My wife and I are planning a trip to San Francisco to see Wicked and play a bit as we celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary. We will be leaving in a little over a month and are very excited. We don’t get to do much for our anniversary usually but since this is number 10 we thought we would make it special. I mean she has put up with me this long, she should get a little something out of it.

So, the plane and Wicked tickets are purchased, the rental car is reserved and we are researching which hotel to stay at. Planning a trip is a lot of work and can get pricey pretty quick. But it will all be worth it in the end.

I almost made it a disaster though. Yesterday we went to the bank to cash a couple of checks. My wife almost always handles this (which is why I never have any money). This time she wanted to wait in the car with the kids and play solitair on my phone. So I headed in and gave the two checks to the teller and said I wanted to cash them. She asked for my driver’s license which is usually enough to get a check cashed. Well, she started asking me to verify the last 4 digits of my social security number, my address, the other person’s name on the joint account, my monther’s maiden name, etc. I couldn’t figure out why she was being so thorough. She finally said that she would go ahead and cash them but they aren’t supposed to without current identification. She said that my driver’s license had expired 5 month’s ago.

I was like “what the heck”? I looked at my license and sure enough, it was expired. And, since you have to have current and valid identification in order to board a plane, I would have missed my flight to San Francisco, seeing Wicked, and missed out on a very fun anniversary.

Thank you bank teller for being so thorough and letting me know that my license had expired. I have shown that driver’s license at a store I buy parts at many many times and they have never said a word.

Moral of the story is to do whatever you are doing to the best of your ability and don’t cut corners or be afraid to speak up when something is not right. If this teller had been too afraid to question my ID, I would have paid the price when I went to board the plane. So, thanks again.

After we got home, I gathered all of the required documents and headed in to the DMV and renewed my license. What a relief!

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My wife is a graphic designer. She has been doing graphic design for over 15 years. I get to listen to some of her frustrations as she works with certain clients. The problem is that graphic design is so subjective. What one person loves, another person hates. So, she has to try to figure out what the client is going for and try to come up with the perfect design. Her clients aren’t always helpful in communicating their wants. Anyway, I found this little cartoon that shows how a lot of clients are when working with graphic designers. I thought you may get a kick out of it.

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What the heck is Folding@home? That’s what I thought when I stumbled across a forum talking about “folding”. People on this forum were talking about their computer’s specs and processing power and how much folding they had done. It got me curious so I kept reading to see what they were talking about. I finally made my way to Stanford University’s website talking all about folding and what it is. It is very interesting.

Folding refers to protein folding and misfolding and how that relates to various deseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Mad Cow, Cancer, and a bunch of other deseases. When proteins do not fold correctly, there can be serious consequences  such as these and other deseases and conditions. In order to study the folding process, a lot of processing power is needed to do molecular simulations and calculate all that biological stuff. So, rather than spend millions of dollars building or renting time on a super computer, they have created one of the fastest super computers for free. It is made up of thousands of individual computers around the world. At the time of this writing, there are over 350,000 active CPUs which contribute to the project. That is quite a few CPUs considering that the project has been around for just under 10 years.

So, I decided to join the movement and contribute to hopefully finding cures for some of these deseases. It is fairly simple to help out, you simply download a small program from Standford’s site and install it. It will ask you some questions about how you want it to install and you are able to choose a username (not required) and can even join a team (also not required). If you would like to join my team, put in team number 183338 when asked. You can then track how much our team is helping and see your own stats for your username.

I have an old server down in my basement that doesn’t do much but sit there and drain my electricity. So, I thought I would put it to use doing something worthwhile. It is now crunching away on it’s first folding project. After you have installed the software, your computer automatically downloads a project from Stanford’s servers which needs to be computed. Your computer then crunches away on that project and does whatever calculations are needed. Once your computer finishes with the project, it uploads it back to Standord’s server and begins working on the next project. It can take days for your computer to finish a project. You’re probably wondering what kind of drain this has on your computer resources, well, it drains it a lot when the computer doesn’t have any other tasks to do but drains it very little, if any, when your computer is busy with other tasks. You see, the process is set at a very low priority. So, any other processes on your computer take higher priority than the Folding@home process. So, when your computer needs the processor to convert a movie file, or run your browser, it is able to take just as much of the processor as it would have without Folding@home being installed. Folding@home will drop to 0% processor usage if needed so that your computer can do any other tasks it needs to. On the other hand, when you are not using your computer for any processor intensive tasks (probably about 95% of the time), it will use as much of the processor as it can. So, you may see your processor at 100% whenever Folding@home is working on a project. Don’t be alarmed, it will allow any other task to use as much CPU as it wants to immediately if needed. So, it won’t slow down your computer at all.

So, why not give all of that idle processor power over to something useful and rewarding for everyone by doing your own folding. You’ll feel better about being a part of something so important and it it doesn’t really hurt you or your computer to help out. And agin, if you want to be part of my team, use team number 183338 when you install your software. Together we can be a part of the solution.

