Missouri 39th.

David Fletcher mentions Brown's eGovernment Study. Of course, I would be more happy mentioning it if we ranked #1 as Utah did. Missouri comes up 39th. Ouch.

Full Report.

Google Video

So, have you played with Google Video Beta at all?

Warning 201

I got an error using Cisco's VPN client yesterday. It stated:

Warning 201: The necessary VPN sub-system is not available. You can not connect to the remote VPN server.

This occurred on two different configurations. Both running v4.0.4. Nothing had changed on either system since the last time that it had worked, but upon simply reinstalling on both, the problem was cleared up. Hmm.

An Odd One

I had kind of an odd thing happen this morning.

The hatch on my 2001 Ford Focus started popping open each time I use my rear windshield wiper. Maybe there is something to be said for having things in a car controlled without the aid of electronics.

I guess the good thing is that I don't have a drive by wire system. I could just see me trying to argue, ..but Officer, I wasn't trying to speed I just turned on my rear wiper and the accelerator just hit the floor.

Mercedes has tested their sidesticks utilizing drive by wire for multiple things (acceleration, steering, braking).

Hmm, so how did you get carpal tunnel. I was driving my Mercedes. ;-)

Photo Story

Played a bit more with Photo Story 3 today. It is kind of neat. Once you build your video, then you can take it into Windows Movie Maker and play with it a bit.

Samsung's Digimax Pro815

Samsung's Digimax Pro815 may not be a true digital single lens reflex (DSLR) camera with interchangeable lenses, but it does have a nice 15x optical Schneider-Krueznach lens. The viewfinder placement looks a bit odd, but I am sure one can probably get use to it. It also has a huge LCD.

Ouch though. Supposedly no image stabilization.

Pentax Digital Camera

I would think that such a screen would not be such a good selling point, when one follows your "Which Camera is Right for Me?" link.

Jeep Commander

I could be wrong, but I am not so sure that the crowd looking to buy a Jeep Commander will like the looks of the Liberty Renegade's riveted fender flares on this bigger package. Don't get me wrong, I think the rivets work well for the niche that the Jeep Liberty Renegade fills, but a bit out of place on the $40,000+ Commander I saw.


I think a cleaner flare without the rivets would be more appropriate. One can tell that Jeep is trying to incorporate some rugged/masculine design cues from their own line as well as the likes of Hummer and Land Rover. I noticed a navy blue Commander on our Jeep dealers lot today. I took a peak and the leather clad interior looked nice enough, along with the sunroof and sunroof portals over the second row seating. I would not be embarrassed to be caught in one.

Of course, like most SUVs out there, the gas mileage ratings make it a little less attractive.

Hello, the season is already in full swing.

This is just a guess, but I would say this is one football blog that isn't going to make it.

Hmm. Adsense.

I do have Google Ads on my blog and very rarely check Adsense to see how much I have made, as it doesn't amount to much, pennies if anything. I kind of wonder if there is a glitch somewhere as it showed $4.20 just for today and most days it is simply nothing. I wonder if someone put in the wrong amount for a calculation. I'm sure I'll find out if that is the case.

Gmail error

I received the following when trying to access individual e-mails within Gmail this morning. I was able to access it a minute or so later without problem.

Storm Photos

Many of his photos somehow made it around the web in e-mails stating that they were photos of hurricane Katrina and even though they are only storm photos from the midwest, they are simply amazing. You might want to check some of them out on stormchaser Mike Hollingshead's site.

You might also take a look at the post on Snopes about them.

Hey Chevrolet

Hey Chevrolet, did you see that Pontiac stole your Equinox and gave it a different name?

Don't worry, they won't hurt Chevy sales figures, especially in the southwest. I mean after all of the hurricanes, who would want a Torrent.

(I know they are both GM.)

Early Dismissal

An area school announced on the news last night that they would be having a heat related early dismissal day today.

It may be warm for the end of September, but it is only 82 degrees.



I know it was suppose to get to 90, but that is definitely an announcement you don't expect for this time of year.

IT Architect

In the Network World article, "The rise of the IT architect", Tony Redmond mentions that "Architect" is probably the most abused term in IT.

Tony Redmond

Tony does not appear to be one of the corporate HP bloggers, although he may blog elsewhere.

"When you say 'architect', what do you mean?" Numerous companies have employees who identify themselves as architects, but those people might be anything from CIOs to programmers, he explains.

It apppears to me antoher title that gets a lot of abuse is the GIS title (GIS analyst, GIS technician, GIS specialist). A very wide ranging interpretation of duties and skills for positions posted as GIS (A few sites with GIS info - 1, 2, 3).

