I do not subscribe to Glenn Beck, nor do I claim to know a whole lot about him other than he is a conservative, LDS radio/TV talk show host. However, tonight I saw something from him via KSL/YouTube that was touching. His comments reflected some of my feelings of the passing of President Gordon B. Hinckley. I have been wanting to write something about it the past few days, but could not find the words to express myself properly. Thank you Mr. Beck for putting in to words what my lack of time and eloquence could hope to muster right now.

I ran across this presentation today and thought it was a great explanation for those people that have asked me (and there are a few of you), “what is a blog?”

I was browsing tech articles today and ran across this comparison of Red Hat, Canonical [Ubuntu], and Windows. Now, before I begin on this brief but ever so relevant diatribe, let me preface my rant with the fact that I have been a regular user of various Linux flavors (Mandrake, Red Hat, Ubuntu, SUSE, Fedora, etc.) since the late 1990’s, so though I am not a system administrator, I have a fair amount of Linux administration experience.

Over the past few years, when approached with the question of which OS one should run on their corporate network, I unwaveringly respond, “Windows XP” [of course]. The principle argument being that most small businesses cannot afford a full-time system administrator to administer a non-Windows network. It is nice to now have some numbers to support my argument. Keep in mind, I do not state one way or the other which OS is more secure, reliable, or robust. I only mention this for the simple fact that running a Windows based network, over the long run, will almost always be more affordable.

Compete solely on price, no thanks

Tonight, I arrived home hoping to jump right in to my “moonlighting” gig only to discover that an issue with my computer from this morning had persisted. For some reason, something, some application was causing a consistent amount of traffic (not large amounts of it mind you) across my local Ethernet connection. Fortunately for me, I am somewhat tech savvy and thus commenced troubleshooting to discover the source rogue application.

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I have a love-hate relationship with Firefox. I have used it in tandem with Internet Explorer since the days of the original Mozilla browser, each one having it’s own pros and cons. To be quite honest, Firefox zealots make me laugh since most of them have been around the web about as long as my kid sister, and yet seem to have the experience and wisdom of of Elmo when it comes to the “browser wars”.

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Today I received a phished e-mail to one of my many (many) free Yahoo! e-mail accounts that somehow cleared all of their SPAM algorithms. Interestingly enough, the link inside the message was to a legitimate AOL landing page. However, it was a redirect page that sent me to a phishing site site removed. I have run into this various times on a couple of client projects and it is just interesting (and worrisome) to see it happen so blatantly on other, high trafficked web sites. Here is the redirect link (notice I am appending my URL to the end of the query string.)

http://www.aol.com/redir.adp?url=http://www.skowronek.org

I attempted to locate the appropriate abuse contact at AOL, but unfortunately I do not have the time, nor patience to rummage through their site to locate their security advisers. So I will just have to notify another security expert as soon as I have time to actually figure out who that would be.

It’s been a couple of weeks since I finished the final design, and now, after a day or so of coding and fussing with WordPress, it is finally done. Completely rebuilt with widgets (I’ll post my twitter and other such widgets later perhaps) and dynamic everything. Now time for bed.

One can only wonder how many commercials can be based on WoW. I have not yet been sucked into the awe that is WoW, but this is quite good.