September 5, 2008

Creating a comfortable work environment

I told y’all two days ago that using my new laptop has already caused a bad flare of the tendonitis in my hands and wrists. I’ve been gripping tools and using them to bang on the structures I inspect for almost thirty years now. That led to a condition called DeQuerveins, a repetitive motion injury to the thumb. Trying to accommodate the DeQuerveins caused me to grip things awkwardly and I developed carpal tunnel syndrome and tennis elbow. I then tried to work left-handed for a while & the result is that I have all three conditions on both the left and right sides. I work carefully these days and my hands and arms haven’t been giving me trouble until this week. Right now my new laptop is sitting on my desk. I don’t have a wireless setup yet, so I’ve had to place it where I can plug into my cable modem. The top of the desk is too high for keyboard placement, so my hands are giving me fits once again. I bought a wireless mouse and a slant board/cooling fan yesterday, hoping they would help. They haven’t. I need to get myself set up with some truely ergonomic computer accessories that will allow me to return to proper posture and hand positioning. Going wireless will help - I’ll be able to use my laptop at a more comfortable level - but what I’m most concerned with is supporting my wrists and positioning all of my equipment in a way that will reduce risk of injury. I’ve found several solutions at iShopErgonomics.com. That’s the Bakker Elkhuizen Ergo-Q 330 up there at the top of my post. It will pack up and go wherever I take my laptop so I can always have a wrist-friendly ergonomic workstation, no matter where I use my computer. It’s a thing of beauty. I like it. I want it.

You may not have any repetitive motion injuries that require special accomodations. Good for you. Now you need to do something to insure that you stay injury-free and pain-free. Check out iShopErgonomics for all the accessories you need, for your home or office work station and for portable comfort when you’re on the go. It’s the smart thing to do.

Technorati Tags: computer comfort, computers, ergonomics, ergonomic work accessories

September 4, 2008

I told you I live in the country

It must seem to you like I’ve done nothing but deal with computer problems for the last two weeks. It’s felt like that to me, but I have done a few other things. Last Friday I did a termite inspection for a home right up the coast from me. I enjoyed a little “talk story” time with the very nice local couple who own the home and they introduced me to their pets. That’s Poomba and Wilbur up there, who behave more like puppies than pigs one generation removed from feral. They were pushing their snouts through the fencing to try to check me out, but that made it hard to see their faces. Their papa stepped in and rattled their food bowl so I could get a picture. First thing I noticed about them: they didn’t stink. I’ve been around pigs before and this was a new and different experience. I’m thinking that their pen must be cleaned every day. There’s plenty of mud in their pen for them to wallow and cool off in, so they were muddy, but not smelly at all.

Feral pigs are a real problem in Hawaii. They’re quite destructive to our forests and have contributed to the loss and/or endangerment of indigenous plants and habitats. Hawaii has no indigenous mammals, so all of them that exist here now are intrusive in our fragile environment. Feral pigs are controlled mostly by hunters, a solution which works well because pork plays a big part in local diets. Many of my neighbors are hunters and most of us benefit by having local pork in the freezer year-round. Poomba and Wilbur were found after a hunter took their mother. Not wanting to leave the piglings to fend for themselves, he brought them to my clients, who have been great foster-parents to them and won’t be turning them into kalua pork.

Update on my computer woes: I bought a cooling pad and a wireless mouse today. My wrist is already inflamed after only a couple of days of using the flat keyboard and touchpad on the lappy, so I’m hoping the more ergonomic design will help with that. I also found my tech geek this morning. He’s a guy I’ve known for a while, but I only found out today that he specializes in rescuing damaged hard drives. I’ll take my old computer to him sometime soon & see if he can extract the documents, photos & other data that I can’t access right now.

Technorati Tags: computer accessories, computers, feral pigs, feral animals, Hawaii, environment

September 3, 2008

I have a lappy!

