were right in front of them. Idiots. Everyone raise your hands if you got your degree through a school you learned about through junk mail.

While working on my employer’s web site, I found a document that was built with really ugly HTML. I cleaned up the HTML, used [H1] and [H2] instead of [font size+2][b] and I am really pleased with the resulting pages. The old page had 15,397 characters. The new page has 14,784 characters. Granted that is only 613 characters, but the page is structurally more sound (for example, the table has table header tags now, so the columns make sense logically; sections are broken down into Headings levels), so it should render more nicely on alternate web browsers (phones, PDAs, etc.).

Some people mentioned that the new site was a bit blah. So to add a bit of color, I have added four random photos from my Photo Gallery to the bottom of the home page. They rotate randomly from the various galleries, and of course you can select (click on) the photo to see the others in that collection. The annoying thing is that you can tell that I have used several different programs to generate the thumbnails, because there are several different sizes of images. And yes, I have new photos to upload, hopefully tomorrow I’ll have time to do that.

My office uses Macs for everything. Almost everyone has a laptop (an iBook or a PowerBook). And everyone is running either Jaguar (OS X 10.2) or Panther (OS X 10.3). And we have a rather large list of people that we need to contact for one reason or another.
For years, we’ve been using Now Contact for managing our contact database. Basically, you have one computer dedicated to function as the main server, and then everyone else in the office has a copy of the database on their comptuer. And each user computer connects to the database every x minutes to send and receive updates. The system basically works.
The problem is the basically.
We need more functionality. Things like Groups (who is on the xxxx mailing list?) When was the last time someone talked to Rep. XXX’s staff? Who last updated this record?
A huge part of the databse problem is simply keeping the information up-to-date. And that’s a training of the user issue that we will have with any solution.

A good list of tips for how to take better photographs (digital or film): Digital Photography Composition Tips.

Interesting article at Stuff and Nonsense: What’s in a Name? Let me think about using the same names to [div]s and [span]s. I think it is a great idea. It would be pretty cool to use the PlanetMike style sheet on any other site someone out there is running.

I just got a new Palm, the Tungsten-E. My old Palm (the V) was basically working fine, but the screen was getting marked up, and the memory was really small, only 2MB. The Tungsten-E has a beautiful screen, color 240×240 pxiels (vs 120×120 gray). Battery life so far seems to not be great, but I’m still playing.

I can now read PDFs, play more games, and read email. The VersaMail program is the big thing I wanted to be able to use. I can now sync some of my email accounts with the Palm, so I can read email during my commute. We’ll see how well that really works.

Because they send out “helpful” notices to people who send their customers viruses via email.

So, their mail server is intelligent enough to realize that someone has sent a virus to a customer? Fine, that’s good customer service.

But then they email the “From:” address letting the “sender” know that they have sent a virus. Ridiculous! Their system should know that the virus is faking both the To: and the From: address, and the system should then silently erase the message. And now that I’ve gotten nearly 100 of these “warnings” I am ready to complain to them about mailbombing me.