Results from the Dentist

Okay, so I have to have a root canal. No offense, but I still don't like dentist. ;-)

I know. It is my own fault. If I had regular visits it probably never would have gotten this far. Anyway, once I get the root canal they recommend a crown to help keep it from fracturing as it is one of the back teeth used a lot for chewing. I know I have more dental work that I need to get done as well. Ugh.

The one thing I did like is that they have new equipment that lets them take the x-ray and boom it is on the monitor in the room. They can play with the contrast and show you everything, such as the chip off of the tooth and the cavity going down all the way to the pulp. Pretty cool from a technology perspective. It sure beats looking at those tiny little squares they use to do them on.

Dmailer

It seems that Dmailer Sync has had a lot of updates lately. It is currently at version 4.4.205. I did not care for 4.4.204 as you had to go back and figure out where you had put your activation code and reactivate it. Other than that it installed flawlessly like most of the updates have.

Update 9/19/05 12:10pm: There was an update today too. Version 4.4.206 is now the current version.

EEK

I have a dentist appointment today. It might not be so bad if it were simply for a cleaning, but it's not.

I believe it was in the not to distant past that my wife said something about me not liking to go to the dentist and my dad kind of chuckled and said that he probably knew why. The dentist I had as a kid was a butcher (some would say just figuratively - but now I wonder). My father said that he did not realize until much later that a visit to the dentist did not automatically mean PAIN. Yes, Dad, I would say that could have something to do with my apprehension about going to the dentist.

Proofpoint

Proofpoint is being utilized at work now. It seems okay so far, although I know there will be some users that will be confused when they get that first e-mail from the system. A bit of training or more correspondence would probably have been in order, but that is not my call. It will especially throw some when they get the old Security Alert as the security certificate does not match the name of the site.

The emails listed below have been placed in your personal Quarantine since you received your last End User Digest. They will be deleted after 14 days. To deliver an email to your inbox, click on Release. To deliver an email to your inbox and add the email sender to your Safe Senders List, click on Safelist.

If you DO NOT see the option to Safelist a message, click on the "Request Safe/Blocked Senders List" button. You will immediately be sent a Safe/Blocked Senders List Summary e-mail. Then, the next time you receive a digest, the Safelist option will appear.

Nice capture

A very nice capture of the Tribute in Light by Keith Kin Yan.

Periodic Table Extension

Having been a research chemist I think my dad would like the Periodic Table Extension available for Firefox. I'll have to mention it to him.



When you hover over an element you'll see that it gives the specifics on it. If you click on an element it opens a browser window initiating a Google Search on that specific element.

Another Blog Search

I mentioned another search earlier, well now I am mentioning another Blog Search. A new competitor for IceRocket and the like. This one has some background in the "Search" game. It is associated with Google's own Blogger and simply called Blog Search (hmm, BS for short?). I imagine they didn't call it Blogger Search as that might imply that it would only search the Blogger site (although it appears that address is for sale - so it could be changing). It states that it will search blogs from all over the web. The good and bad of calling it Blog Search depending on which angle you are looking at it from, is that someone already has the http://www.blogsearch.com address, which will probably gain some traffic as a result as many that hear about it will simply type blogsearch in instead of search.blogger.com.

It does give the option on the results page to sort by relevance or by date.

Another Search Engine

This is an interesting one. A source code search.



Excerpt from the site:

Codase Launches the First Comprehensive and Syntax-Aware Source Code Search Service

Fremont, CA - Sep 9, 2005 - Codase, Inc., a leading source code search company, announced today the release of the alpha version of its advanced source code search service, with the service being made immediately available through its website, http://www.codase.com.

Codase is a new kind of search service for open source code. Rather than treating code as text, Codase understands programming languages, and treats code as code, the way it's supposed to be. This unique and syntax-aware approach provides the most accurate and detailed search results with fine granularity levels of controls. With Codase, developers can search functions, classes, strings, constants, macros, comments and other programming language constructs.

Ugh!

I have had the personalized Google not show GMail right away, but I simply do a refresh and it is there. So normally it is not that GMail is truly unavailable. This time it appeared it was truly unavailable. I kept hitting refresh on the personalized Google page and it wasn't showing up, so I tried directly and this is what I got. It was available within a couple of minutes, so no big deal, but it did surprise me.

Image Processing Wizard

Other than the fact that their site appears to be down at the moment (so I posted link via CNET above) the Image Processing Wizard is pretty nice for resizing and adding a watermark.



Screen 1


Screen 2


Screen 3


Screen 4


Screen 5


Update: Now that it is back up here is a direct link.