How did you spend your Labor Day? I was supposed to have lunch with the Table of Contents, including two members who moved a while back but are here visiting. Instead I spent the morning at Office Max. That nasty trojan virus I thought I had defeated a week or so ago? That dragon was not slain, merely resting. It came back with a vengence. At one point there were over 2700 instances of it installed on my computer. I kept cleaning & updating virus definitions & running scans, but on Sunday my poor PC had had enough. The hard drive gave up the ghost. I had done a termite inspection of Friday & hadn’t been able to generate the report that two realtors, an escrow company, a buyer and a seller were waiting on. I needed a new computer immediately. Since I’m going to be traveling soon (for the first time since I got online eight nine years ago) the timing was right for me to buy my first laptop.

I didn’t have time to run all over the island comparision shopping. I’d have done some online research before going out, but … oops! … no hard drive! Office Max is where I’ve been buying office supplies for all the years that I’ve owned my business. They know me there & I trust them. They’re also closer to my home, by at least half an hour, than any other place that carries computers. I bought my last computer and my printers at CompUSA (which was in the same shopping center,) but they’re long gone. Office Max is not an electronics store, so I didn’t have a lot of choices. They only carried six laptops. I liked the one above & was ready to buy it.

When my sales guy (who was also the store manager) went in the back to pull my selection he discovered that he still had this bundle available. Very similar laptop, slightly smaller, but with an Intel Centrino processor (which someone had told me I should get) and also came with some other goodies. I decided to go for it. Sales guy didn’t want me to take his picture, but Priscilla, who brought my stuff to the register and pulled the extra USB cable I wanted (she’s on the left) and the gal who gladly relieved me of a large sum of money (right - don’t remember her name) thought that making an appearance on skeet’s stuff was just fine. The price shown on the Office Max promo was not available to me (things always cost more in Hawaii.) By the time I added Office, the extra USB cable and a super-duper warranty (I always go for the super-duper warranty on electronics) I spent almost exactly $1200. Money I wasn’t planning on spending, but what you gonna do?

Since my sis stubbornly refuses to read my blog it’s safe to tell you this. I was buying her a printer for her birthday. Was actually in the process of ordering it online when one of my crashes occurred last week. The printer that came with my new lappy is an upgrade from what I was planning on sending her. I figure that the only way I’m ever going to see pictures of my two great nieces is to make it easy for her to print photos that she takes with her new digital camera (she’s crawling into the 21st century just a little more slowly than me.) Someday soon I’ll buy some premium photo papers in several sizes and pack this thing up for shipping to Texas. I have an HP Officejet for my own use and didn’t need the extra printer, but it was cool to get a really nice one for Sis in my bundle - two birds, one stone.

My bundle also includes a very cool gear bag. This is probably supposed to be a back-to-school bundle for college kids, but I think it turned out to be a pretty good deal for me. I have an attache’ style lappy bag, but this one is nicely padded and has pockets for all the stuff you need when you go portable. Remember I told you I’ll be traveling sometime soon? I want my new toy well protected from bumps & bruises, so this is how she’ll travel with me.

There she is. As you can see, I shoved everything on my desk aside & set her up there. I suppose I’ll add wireless to my service someday soon, but right now she’s tethered to the desk by a power cord, a printer cord and a USB cable connecting her to my cable modem. Some of the clutter you see behind her has already been cleared away, but I’ll finish tidying up today. I was in a hurry to get things set up so I could get my report out. I finally did that yesterday, three days late. It’s a good thing my clients love me!

I’ve been using my new lappy for about twenty-four hours. The tendonitis in my right wrist is screaming, so I’ll have to figure out the ergonomics of using a flat keyboard. The touchpad is a pain in the butt, but I’m sure I’ll adapt after a while. Right now I’m not liking it at all, so I’ll be adding a mouse for when I’m at my desk. I can’t recover all of the photos and documents & other stuff that I lost with the old hard drive, but I’m slowly downloading the programs I need and refilling my bookmarks and address books. I’m still a technophobe & still hate change, but I’m adapting. I’ll give you an update somewhere down the road & let you know how that’s going. Overall, for right now: still bummed about what I’ve lost, but pretty happy with what I’ve found.

