Back at work

I'm back at work, still not feeling the best. I've got a ton of work to catch up on. Yippee! At least no band practice tonight - I guess we're going to get back to it on Saturday.

Bah... I've got a cold

I have a cold and am staying home from work. I got home yesterday from Elkhart and started getting the sniffles.

Not much to report on Thanksgiving. I spent Saturday at my friend Jim's house and played a Star Wars game with him and his sons. Noah and I avenged ourselved from the D&D mini's game and beat Jim and Wesley.

The Snodgrasses came over for Thanksgiving dinner. It was good to see everyone. I saw Bill and Katie whom I haven't seen for almost a year. As usual, Mom did an excellent job with the dinner. Sweet potatoes, mmmmm.

That's all I got - I hope everyone had a good weekend.

Snow!

It snowed a couple of inches last night, and the forecast is for 5-6 more with 40 to 50 mph winds. I'll be heading to Elkhart tonight for Thanksgiving as a result.

I had a good time in Indianpolis over the weekend. Maggie seemed to enjoy her new DS and Nintendogs. I'm jealous. Carl and I played a little bit of Splinter Cell 3 and Tony Hawk: Underground. In Tony Hawk we played "King of the Hill" which was quite fun.

We're having Thanksgiving with the Snodgrasses at my parent's place, as usual, and then I'll be spending Friday at Shawn's house gaming, smoking cigars, and being a big kid.

I'll be back in Hammond either on Saturday or Sunday.

Adventures in telephony

Last night, Buck and Gunthyr and I got online to do a little role-playing on Buck's BAHS game (By Axe, Hammer or Sword - catchy, eh?). We've used Yahoo Messenger in the past, but the voice quality is poor - lots of echo, half-duplex, etc. Google Talk is quite good, but unfortunately it doesn't support conference calling. We found a kludged way of doing it, but one person's voice ended up suffering quite a bit to the point of going back to Yahoo.

I've downloaded Skype and we'll try that out. It supports conference calling and the voice quality is supposed to be pretty good. I'm sure Google will add conference calling to their software - it just came out. I'm a little surprised it doesn't have it already, but I'll be even more surprised if they don't end up adding it.

Change of plans

I will not be practicing tonight or Saturday. Dave, our guitarist, is rehabbing the space, has other issues, etc., so it sounds like the band might be on hold until at least after Thanksgiving.

So, that means I'll be going to Indianapolis on Saturday (after my car repair) to my niece, Maggie's, birthday party. I know what you're getting, Maggie, na na na na nah! (I'm jealous, too.)

Keeping up to date

If you'd like to be notified of new postings on this blog, there are two ways - using an RSS reader or asking me to send you e-mail updates.

I recommend learning about RSS readers and using them, but if you're new to RSS feeds, don't like them, and don't want to use them for whatever reason, you can subscribe via e-mail updates by using the form included in the sidebar to the right. However, I recommend using an RSS reader. These are used to keep track of all the new content posted on websites you visit in one convenient place. The provide a headline/abstract format which allows you to quickly scan information. If you want to read more, a click will take you to the full article in question. Click here to see all the feeds I subscribe to (too many!). Click on one of the links to see an example of the headline/abstract format. Here are two RSS readers:

Bloglines. This is the reader I use - it's web-based, meaning it works through your browser and you don't have to install anything on your computer, and has a lot of nice features. Once you sign up for an account, you can click here or on the button at the right to subscribe to this blog.

Google Reader. I haven't tried this, but it looks cool and plan to check it out. Also, incidentally, check out Google Talk. The sound quality for the voice chat is amazing. If you'd like to chat, add a comment to this post and I'll get in touch!

If you use a Mac, Safari has a built-in RSS icon (Firefox does, too). The URL for this blog is


http://dawgbite.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Copy and paste the above url into the appropriate field on whatever RSS reader you use and it should get you subscribed.

Quick guide to protecting your PC

I'll try and write a quick quide with (mostly) free software to protect your PC from the ravages of spyware and viruses. If you have a Macintosh, you can take comfort in that spending twice as much for a computer has spared you most of these steps, but you're still not entirely safe. I'm fairly mac-illiterate, but I've heard that Paranoid Android is a good step in protecting Safari and OS X. Also, securemac.com seems to be a good resource for securing your Mac. Also, the first step I list for PC users also applies to Macs - a good router/firewall is platform independent - get one.

So, for the PC users out there:

1. Buy a $40 or $50 router to put inbetween your modem and your computer(s). As far as brands are concerned, Linksys, Netgear, and D-Link are the most popular and easiest to find. Any of these will provide your computer(s) a firewall to operate behind. A simplistic explanation is that a firewall will only allow incoming traffic that your computer has explicitly asked for. Of course, if your computer's already infected, it will be asking for more nasty stuff to be brought in or if you visit a malicious website, your computer will be asking for trouble, which brings me to...

2. A software firewall. Software firewalls block any unwanted outgoing traffic. If you're using Windows XP Service Pack 2, it has a built-in firewall that, combined with the previously mentioned hardware firewall, will get you to a relatively secure level of incoming/outbound traffic protection. If you don't have XP, SP 2, I'd recommend the free Sygate personal firewall. These programs are a pain at first because you have to "teach" them what's allowed, but it gives you a good idea of what your computer is doing; sometimes you're not sure if something should be allowed or not, do a search on google to see what the program is if you're not sure. Your anti-virus, spyware, IM clients, browser, e-mail programs, etc, all need to be given permission to access the internet (of course), so the firewall will need to be told this. As software firewalls get better, they get smarter and understand which programs are legitimate or not, but, unfortunately, they're still kind of dumb and you'll have to inform them that your e-mail program (and others) are allowed to access the internet.