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Once again I have obtained a direct line to Santa’s workshop. It is December, so of course Santa is VERY busy. Unfortunately he does not have time to answer thousands of phone calls personally. But, you can leave a message for him so he’ll be sure to know what you want for Christmas. His Direct line is:

801-738-0668

 Let him know your name, how old you are, and what you would like him to bring you for Christmas. And, if you would like to have a recording of your message e-mailed to you, send an e-mail to Santa at santa@claus.fami.ly with the date and approximate time of your call as well as the child’s name and age and Santa will do his best to send your message back to you for your own enjoyment (Ask your parents for help with this part).

Pass this along to your friends and family so they can call Santa too.  http://stevemart.in/2009/12/10/call-santa/

Merry Christmas!

Posted in Computer Networking | 3 Comments »

Ok, so I’ve found a few more of the 15″ Digital Picture Frames. There are a few different brands and I can’t say if they are any good or not. If I were in the market to be purchasing a new frame, I would still go with the Viewsonic I wrote about in a previous entry because I trust the name. But, these others may be equally good if not better, so who knows.

Pandigital PAN1502W02 15 Digital Picture Frame $149.97

Ok, so it’s sold out but maybe they’ll get more in stock. It was selling for $149.97. We had purchased a Pandigital as a gift once and the quality really was nice.

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SmartParts SP15MWA 15 Walnut Wood Digital Photo F $119.99

I have a client with a SmartParts digital frame that his wife gave him for Christmas and it also looks very nice.

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Smartparts 15 4:3 Ratio Digital Photo Frame $119.99

I tend to see a lot of the SmartParts frames available from many sites. Hopefully that means that they make a good product.

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Sunpak SF-150-42001SL 15 TFT LCD Digital Frame - $81.97

I’ve never heard of these guys but the price is sure right. Hopefully the quality is at least decent.

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I just double checked the prices before posting this. They could always change by the time you read this and they could sell out. Enjoy.

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This beautiful, extra large digital multimedia frame plays music and supports most video formats. Choose the ViewSonic VFM1530-11 with a high resolution 1024×768 LCD panel for clear and crisp photo images. The 4:3 aspect ratio gives you minimum distortion or data loss. It’s equipped with a USB connection for easy content download and remote control. Handy brightness and contrast ratio adjustment and energy savings with programmable on/off, keep your photos right within view. This makes a lovely gift for special occasions and for anyone wanting a grand view of all their images. Effective Viewing Area: 12″ x 9″ (304mm x 228 mm) Brightness: 400 cd/m2 (typ) Contrast Ratio: 500:1 (typ) Aspect Ratio: 4:3 Viewing Angle: 120° (H) / 100° (V) Memory Card Supported: SD/SDHC, MMC, MS/MS Pro, CF Image File Format: JPEG Video Format: MJPEG, MPEG 1, MPEG 4.

This is my gift pick for this Christmas holiday. I bought another 15″ digital picture frame similar to this for my wife for Mother’s Day. She loves it. The reason I pick this one is that, as of this writing, it is selling for $139.99. Also, it is made by Viewsonic. I have always been happy with Viewsonic products in the past. And last but not least, it is large. A 15″ frame mounts nicely on the wall. We have so many digital pictures just hiding out on a hard drive that we don’t get to see very often. This allows us to be able to see the pictures and enjoy them. So, check it out and snag one before they are gone. I have already watched Amazon sell out of them and I’ve watched the price fluctuate up to $199, so get one ordered while you can still get it cheap and while it will still make it before Christmas.

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I am a big fan of opendns.com. You may not have even heard of it. Most people don’t even know what DNS is and would therefore have no idea why they would need something called opendns.com. Well, DNS is how your computer is able to figure out how to load each website you visit. When you type in http://stevemart.in as you frequestly do, DNS is what takes that address and figures out what the underlying IP address is for it. The IP for http://stevemart.in currently happens to be 65.254.250.110. If a switch hosts, that IP will change. DNS would be able to find the new address. If we had a DNS engine in our own brains, it would be like someone who has no idea where I live say “I want to go to Steve Martin’s house”. His little DNS engine would give him my exact street address so that he could go there. Wouldn’t that be nice? I could go through the process DNS uses to obtain the IP addresses of domain names, but for this article, it’s not that important. So, let’s continue.

