Do you need a portable vampire slaying kit? I wish I had one of these that would rid me of pesky managers! It would contain items like a buzzword dictionary, actual work, and requirements that he would have to follow-up on. I think that's enough to make most managers run out of the room. What would you put in your Manager Avoidance kit?

Reviews have started coming in for Matrix Revolutions. Warning: there are spoilers! Something about conflict and resolution...

Spammers steal email addresses from Orbitz.com. Who's next, and is your email safe? How does this affect our schools? News Channel 36 On Your Side has the full details! Team Coverage!

Seriously, you must be a stupid user if you don't have at least one email alias to protect your real addresses.

Anyone come across terminal server issues with Win 2003 server? It was working for a week now it decides to fail on connection and reboot my server?

Are you using Microsoft Office 2003 yet? Do you have a Novell server? If so, you may have noticed a problem! "When you try to save an Office 2003 file to a Novell Netware network location, you may receive an error message that indicates that the file (or the folder that contains it) is marked as read-only." Well, here's the Hotfix.

MY CPU has a turbo laser hemi. Buzzword enabled. So there.

The 1.10 Patch to Diablo II is out. And am I glad we get one more run of WarCraft III this week before switching over.

"Finder, now with a brushed aluminum look, introduces an indispensable 'sidebar' to Finder windows. The sidebar, a customizable place holder for frequently used folders and volumes, makes it much easier to navigate hard drives and networks, or to connect to iTools. It should have been there all along." Why does it always have to be brushed metal?

Hey, does that thing have a hemi? Why yes, my CPU does have a hemi!

'Price Is Right' Announcer Rod Roddy Dies"Come on Down" I think we all remember this guy.

Just in time for the holidays! There is a Jimi Hendrix action figure due for release soon. A new toy for a generation of kids that have never even heard of the man or his music. Another brilliant marketing strategy, coming to a Walmart near you... At least their grandparents might come out of the their Alzheimer's fog and try to explain it to them. And what a role model for our youth!

The latest patch for Trillian is available. I believe this allows Yahoo! and MSN users to log in. So much for shutting 3rd-party IM clients out.

I still haven't figured out if it's poor etiquette to blog someone else's blog, so here goes: Joss Whedon's Firefly blog has a blog entry that links to the Fox Firefly blog and details the upcoming Firefly DVD release. One more blog link and we'll have blogged our way to China...

Mozilla Firebird 0.7.1 has been released (for Mac OSX only). It fixes a couple of glitches with the last release. Happy installing!

#1,298,927 why I hate AOL - Turning off Windows Messenger services without even telling you about it. The reason here is noble, but the implementation is very, very wrong.

Fun for Friday Star Wars Kid I am sure you have all seen him but they have some funny new additions.

Love the Elizabethan curse generator, and the Erse insults. Space was good, too. By the way, you're all Borg loving pimps for a Ferengi bilge spore.

Having failed at designing a revolutionary form of travel, Dean Kamen has decided to switch careers and host Lego tournaments. Good luck to you Dean, and in all of your future endeavors.

Proof that there is justice in the world. "The company that only last year billed itself as the world's largest online advertiser has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection." Note to companies: If you advertise with pop-ups we will NOT buy from you. Also, please remember that anyone who uses a real browser (not IE) won't even see you pop-ups. Hoorah!

Toshiba adds VoIP to handheld! "Toshiba launched on Thursday two updated Pocket PC handhelds, including a business-oriented model that features built-in wireless networking with voice over Internet Protocol capabilities." Looks like I need a new PDA again...

SuSE Linux upgrades Exchange competitor. One more reason why M$ should be scared!

Anheuser-Busch Profit Up on Low-Carb Sales. Do you have fat-free pretzels with that? How 'bout some soy nuts or veggie wings? If you're going to drink beer, drink a real beer! Sierra Nevada, Guinness, and Brooklyn Brewery all have beers that don't require you to wear a skirt, talk about your feelings, or skip Monday night football. Enjoy!

Cheerleaders Shed Skirts to Wow Fans. “It’s exciting for male fans to see these gorgeous women in outfits that enhance their figures,” she said. "We’ve gotten an overall positive response from the fans." Well, Duh!

New spam law? It must be election year! Does anyone actually think this is going to work? The whole idea of a do-not-spam list is frightening. Are you going to give a list of real e-mail addresses to marketers and say, "please don't e-mail these people"? That's going to work out just as they plan, I'm sure...

Weaver's Woeful Season Gets Even Worse What the hell was Torre thinking, this isn't little league where everyone gets a turn in the game....

