With Transformers:Revenge of the Fallen out in theaters, weapons of destruction are pretty cool to watch on the big screen. Wouldn’t it be nice if we already had some of that technology available to us for real? Perhaps we do. Check-out this video we uncovered of a the F-35B fighter jet that does a little bit of transforming of its own.
I finally watched the movie tonight at IMAX. Definitely the way to see it! Very good movie, but even less kid friendly than the first one.
I’m hitting a little bit of a theme with my posts. Can you tell it’s that time of the week when I go through my spam filters and check for false positives? That’s what I’m doing and I’m reminded of something that to me is extremely easy to identify. I’m not sure why messages fitting this scenario aren’t immediately flagged as spam and never seen by the user.
I don’t know how many times I’ve gone into my email and noticed messages with a weird date and time. In my opinion if an email is sent to me with a "Sent On" date prior to the Pony Express being in service, it’s more than likely a spam email. Even if it’s a legitimate email from a reliable source, I probably don’t want to see it. When they realize I’m not getting their emails or responding, then we can talk about fixing their time server on their computers.
The same would be true for any date where "Sent On" is in the future of the current date. To me those are obvious issues and could be deleted at the server level. Anyone else agree with me here?
I know you can’t clump emails sent in the wee hours of the morning as always spam, I believe they are frequently from senders you may not want to see. Perhaps these could immediately be tagged as junk and kept for review. In fact, I think some email servers already do this as a first level trigger of potential spam sources.
I can’t imagine what it would be like to have one of my children go missing. What might be worse is to have your child kidnapped. If that were to occur you know that there is someone that has specifically taken your child, they’re not just missing and perhaps lost or just by themselves.
If that would occur to you, you’d do anything to try and get them back. Why wouldn’t you do the same thing for someone else’s child?
With Wireless Amber Alerts you can be notified immediately of events where children have gone missing or kidnapped.
The national Wireless AMBER Alerts Initiative is a voluntary partnership between the wireless industry, the United States Department of Justice, and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), to distribute AMBER Alerts to wireless subscribers who opt in to receive the messages and are able to receive text messages on their wireless devices.
It’s just a text message and a phone bill. Isn’t that miniscule in comparison to helping return a child or another person to their rightful guardian?
Uncover a missing child using Wireless Amber Alerts
I’ve written regularly about my selection of Windows Live OneCare as my anti-virus and anti-malware software application of choice. At the time of needing my own new application, I was able to purchase the software for use on three machines. At the time, I believe they were the only company to provide this purchase option. Many followed afterwards.
Microsoft has now released their Microsoft Security Essentails application that will be completely replacing Windows Live OneCare as their security application of choice.
The big change between the two application is that Microsoft Security Essentials will be offered as a free download. Compared to the price of OneCare. There are a few different functions that will not be included in the new application, but the core components of what you’re looking for in this kind of application will be there.
What anti-virus application do you use? What system do you have running on a daily basis? What applications do you use for some extra-curricular system scrubbing when it’s called for because of a variety of reasons?
I was appalled the other day as I drove into my neighborhood. There was a boy standing in his yard and he couldn’t have been more than 12 or 13 years old. The reason I was appalled was that I could not believe what was on his shirt. As shocking to me was also the fact that he was standing there with what I would imagine to be his mother. What did his shirt say? In bold, white font but F*** YOU! Seriously!?
Nice Turtle Apparel is trying to change that. You see I hadn’t thought too much about it but there is a proliferation of rude or slightly offending shirts on the market these days. There doesn’t have to be a dead-end of options for wearing fashionable t-shirts with less than edifying messages on them.
You are probably wondering why we chose a turtle as our spokesman. The answer is quite simple really. My wife and I were shopping in a large super store one day (no names) and noticed that for the longest time the only t-shirts available were designed to be mean, rude, and selfish. whether attacking someone’s datability, attractiveness, intelligence, or existence, it seemed as if there were no nice things to be said. "What kind of message are we sending to this generation?", we asked ourselves.
Once we came across a familiar icon, a fuzzy little innocent looking rabbit with a bad attitude and sweet name (which we will not share here for legal purposes), that was it, we had decided that there was enough negative influence out there. It was time for a new face on the scene. The voice of niceness to shout into the hateful darkness and remind the world to "Be Nice!" Thus, "nice turtle" was born (created to be exact). So, to answer the question, "Why a turtle"… Why not!
Turn a new leaf in life and let’s help switch the flow of vulgarity and offensive apparel.
Go uncover a nice, friendly item for yourself or a friend at Nice Turtle Apparel
I manage a number of email addresses on a daily basis. Some of the servers have great spam checking filters while others get legitimate emails caught in the filters by mistake on a regular basis. Regardless of the filters I setup or whitelist and blacklists I edit and update, I find myself scanning my junk mail folder for some services at least weekly.
I will regularly sort my Junk Mail folders by "Subject" which for me makes it very easy to scan through subject lines that are usually very similar and the only difference is the spoofed email address they’ve created from the "From" line.
It can depend on your personal preference, sorting by "From" can also be helpful sometimes, especially if you’re looking for a specific address that always seems to get a false positive identification as spam.
