My assigned username and password for a system I occasionally use:
Username: 106366590E
Password: UZYYGGL9
I feel secure.
Monthly Archive for June, 2007
Have you considered what it costs to leave machines on all the time?
I told one of the staff members at the church that they should go ahead and power down their machine at night. I also told them to turn off the streaming radio station when they are away from their desk. I am always concerned about unnecessary use of power for both cost and environmental reasons.
In a recent study found via eco geek and Gizmodo I read that each year $1.72 Billion is wasted on computers being left on all night. I’m not sure about the findings, but I know we waste a lot of money on our computers. With the bad electricity to our building we are more likely to have a computer destroyed by power surges and brownouts than turning them off 5 times per week.
Consider that the average office work hours are around 48 hours per week (rounded off to make math easier). That is 2 full days.
If you leave your computer and monitor on all the time then they are running for 7 days each week (168 hours).
Running a computer for 48 hours a week vs. 168 hours is like running it for 105 days vs. 365 (a difference of 260 days).
To make this easier to remember, look at your calendar and mark the 105th day: April 15.
Just image how happy your computer would be if it only had to work until tax day each year rather than the entire year.
Make your computer happy. Turn it off.
Does anyone out there have official like rules about turning computers off?
Adobe Reader 8.1 is out and that means it is time for me to update it on the network. This is one of those programs that we store on the network to make installation easier on new computers or those that had been neglected at an older version. The problem is that Adobe Reader doesn’t have a direct link. It goes through a downloader in IE, and GetPlus in Firefox.
I had always used FireFox for getting the install file, but I figured that was no longer an option. Fortunately I still has Safari installed on my computer so I used it to access Adobe and download the file directly from here: http://ardownload.adobe.com/. . ./AdbeRdr810_en_US.exe.
At home I am in the process of rebuilding my machine. It is a perverse hobby for a geek to decide on occasion that the OS installation needs to be scrapped and rebuilt from scratch but I have a new faster hard drive and it deserves a clean install. I’m not about to stick Safari on this machine, I won’t even let Quicktime or iTunes on it, so I grabbed a Firefox User Agent Switcher and visited Adobe pretending to be on an Opera browser (something else I’m not planning to install).
I’ll remember this option for Adobe 8.2
Despite all the worries I have about Google going evil, I am still an avid user. I get my news from RSS feeds and News.Google.com. I even have a large list of searches that Google sends to my gmail account via Google Alerts. So, when I heard that Google News has a blog of its own I checked it out and I liked the first post enough to comment on it.
I like their list of reasons for doing a blog, and I am going to add this into my arguments for better usage of blogs in the church.
- They don’t issue many press releases. They don’t have too. The people that Google wants to inform are already looking for the information. The same goes for your church. Believe me, the people at your church want information; and if they don’t get information they will either miss out on something meant for them or gripe about how nobody knowing what’s going on.
- They don’t want to fill your inbox. I can’t stand mailing lists from companies and organizations. The information tends to feel more self serving than informational. Even if I do subscribe to a list I tend to skip over them when I am doing my first trip through the inbox and then a few days later I delete them figuring them to be out of date. E-Mail is outdated, it is unpredictable, and troublesome.
- A blog is more direct and informal. Not every piece of news is mail worthy, and much of it isn’t even email worthy. Yet, there is a lot of that news which people would be interested in knowing. It is the type of news that builds familiarity.
I would also like to tack on another point about that 3rd point. If the church sends you an email with something good in it and you want to share it with a friend then the best way to do that is to go back to your computer and forward the email to them. There are problems with that.
- Forwarded emails, which are not properly reformat, are horrible. Especially if you were crazy enough to send it in html (html email is a detestable chimera).
- You have to go back to your computer to do it. Chances are I will forget, suddenly consider whether the person really wanted me to bug them with an email, or procrastinate on it until it is too late. It is better to just say “Hey, check out the news blog at TheChurchIMentioned.com/news, it should still be on the first page.”