USATODAY.com - New Zealand farmers say 'flatulence' tax stinks You just can't write stuff this good...

There's a wonderful article about How NOT to install computer hardware. Unfortately, our Stupid Users won't detect the blatent and seething sarcasm in the article, and would actually follow the instructions given.

"ROAD WARRIOR HAWK PASSES AWAY": Was always one of my fav tag teams, a shame to go @ 46.

You've probably all read it, but it still deserves to be a posting on our blog. COBRA!

The Yankees win! Theeee Yankees win! Or do they.... Proof positive that trying to save time writing a sports story before it happens is never a good idea!

"HOGAN RUNNING FOR GOVERNOR?, SABLE'S PLAYBOY PIC MAKES TOP 50 LIST AND MORE WWE NEWS" What a copy cat Brother

Hell Froze Over, indeed. The marketing wizards at Apple deserve a raise for that line.

CNet is reporting that "Microsoft released its first monthly security update on Wednesday, following a new schedule that attempts to ease the load on overburdened system administrators." How does waiting until the end of the month to secure systems ease the load? I wonder if virus creators will now time the viruses for the day after the previous month's updates. That would give them a full month to wreak havoc before Microsoft bothers to fix the problem. Note to Bill: delaying security updates does NOT help me!

NVIDIA today announced additional details of their new nForce3 Go120 platform which supports the newly announced Transmeta Efficeon microprocessor family. I have no idea what Efficeon is, but it sounds fast and I want one!

Looks like today is a great day for software updates - FileZilla has released the new version. You can download it from SourceForge.net by following this link or browse Release Notes and ChangeLog by visiting this link.

It looks like it's a Mozilla kind of day! Mozilla Thunderbird 0.3 has been released. Download and enjoy!

Get your “extra salty” edition Sgt. Hartman doll...
Also great interview from Gunnery Sergeant R. Lee Ermey(FULL METAL JACKET) on his roles in the new )TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE and WILLARD (which was just released on VHS and DVD by New Line).

Mozilla Firebird - The Best Browser, Bar None! Firebird 0.7 is finally released along with a spiffy new web site! Happy downloading. If you was an EXE install, it's available here.

If you haven't heard by now, the Sci Fi Channel is doing a remake of Battlestar Galactica. I'm a big fan of the old series and immensely enjoyed the marathon of old episodes yesterday. If you're not familiar with the original, a DVD box set is ready for pre-order! If you're not excited yet, does this picture of a humanoid Cylon do anything for you?

We need more links for the sidebar of the Stupid Users blog. What do you think should be there?

HaloScan.com - Weblog Commenting. Due to recent (and very frequent) problems with the blog comment hosting service I've been using I have decided to go with another service. Unfortunately, this means that our comments will be wiped out again. Hopefully moving to the new service will prevent this from happening in the future...

Microsoft set up a web page to help people figure out if a Microsoft security-related message is genuine. There quite a few words and a couple of pretty pictures, but I can sum the whole thing up in a couple of sentences. Ways to know it's a Microsoft security warning: 1. It's a patch for the patch you rolled out last week. 2. 3 of them were issued at the same time. 3. It addresses the symptoms and not the problem. 4. The security information that prompted the patch to be created was released at least 6 months prior.

Jarn_the_Defender's dream job is now available. Serious applications only.

For the really lazy gamer...LOL
Monkeys use mind to move objects

Ten Things I Dig About Panther. My personal favorites are Expose and active directory integration. More reasons to make Moc OSX your OS of choice!

Parents Sue School Over Wi-Fi: A pioneering elementary school district outside Chicago has been sued for installing a wireless computer network by parents worried that exposure to the network's radio waves could harm their children. Someone should tell them that cordless phones, microwaves, and baby monitors run in the same frequency range. I honestly can't believe they are suing over this - I would love for my child to go to a school like this! These are probably the same parents that think video games cause all the violence and evil in the world.

For those of you who care, GAIM 0.71 has been released. Download

Hacked television, anyone? I can see it now: weekly Microsoft security updates, McAfee Commercial Scan, patches to remove Friends episodes...

Windows security update planned

WASHINGTON, Oct. 9 — Stung by criticism over lax software security, Microsoft Corp. disclosed plans Thursday to update its flagship Windows operating systems early in 2004 to make consumers less vulnerable to hackers.

