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Rick

Back to work

I just got back in town a few hours ago. I have been returning calls and sifting through emails. One of the drawbacks to technology is that it makes it easier for work to stack up while you are gone.

I must, again, say how grateful I am for Cloudmark Desktop, an email spam filter that actually works. I had over 300 emails while I was gone, but only about 20 were actually worth reading. Cloudmark sifted all of the spam and none of the good stuff.

I can't figure out why more Internet service providers don't use Cloudmark to filter spam (Do you hear me ACS, Bresnan, AOL and every other ISP that uses a crappy filter that prevents the good stuff from getting through on a regular basis? I didn't think so.).

Weather on the road

I am traveling with my family this week on my kid's spring break. After making the habit of not taking my laptop on a trip a couple of year's ago, we have found that having the laptop makes information gathering much easier, more accurate and faster. One of the most used things I like to use the laptop for is weather forecasting. I'm no meteorologist, but having access to up-to-the-minute radar, satellite, and storm tracking information at my fingertips makes planning for the day's events come off with fewer weather related hitches.

Right now, my favorite online weather center is Weather Underground . I have used them for years and find their information extremely current and thorough. I will mix in a bit of the National Weather Service and Intellicast at times as well. In the last few years, I stopped visiting the Weather Channel's web site because of their almost garish advertising. Give some of these weather sites a try if you haven't already and also let me know where you like to check weather on the road or at home.  

Will old media kill itself off?

Viacom is suing YouTube (Google) for $1 billion for copyright violations. People (not YouTube) have posted clips (not entire shows unless the shows were under 10  minutes) on YouTube without Viacom's permission.

As a result, many YouTube visitors were turned onto Viacom regular programing as well as many other programs like, The Office, 24, Desperate Housewives, The Family Guy, Ali G, and Lost.

While some of these people would have started watching these programs without the help of the Internet, most people use the Internet to get caught up on episodes that aired before they started watching.

Technology doesn’t work unless you use it

My family and I are taking a short spring break trip this year and have already run into a travel snafu. After booking our flights at the US Airways web site in January, we did not check again on our itenerary since we already had receipts, seat assignments and all travel information until a few hours before we left for the airport. Upon looking at the US Airways site, it appeared that our connecting flight in Phoenix had been moved up by three hours! No one had contacted us by telephone or email to give us this important morsel of information, but I also take the blame for not checking on the flights at least the day before. We jumped in the mini-van and hustled to the airport only to have our information confirmed and told that we would indeed not be able to get to our destination until the following day.

Interview with Todd Davis of LifeLock.com

Join us tomorrow for an interview with Todd Davis of LifeLock.com.

If you would like to subscribe to LifeLock's services. Simply visit their website at sign up. Use the code COC for a 20 percent discount! 

Find out how LifeLock can protect your identity and more about the dangers of identity theft.

Here is a cool screen shot from Todd's testimonial on LifeLock.com.

Todd Davis

A Faster computer does not equal faster Internet

Just as Rick mentioned that people often expect the computer to run faster once they have faster Internet, the opposite is also expected.

Often people on dial-up or slower DSL ask me once they have a new computer whether their email will go faster or their websites will load quickly. Typically the difference between a new computer and a Windows 98 machine with sufficient RAM will be barely noticeable.

It may take longer for programs like Outlook Express or Internet Explorer longer to start up on an older machine, once the program has loaded the actual reaction time for the Internet is pretty much unchanged.

Faster Internet does not equal faster computer

A common misconception I run across often is that getting a faster Internet
connection will make the computer faster. The Internet is just one of many
functions a computer performs. Whether you connect via a phone line, DSL,
or cable has absolutely NO bearing on how quickly the computer boots up or
opens a particular program.

A faster Internet connection will allow you to receive large email
attachments faster, surf the web faster, and download updates faster, but
it does nothing else for speeding up other computer functions. If your
computer feels slow, that can be due to one or more factors including; not

Is Vista driving computer prices down again?

After the release of Vista we saw prices for desktops and laptops rise nearly 15% for equivalent Windows XP computers. Since Vista's release, the sales numbers for computers and Vista itself have been dismal and retailers are not happy. I opened up my local paper today at breakfast and found that Office Depot had three decent laptops on sale for under $900 all with 1 GB of RAM. One was $699. We haven't seen those kind of prices on laptops since before Christmas. It makes me wonder if Microsoft is giving some kind of incentive to manufacturers to lower their prices in order to help drive sales.

Do you really have that much time on your hands?

I hate to beat a dead horse, but I need to know. One of the most common responses I get from people who don't have a high speed Internet connection is, "I have plenty of time to wait and am in no hurry." While I admire the Zen like focus and calm nerves of these folks, I have to ask the obvious. "Really?"

Today, I worked with a customer who lives literally in the middle of the mountains…the nearest town (about 200 people) is more than 20 miles away and the phone line sounds like popcorn in a microwave and there is no cell service. She has been patiently using dial-up Internet service for more than 7 years connecting at speeds of between 12 kbps and 14.4 kbps on a good day. Yes, you read that correctly…12-14 kbps!!! That is half the speed of a poor dial-up connection…good dial-up connections range from 44 kbps to 52 kbps. An entry level DSL connection starts at 256 kbps. When I setup her new computer today, it took almost thirty minutes to download and install the flash plug-in for her browser. I ended up disabling graphics from showing in her browser and showed her how to view a graphic if she really needed to since a 54kb graphic would take nearly two minutes to load.