Executive Software to Diskeeper Corporation

Hmm, that is easier to remember anyway.

Googled

The State of Missouri is using Google via a Google Search Appliance (GSA).

You can try it out on the State Portal.

Sprint-Nextel

Those going to the SprintPCS or Nextel website are greeted with a new page.

Who is at fault?

At this point I don't care who is at fault. It appears there is enough blame to go around for every level of government and more for the way Hurricane Kitrina was handled. Don't spend a lot of money getting a committee together to determine who to blame. If you are going to get a committee together, then get one together to figure out what to do for the next disaster/catastrophic event that could take place.

This was a natural disaster that we watched heading towards us and look how bad it was. What would happen during a large scale terror attack that we don't see coming? Are we any more prepared? What if there was some disaster/catastrophe that hit multiple states all across the country at the same time with the level of devastation left by Hurricane Kitrina? Even though we may all be affected in some way, most natural disasters/terrorists attacks we have seen have for the most part been centralized to an area. We need to be better prepared, no matter what one's political affiliation may be.

Blog Spam

I was hoping it would never happen, but it did. I have been getting blog spam in my comments. As it has started I have now turned on Blogger's Word Verification on comments.

Firefox Next Release

Beta 1 of Firefox 1.5 is out.

I like being able to move the tabs around.

Novell Client Error

I've said it before and I'll probably say it again. As a Windows shop I am not sure why we have been dealing with Novell for so long. Ugh. Supposedly within a year it will be gone. They had some kind of problem with a cluster Thursday and then I received this error:

Internal error 0xFFFFE86A occured. Try again. If the error occurs again, restart your workstation and try again. If the error persists, contact your network administrator.

It persisted. I had a similar popup once before on Windows XP when my password got locked out. It had a different error number, but otherwise the same message. The interesting part was when I logged onto my Windows 2000 test machine it didn't give me the error, it simply stated that my account was locked. This error occurred on both operating systems. Still not real sure what all happened, but the Support Center stated that some machines had the message clear up with a cold boot and others required that the Novell client be upgraded to the latest version. Needless to say, a cold reboot did nothing. My Novell client is now at Version 4.91.0.20050216.

Gas Prices

Gas went back down to $2.87/gal a couple of days ago. That is definitely in the right direction.

Zip Code Info

Have a Zip Code and you're wanting to know the City? Simply head over to the US Post Office Site to find it out. You can find also find things by Address, by City, by Company.

Did you know that you can also get raw City/State Zip Code data from the Post Office as well as Zip+4, etc.. There is a cost.

FAQ from Post Office Site:

Where can I get a database or directory of all ZIP Codes and/or ZIP+4
Codes along with the corresponding city, state, county, etc.?

The information you are seeking is not available via download but is
provided through the National Customer Support Center at (800)
238-3150, select Option 6 and then Option 2. Ask the service
representative for pricing and information for our products

You can get one that includes raw data for CITY, STATE, COUNTY, COUNTY CODE, and 5 DIGIT ZIP on CD is $350 for a 1 year subscription. It was stated that
one can select if they want to receive the updates every month or
every other month.

(Make sure to check with them for current information)
By check or money order:

National Customer Support Center
6060 Primacy Parkway Suite 201
Memphis, TN 38188-0001

By credit card:

Fax to 901-681-4409

7-10 Business Days to receive.

Here is a list of some of their products.

Football

The boys did not end up with the results they wanted the other night, but playing one of the biggest schools in the State was a good test to start the season. They'll be playing a team from a neighboring state next time. With gas prices, I am glad it is a home game.

Personalized Google

Often times when loading personalized Google, I get this message on GMail. It normally comes up simply by refreshing the page, but hopefully they will get that fixed.

Interesting Trip

I would say this would definitley be an interesting trip. I wish the journal would have been done with some blog tool and not FrontPage.

Gas Prices

I know it is not bad compared to some areas, but to keep you up to date for comparison, gas here in Mid Missouri was $3.09 yesterday.

Freshmen

The Freshmen boys had their first scrimmage.

Watch the used car market.

With all of the ramifications that may be felt by our economy from the whole hurricane aftermath (gas supply, government expenditures, insurance, fraud, etc..) I think the car industry will definitely be one to feel the pain. How many more incentives can they come up with to get people to buy cars, especially the gas guzzlers?

Of the vehicles that will sell the hybrids will probably gain even more popularity if gas prices keep increasing.

The big thing to watch out for if you're buying a used car, especially in the near future, will be those that may come from the flood area and outwardly don't show any signs. Hopefully they'll end up with a flood or salvage title, but don't bet they all will.