- Give a man a fish and he will feed for a day, give a man a feed and he will fish for your news. With regard to that last sentence, I apologize. A blog/news site makes it easy for people to connect with what is going on. They can hear the heartbeat of your ministry from the comfort of their own keyboard.
For the record, I have subscribed to the Google News Blog in my Sage live bookmark feeds. I’ll see how it goes, and if I decide that I don’t want to keep up with their information on my schedule then I will delete the link and not worry about it again.
Lifehacker is stalking me again. This happens way too often. Just last night I was looking for ways to do NTFS on Mac and I was looking at this item. Seeing the MacFuse logo on one computer while knowing that a page with the same logo was loaded on a separate computer of mine felt Twilight Zoney.
Anyone using MacFuse out there? I’m wondering if it is worth it. Especially for formatting an external drive to NTFS rather than Fat32 so as to move bigger files.
This is a great tip via Lifehacker and from a 3 year old blog post elsewhere.
When you get an error message in Windows, use Ctrl-C to copy it to the clipboard and then use your preferred pasting method to place the text somewhere else.
Example: Trying to close Notepad without saving
—————————
Notepad
—————————
The text in the Untitled file has changed.Do you want to save the changes?
—————————
Yes No Cancel
—————————
Yes, this is helpful to the typical geek who wants to check out particular information about an error or to keep a record of errors for future comparison, but there is more.
Teach this to your people!!!
I am tired of getting calls where someone says “I tried to do something, but it gave me an error message, what’s wrong?” Train them to copy & paste confusing error messages into an email or your help desk so that you can see it when they ask you about it.
Eric Sevareid is quoted as saying “The chief cause of problems is solutions.”
- 2,000,000 tires were used as an artificial reef in the 1970s, but they became a detriment to marine life and now 700,000 are planned for retrieval.
- Environmental groups have worked so hard to stop timber companies from maintaining and harvesting trees that the companies had to divest their land to developers who just wiped out the forests for housing.
- Reseeding has been common following wildfires, but due to expediency the seeds are fast growing, invasive, typically non-native plants that become a problem to the local environment.
EDIT: I forgot to post my point.
Next time you are digging under a console trying to get the media system running on Sunday morning or trying to sort out a huge patchwork of cables, or figuring out why your files are disordered, or have volunteers griping to each other about the crummy system; remember this quote.
There are three locations in the church building that regularly bring this quote to mind. But things there are so fouled up that fixing them is a scary endeavor. Makes you want to travel back a few years and set up a system and procedures that would keep the current reality from happening.
I just discovered that sometime in the recent past (I hope) I stopped receiving email from most of my OSMinistry email addresses. I’m not sure when this happened, but the POP box has 2300 messages in it.
Before I started forwarding all my addresses to my GMail Account I had them all forwarded to one POP box which I accessed either though my own setup of SquirrelMail or Eudora. 18 months ago I completely stopped using Eudora and about that time I thought I moved that POP box into a position to be checked by GMail.
Well, I was just testing something and I was trying to figure out why the email wasn’t getting to me. I discovered that the POP box had 53MB in it and that it was full of “Please moderate this comment” and “So and so has sent you a message.” I’m sure I have kept up with all of them, but I did find a few that I am not sure were really handled.
I have now done what any reasonable person would do, I wiped out the whole lot of them. The old emails I had been saving are probably not important anymore, the new ones I have missed are beyond catching up on, and the spam that got through the filters was too bizarre to worry about.
So, I promise that I was not intentionally avoiding most of you.
Now, to those I was avoiding . . .
A man in Mobile, Alabama filled up his drink at a gas station and then spilled it. After cleaning it up he spilled a second and then a third. When he finally prepared to leave the store the clerk confronted him about paying for his drink and the man replied with a threat to shoot the clerk.
The prosecutor said of him,
“He clearly appeared to be under the influence of something other than good sense.”
I’ll have to use that line sometime.