3. Install Mozilla's free Firefox browser. 90% of all spyware attacks Microsoft Internet Explorer. Firefox works on most of the pages IE does and is much, much safer. If you find Firefox not working on a particular website, you can always use IE for that site. Firefox will import your bookmarks, saved history, etc., so you won't lose anything by switching.

4. Antispyware software. I'd recommend installing all THREE of the following programs, although it's probably a little overboard.

Microsoft AntiSpyware will get you 90% of the way there. Microsoft bought the very good Giant anti-spyware and has tweaked it and it's very good at catching most stuff. In various tests, this was shown to cast the widest net in catching spyware. The big bonus to me is that it will auto-update itself (make sure to answer "yes" when it prompts you about this). You'll have to go through the "Genuine Windows Validation" process, AND you need Windows 2000 or above. If you have Windows 98 or lower, please install the next two recommendations

Spypot Search and Destroy. This does not auto-update, but it's easy to run - please update the definitions regularly and also use the "immunize" feature.

Ad-Aware. This isn't nearly as good as it used to be (it was one of the first anti-spyware programs), but installing this still seems to be recommended as an overkill, confidence measure.

5. Anti-virus software. AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition is a great product that is almost as good as the ubiquitous Norton Anti-Virus. If you're willing to spend some money, I still think Norton is better, but I use AVG and am comfortable in its protection.

If you take these steps, you will go a very long way to protecting yourself. This combined with your savvy use will keep you protected. Savvy users don't install software they don't absolutely need (comet cursors, cute screensavers, etc.), don't click on attachments unless they're expecting them and don't visit fringe websites dealing with hacking, gambling or pornography. Ethical considerations aside, it has been found that these websites put forth the majority of the nasty stuff that can infect your computer, sometimes without you clicking on anything - by merely visiting a malicious website you can get infected. So be careful and take the steps outlined above, backup frequently and you should enjoy relatively stress-free computing.

Friday after Thanksgiving update

For those concerned, my request for taking the Friday after Thanksgiving off has been approved. Whew.

Fun weekend

I had a fun weekend. I spent Saturday afternoon/evening with my friend Jimmy. He gave me a great cigar - a "Royal Jamaica Oro Rojo" which I proceeded to smoke with him on his back porch. We then played a DnD miniatures game with his sons Noah and Wesley. Jim and Wesley were on one team and Noah and I on the other. We got hammered, but they had a "death knight" and this other lich-like thingy that had this "abysmal blast" special ability which wiped out half of our army from the start, so even though the "points" were the same in building the army, it wasn't fair. Not only wasn't it fair, I'll call it cheating.

On Sunday morning, I played Spinter Cell 3 with my nephew, Carl. We played the multiplayer coop mode, which is quite fun - you can throw your partner over ledges, use each other as ladders, etc. In this aspect, it's a unique game. We didn't get very far, but it'll be something to look forward to at the holidays. My mom also had a brunch where our friends the Tubbs came over to see Anna and Tony's little girl, Abbey (sp?) who is a whole 5 months old. She's cute and very happy. I drove back home yesterday afternoon and watched a tivoed Alias (I'm not buying Sydney being pregnant and still working, by the way), tracked down a pizza place that Jimmy recommended when he lived in Highland (Langel's - pretty good, Jim, thanks) and went to bed early.

This week I have band practice on Wednesday night and Saturday afternoon, and an appointment to get my Saturn's recall work done on Saturday morning. Otherwise, I should be either at work or at home.

I'm off to the cigar store to look for Royal Jamaicas...

Off to Elkhart...

I'm off to Elkhart to see my nieces and nephew as well as my friends. I'll be back sometime tomorrow. Videogames, football and dogs, dogs, dogs! (Whenever the Fawley's get together, it's a house with 5 dogs - very fun until it becomes so hectic that they get herded outside).

Have a good weekend.

Sony DRM Rant...

It's probably not a surprise that my first post is a rant about Sony's DRM "Screw You and Your Computer" DRM rootkits. Enough already! To make this short and sweet, Sony has licensed a "rootkit" technology to put on their CDs which prevents their customers from copying the CD in a computer. A "rootkit", according to Wikipedia, is a set of software tools frequently used by a third-party (usually an intruder) after gaining access to a computer system. These tools are intended to conceal running processes, files or system data, which helps an intruder maintain access to a system for purposes unbeknownst to the user. Intellectual property debates aside, this rootkit is now being used by hackers to hide their own mailicious software and has been causing Windows computers to "blue screen," causing some of them to have to be entirely rebuilt.

Please read more about this on Wikipedia's concise explanation and here's a list of the Sony CDs affected. If you've been infected by one of these CD's, there is a patch available, but it's buggy and causes its own technical problems as well as still violating privacy. I'd say hold on as this has created enough of a firestorm that Sony will eventually issue a reliable uninstall/patch eventually.

California has filed a class-action lawsuit against Sony and New York is expected to follow. I, for one, will not be purchasing any Sony CDs anytime soon, and lots of others feel the same way. Hopefully between these decreased sales and lawsuits, this DRM zealotry will lessen.