Both of these options work far better for me than the default sorting method of "Date".
Twitter continues to become more and more mainstream these days. Being talked about by a variety of celebrities as well as being mentioned in more and more commercials every night it seems. The question is whether or not it’s got a trick up its sleeve that you may not have thought of before now.
You’re probably well aware of the twitter 140 character limit that was established to work with the limits set by mobile phone carriers for SMS text messaging. Did you know that you can take advantage of twitter and use it as a free texting distribution service for people to use who may never know what twitter is or use it themselves.
Anyone with a cell phone can "subscribe" a twitterer’s updates. If the person twittering uses those updates to communicate news and instructions to that group of people, twitter can provide just that tool.
All you need to tell people to follow your updates is the following:
From their cell phone have them send a text to 40404 with the message "follow yourusername". They’ll then receive the following message response back:
Welcome to Twitter. Please confirm by replying with your name. Standard message charges apply, ‘stop’ to quite or ‘help’ for help.
In actuality that will then create them a twitter account with the name they text back. It appears twitter will add a number to the name to make it unique if it already exists. For example in testing for this post I now exist at jasonbean1 and bnpositive1 on twitter. I’m still testing to see how I might get access to those accounts if I ever wanted to start truly using twitter.
After creating your account you’ll receive the following text message:
Hi, Jason Bean! Have friends send ‘follow JasonBean1′ to this # for your updates. ‘help’ for more. What are you doing?
When you follow someone you’ll receive the following message response:
You’ll receive a message every time Bnpositive updates. To silence, send ‘off bnpositive’. For more commands, send ‘help’.
Did you catch all that? Free text messaging tool using twitter. Obviously it comes with all the other benefits of twitter too.
I spend quite a bit of time developing websites and other applications for a variety of user audiences and groups. The challenge with developing any type of system or user interface is getting an accurate idea of what the user is experiencing and thinking for themselves. The UserVoice website provides the ability to get the answers you need.
The UserVoice website gives you the ability to listen to your customers and gather their input and thoughts on just about anything you would need.
On other projects we were left frustrated and overwhelmed when trying to grasp what our users really wanted. Unorganized inboxes and clogged ticket systems ruled the day. Forums were awash with duplication, user support was impossible to determine, and valuable ideas were lost in the shuffle.
UserVoice adds structure to feedback and reduces the overhead of an honest dialog with our users — It creates a market around good ideas so we get more quality than quantity.
If you’re looking for feedback, you need to expect more than just the feedback. You need to also be aware of how you’re going to organize all of that information and make changes and decisions based on that information.
Not sure if you’ve noticed it or not, but Outlook isn’t the most reliable engine for rendering accurate HTML display in your emails. Microsoft Outlook uses the Microsoft Word rendering engine to both create and display HTML in your emails. It’s for this reason that many people believe that Outlook is seriously broken and they’ve started a campaign to fix it.
If you’ve ever done any web development, you’ve probably realized that HTML that’s created by Microsoft Word and the old Microsoft Frontpage application was loaded with a lot of junk.
The folks behind fixoutlook.org are hoping that Microsoft will take the opportunity coming with Office 2010 to step away from the Microsoft Word rendering engine from being used for HTML rendering in Outlook.
Microsoft has stated that they don’t believe Outlook is broken and they will continue to use Word because there are no agreeable standards in how HTML code is to be rendered for email.
What do you think? Is HTML in Outlook broken?
This story has been around for a little while but the question is still out on the impact of these types of decisions. Have you been aware of this pending legislation? Does it worry you? The long-term effects of these changes could be more than you would think initially.
The news is regularly peppered with stories of computers and networks being compromised and security being questioned. The new bill introduced as the Cybersecurity Act of 2009 will give the US Government extended reach in shutting down portions of the Internet as they deem necessary, as well as gaining control and access to data previously off limits to government review without due process and legal warrants.
Perhaps more interesting than the article itself is the amount of comments that have now been collected on the article. Read the article to get a better idea of the details of what’s being discussed, but read the comments to start getting colorful representation of how these proposed changes are expected to impact individuals and businesses.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation provides good overview of the impact to these proposed changes as well.
Would love to hear your thoughts on this legislation as it continues to be discussed.
The pop music icon, Michael Jackson, has died at the age of 50 in Los Angeles, California. Michael was preparing for a comeback world tour where his shows sold out within minutes of tickets being available. With 13 Grammy Awards and almost 1 billion records sold, regardless of your personal opinions, he was without a doubt the most successful music entertainer of all time.
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You can read a variety of news articles and stories about him now or check out his extensive Wikipedia page as well.
Screen savers on your computer used to be more popular and important than they are now. I remember when the flying Toasters were the coolest screen savers. Then I’ve seen the Matrix falling icons screen saver and a variety of others.
Sprint has released a new screen saver for their Now network that takes advantage of our quest for information and data. You can pull in your favorite sources of information you want to know about and see them presented on your screen when you’re not busy working. The service also pulls in data from many of the most popular social media networks as well.
My only problem is my computer is rarely sitting unused long enough for me to take advantage of a screen saver. However, I’ve now got the Sprint Now Network screen saver running.