Any ISP you use has DNS servers setup for their customers to use. Usually everyone just uses them without thinking about it because it is automatic and they don’t know they even have an option. Well, you do, and opendns.com claims that they do a much better job at DNS than the ISPs. If it were as simple as that, that may be enough reason to start using opendns.com but there is SOOOOO much more to it than that. Opendns.com is a way to actually control the DNS for a computer or network. Let’s say you don’t want the people in your home to be able to go to a particular website or even a particular catagory of websites. Can you imagine a scenario where that might be possible? If so, you would create an opendns.com account and program the opendns.com IP addresses into your router so that whenever someone connects to your network, all their website requests go through opendns.com instead of your ISPs DNS. Then you customize your opendns.com account to block certain catagories of websites or even individual websites as you see fit. Now anyone on your network that tries to visit a site that is in a blocked catagory will not be successful in visiting that site. They will get a page that lets them know the site is in a blocked catagory. Pretty nifty eh?

If you choose not to setup an opendns.com account, you can still simply program your router to use opendns.com or even individual computers and at the bare minimum, they will be a bit more protected against certain threats online. You see, opendns.com actively blocks many of the domains that certain viruses are known to “phone home” too when a computer gets infected.

I have opendns configured at several of my clients’ locations as well as my home and it does a great job of resolving DNS requests. And, we get a little bit of extra protection to boot. You’re probably wondering how much an amazing service like this costs as it is quite useful and would be so nice to use. Well, the greatest thing about it is that it is 100% FREE. That’s right, you get everything completely FREE. As of tomorrow, they will be launching a new enterprise version which I assume with carry some new bells and whistles but it will be a value added service which you won’t have to use. So go to http://www.opendns.com and check it out. You have absolutely nothing to lose and quite possibly a whole lot to gain.

I haven’t really gone through the nuts and bolts of actually setting up opendns on your network as I really just wanted to introduce it. You can get great instructions from their site but if you have specific questions, let me know.

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I’ve been married for 9 LONG years (just kidding honey) and have lived in 3 different homes with a short stay of about 6 months at my in-laws while one of our homes was being built. Since our first home, a condo, we decided to leave our outdoor lights on all night. The idea behind it was to not let our home be dark around it. Darkness gives criminals lots of great hiding spots. So, any place where we have an outside door, we have a light. In our 9 years of marriage we have never had our home or our vehicle broken into. There is one exception to this and it is when we lived at my in-laws for those 6 months waiting for our house to finish being built. My in-laws do not leave their outside lights on through the night so it is extremely dark around their house at night. We had parked our car in their driveway and when we woke up in the morning, we found that our stereo had been stolen and the trunk had been emptied. The funny thing about it is that my mother-in-law was in charge of the neighborhood watch program at the time. You can never know for sure, but I am guessing that our car wouldn’t have been touched if their house had been well lit on the outside.

So, my advice to you is to leave you outdoor lights on throughout the night. If you are concerned about a higher electrical bill, maybe put a motion sensor on your lights so they only turn on when someone walks nearby. But, if the lights are already on, the burgler probably won’t even check your house and will head to a house with dark hiding spots. Also, with the newer CFL light bulbs, you can put in a 100 watt equivalent light while only actually using 23 watts of power. Or use a 60 watt which draws only 13 watts. As long as you keep things lit up. Below are a couple of pictures I took this evening. One with no light on and the other with a light on. Which one appears more inviting to a burgler? You decide.

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Once again I have been “honored” with the Best of Riverton Award. All I have to do is send these guys a bunch of money to ship the plaque to me. What a business. I’m surprized they haven’t been investigated. But, I guess they aren’t really doing anything illegal. If someone is stupid enough to send them money for a fake award, too bad for them.

Press Release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Smart Technology Receives 2009 Best of Riverton Award

U.S. Commerce Association’s Award Plaque Honors the Achievement

WASHINGTON D.C., June 8, 2009 — Smart Technology has been selected for the 2009 Best of Riverton Award in the Computer Consultants category by the U.S. Commerce Association (USCA).

The USCA “Best of Local Business” Award Program recognizes outstanding local businesses throughout the country. Each year, the USCA identifies companies that they believe have achieved exceptional marketing success in their local community and business category. These are local companies that enhance the positive image of small business through service to their customers and community.

Various sources of information were gathered and analyzed to choose the winners in each category. The 2009 USCA Award Program focused on quality, not quantity. Winners are determined based on the information gathered both internally by the USCA and data provided by third parties.

About U.S. Commerce Association (USCA)

U.S. Commerce Association (USCA) is a Washington D.C. based organization funded by local businesses operating in towns, large and small, across America. The purpose of USCA is to promote local business through public relations, marketing and advertising.

The USCA was established to recognize the best of local businesses in their community. Our organization works exclusively with local business owners, trade groups, professional associations, chambers of commerce and other business advertising and marketing groups. Our mission is to be an advocate for small and medium size businesses and business entrepreneurs across America.

SOURCE: U.S. Commerce Association

CONTACT:
U.S. Commerce Association
Email: PublicRelations@us-ca.org
URL: http://www.us-ca.org

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I thought this was a pretty funny video on how you can land that next job you are trying to get.

Pepsi Max Job Interview Funny Commercial – Funny bloopers are a click away

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