Happy Holidays

Just a Happy Holiday wish to everyone out there. Posting will probably be slow or non-existent until after the new year.

The wife of one of my best friends passed away this past weekend. She fell quickly to an illness that came on the middle part of last week and she died in the hospital Saturday evening. She leaves behind two young children at a time of year that many children are waiting in anticipation of what Santa might bring. This will not be a bright Christmas for them. I ask that as you open gifts this holiday season, whether it is exactly what you wanted or the last thing you would have ever put on a list, expensive and shiny or cheap and dull, go ahead and allow yourself to enjoy the presents, but please take a brief moment to reflect that compared to relationships with your family and friends, the gifts really have no value.

Cool Memory Key

Clip Drive has a USB memory key (flash drive, or whatever the flavor of the week is to call them) that uses biometrics to secure data. If you plug it in you will see a drive. If you scan your print and have authority a second drive will appear. This is the drive with the encrypted data. You can setup how much of the memory is allocated to each drive. No, it will not work if you cut off somone's finger and try to scan it.

See the ClipDrive site for more info or see the Windows Media video from news.com.

Not so Magic for Network Associates

Network Associates is selling their Help Desk product division, Magic Solutions to BMC. BMC is the parent company of competing Help Desk solution Remedy. I care as we utilize the Magic Total Service Desk Enterprise Suite for our Help Desk.

See press:

Press release on Network Associates' site

Press release on Remedy's site

Press release on BMC's site

Article on Network World Fusion

OUCH! Worm hits Windows-based ATMs

So Not Cool!

Excerpt from ZDNet:

A computer virus infected automated teller machines running Microsoft Windows at two banks, Diebold, the maker of the ATMs announced Monday. In August, the Nachi virus helped shut down an unknown number of ATMs running Windows XP Embedded. The incident is probably the first case of a virus
infecting a cash machine.

Read the whole article here.

Can you say consolidate?

Per article "IBM Software Strategy Goes Vertical" in e-Pro Magazine it sounds as if a person would be able to have one contact that can answer questions or help with any IBM/Lotus combination of products needed for a solution. It sounds more like the politics involved in getting away from having a Lotus Rep and an IBM Rep rep to me. Of course, I could be wrong.

People Issues

I think Bob Rosner's post in the Fast Company Weblog is interesting. It seems to indicate that I could work at a hospital or at Microsoft and things would not be much different than where I am now.

Excerpt:

...I had a speech to hospital CFOs this morning and one this afternoon at Microsoft.

The CFO talk was interesting and fits perfectly into the topic of the Seven Deadly Workplace Sins. I asked them to list their biggest headaches. I expected to hear about health care financing, insurance companies, etc.

Their top three:

3. Politics
2. Poor communiations
1. Resistance to change

It appears that it is happening.

I think the first two paragraphs of this article, "Justifying the Cost of Notes" in ePro Magazine might give some insight into where the State is going in regards to e-mail, but that is simply my guess, looking from the outside.

Annoying Habit

How many e-mails do you send? I am not sure how many I send but it is a fair number. There is a technical contact in another agency that I have to correspond with on occassion. As the correspondence is usually not time sensitive e-mail usually works fine. Simply calling usually puts you to a voicemail box that is often full. For whatever reason he refuses to reply with the thread of the conversation. It is rather frustrating especially if you have several questions in to him with similar topics as you will get back an answer of yes, and have to remember exactly which subject line you put for which question.

It has to do with the Domino pricing again. Once again, I get the "I'll keep you informed" line.

Quote

How about that quote by Norm Laudermilch, vice president of managed security services for VeriSign. "We're good at catching the attackers who aren't so bright."

Card

Why not make someone's day and send them a card. A free electronic card will do. Spouse, friend, family, coworker, doesn't matter, just send one and make someone's day a bit nicer. Try Hallmark or any other site that offers free greeting cards.

RSS

I am cheap. I use the free Blogger, link to graphics on other sites, etc.. It allows me a place to post and works for me. The Blogger Pro provides RSS. As the plain Blogger doesn't I looked (not to long) for an alternative. I found myRSS. It does work to a degree for my site. I guess it is better than nothing if someone is really wanted an RSS feed to this site. I must say that trying to catch up on blogs after the holiday was a bit tedious in the manual way, although I do like going to the sites, seeing the design of the site, etc.., but found that an RSS Reader can be a handy tool. Once again I didn't look long to find one that was easy to use and met my needs. I am talking about Bloglines. I decided that I wanted an online reader as I did not want to configure a reader for both home and work. This way I can follow the same items at both locations easily. Bloglines is easy to use, allows one to add a blogroll to their site via the blogs you subscribe to. You can limit which ones show, etc.. Really a nice little tool. Add folders and put topic specific subscriptions in the folders. At the folder level it will show how many entries you have to review, open it up and it shows the breakdown per subscription. This may be a feature in all of the RSS readers, but I like the fact that I have the choice of how I want to read it. I can go to a single subscription and click on it to view the entries or I can simply click on the folder and it will display all of the entries for all of the subscriptions in that folder. Cool.

The new Ferrari 612 Scaglietti

Hotmail

The Hotmail update I mentioned in a post on 11/03/03 has been rolled out. My wife uses Hotmail for personal use and absolutely hates it. I prefer the MSN client over Hotmail.

Numbers

The IBM Rep told me yesterday that the numbers (pricing) for 6.5 (on z/OS) went to the data center last week. The plus is that we are talking 6.5, which we requested and hopefully this is a sign of progress. Now if the data center can just accept it and move on. Keep your fingers crossed. If all goes well maybe we can be on 6.5 within the next month or two.

Missing Image

The image on my Domino 6.5 for Linux on zSeries post was not showing up, so I figured I messed something up. Went to check IBM's site and they were having the same problem. Now I don't feel as bad.

Reference Schemas

It has been noted in several places that Microsoft is offering open and royalty-free documentation and license of the Microsoft Office 2003 XML Reference Schemas. See more info on Microsoft's site.

Digital Photography

Also of note, Zatz has a new magazine, which I'll have to check into as I do enjoy photography. It is called "Connected Photographer". Hopefully they can get it out there enough to keep it going.

Blogging

David Gewirtz (David Gewirtz Unplugged), mentions blogging in his article "Domino Unplugged plugs into the blog world". You can see the link to it and the other 162 articles he has published to date for Zatz publications on his Author Page.

Network Problems.

Evidently we are having some network issues. My connection to the network dropped as I was getting ready to post and then it came back a short while later. Not cool!

Domino 6.5 for Linux on zSeries

I mentioned the Redbook "Domino 6.5 for Linux on zSeries" in a post on 9/23/03. It was in draft at that time. The First Edition is available now. You can now download your copy here.