The latest copy protection on BMG music CDs can be disabled by just holding down the Shift key when the CD is inserted into the CD Drive. BMG's response: "yeah, we knew about that, but it's just enough to prevent most stupid users from copying the CD." Wrong. The Stupid Users who really want to rip and share your music are just smart enough to find this information using Google.

**Insert RIAA lawsuit joke here**

Here is a fix for those regular users who can no longer get photo editor to work ( For the Is tyrant who likes to lock them out of anything)...

A search of the Microsoft Knowledge Base for your exact error message returns article 260151 titled: "OFF2000: "No File Format Information Can Be Found in the Registry" Message When You Start Photo Editor". In sum the article says:
1. "Microsoft Photo Editor is a minor auxiliary application that does not meet the requirements of the Windows 2000 Logo compliant program"
2. The program is "trying to access registry keys that require permissions that your account does not have"
3. The workaround is to give "Users" Full Control of this registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Shared Tools

You know you have WAY to much free time when...

A bunch of small-minded individuals ruin it for the rest of us. Now we have to wait until April 2004 for Half-Life 2! If anyone is friends with one of the small-minded individuals, please have them send a copy of the software to me so I can destroy it for them and get the production schedule back on track. I won't play it. Seriously. I mean it.

I've got an idea. Instead of making minor changes to Internet Explorer, why doesn't Microsoft actually update IE so it has a current feature set. Why does every other browser have pop-up blocking and tabbed browsing? Someone explain to me why IE has 97% of the market with 3% of the features!

IBM has developed an airbag for laptop computers! What's next? I wonder if laptops will start coming with LCD wipers to clean off fingerprints...

An article at the Register claims that Linux and Mac OS X would still be more secure than MS Windows even if they were used more frequently. Its a good article for pondering.

One issue I have with the article is the author's claim of a security risk created by Microsoft's monoculture. The author argues that Windows users are exploited because they mainly only use Outlook (which uses the unsecure Internet Explorer), whereas Linux and OS X users have a plethora of apps to use. If we lived in a Mac OS X world, however, there would have to be one killer Outlook-esk OS X app that businesses would flock to -- thus creating a target for virus writers due to popularity. It might be harder to write exploit code for a Linux/OS X app, but it can be done.

Also, the author states that some Linux servers are unsecure by holding MS-type documents (Word .doc's, Excel .xls's). From what information I've seen, macro viruses have gone the way of the dinosaur the last 2-3 years. Word/Excel viruses don't proprogate quickly and efficiently like the viruses/worms of today.

I agree with the author that if we lived in this mythical OS X/Linux world, there would be less viruses floating around. Most of us can agree that Microsoft Windows products are not the most secure in the world. But there's a fine line between comparing the number of flaws between OS's and straight-up Microsoft bashing.

Need a better way to back up your Mozilla profiles? MozillaZine reports that the new version of Mozilla Backup now supports Firebird and Thunderbird!

ICANN has now ordered VeriSign to stop making domain-not-found requests under .net and .com redirect to VeriSign's web site.

VeriSign implemented this service in order to generate more domain registrations. If VeriSign doesn't shut down the SiteFinder service by Saturday, Oct. 4th, then ICANN may sue to cut VeriSign out of managing the .com and the .net domains. Which would hurt VeriSign's security certificates business.

Well, the new QHosts Trojan Horse that changes a computer's DNS servers has been analyzed and described. The article says that a MS Patch is on the way, but has no timeline for the patch release.

This is why we tell the stupid users to update Windows AND the virus scanners.

Want to know a way to guarantee that a movie will suck? How about creating a movie based on a book that you didn't read. To make it worse, try not even liking the genre of the film you're making. If you're still not sure it sucks enough, cast Ben Affleck in a leading role. I'm a John Woo fan and this movie is SO going to suck!

It's hard to believe, but there was actually a technology company (other than Microsoft) that SCO hadn't pissed off yet. When they heard about it, they immediately filed suit. Anyone else think this whole thing is being funded by Bill Gates?

You gotta love when hypocrisy rears its ugly head! Remember when Madonna tried to make a statement about file-sharing and got her website hacked for it? Well, it turns out she's been doing some sharing of her own! From The Smoking Gun: And you thought Madonna came up with those kinky ideas all by herself? A new copyright lawsuit alleges that the singer's latest racy video is based entirely on the work of a late French fashion photographer. Details...

SuSE is set release an update of it's already very good Linux OS. In addition to a bunch of other features, it adds support for NTFS!

Can anyone tell me why it would be a good idea to open the Windows source code to Chinese hackers? If anything would convert me to Linux or OSX, this would be it!