Technorati Tags: adapting to change, computer crash, computers, laptop, shopping

August 30, 2008

I’m feeling sick

My computer crashed on Friday afternoon. It’s taken me a little more than twenty-four hours to get things back up and running. I was back online briefly earlier today,then crashed again. I was stuck for a while on a DOS page for BIOS ROM chcecksum error - whatever that is. Then I found something called CHKDSK/F running - it deleted some index items, then I finally got a start screen, but one quite different from the norm. I left it open to see what would happen and Windows began re-installing itself. Do you know what that means? Everything I had saved on my computer is gone. I have no documents, no photos, no email, no email addresses, no bookmarks … everything is gone. I can re-intall the templates for my termite inspection reports, but the reports I’ve issued since my last full back-up (about a month ago) are gone. All of my writing is gone - I don’t think I ever backed up my personal stuff. Address lists and mailing labels, all of my BookCrossing labels and bookmarks - gone. Some reference letters I wrote for friends and former co-workers undergoing employment screening - those are gone, too. Looking at my blog in IE is all messed up, too - the text font is different and my left sidebar has dropped off. It looks fine in Firefox, so I know it’s my IE and not my blog that’s wonky, but somehow that doesn’t help much. I feel nauseous and lost and want to bang my head against the wall. If you know of something more productive I should be doing right now, I’d sure like to know what it is. I’m so befuddled I haven’t a clue where to start, except that I know I need to figure out how to reconfig email so I can at least get future mail. It will take forever to rebuild my address book and past experience tells me that some addresses will never appear in my inbox again, so I’ve lost those contacts. Maybe things will look less dismal to me when the sun comes up tomorrow, but right now - yeah, I’m feeling pretty sick.

Technorati Tags: computer crash, computer nightmares

August 24, 2008

The dragon is slain!

Remember this?

It’s been four long days hunched over my keyboard and I think I’ve developed a permanent dowager’s hump. Four days of stressing and staying up each night “just a little longer,” then finally falling asleep at my desk in the wee hours. Four days of downloading and running various AV software programs. Four days of a computer running so slowly that I was unable to do all of the things I usually do online. Today I announce … SUCCESS! The trojan is dead, and all of his nasty little companions with him!

My problems started Wednesday night when my CA Anti-Virus alerted me to an intruder. Only a Trojan virus, one of the more innocuous forms of malware, but this particual Trojan packs a surprise. The Pupur family of Trojan viruses don’t travel alone. When they come to visit they bring siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles. Several viruses install at once. The reason they’re so pernicious is this: each carries instructions to install the other. Your anti-virus program deletes the first intruder, but before it can get to the companions, they’ve re-installed the one that was already deleted. I was getting pop-up virus alerts every five to thirty seconds as a virus was deleted and then immediately reinstalled. I turned off my alerts in frustration, then went searching for a solution. Here’s the problem with CA: they couldn’t fix it. They were quick to tell me I had a problem, but were not able to get a step ahead of the reinstalls and stop them. After twenty-four or so frustrating hours of research I had enough of a handle on the thing to realize that CA was no longer my friend. What good is an anti-virus program if the only thing it can do is tell you that you’re infected?

I used to have Norton on my computer. It’s the gold standard of anti-virus programs, right? I ditched it in favor of CA a while back because Norton protected me so well that I couldn’t see things I wanted and needed to see - things on my blog like widgets in my sidebars and image maps in my posts. When CA failed me I didn’t want to go back to those problems, so I checked out McAfee. It looked good and came with recommendations from friends, always a plus with me. And if installing and running the program doesn’t delete viruses already present, McAfee offers a Virus Removal Service for only $89.00 - that’s a lot cheaper and a lot more convenient than unhooking your computer, carrying it to a local geek, being totally without service for a few days or a week, then paying a hefty bill. I downloaded the trial scan and set it to work. Over six hours later, McAfee was still scanning and hadn’t yet gone through a quarter of my content. What’s up with that? Meanwhile, a Twitter friend suggested that I try Trend Micro Housecall instead. Feeling like I had nothing to lose, I shut down the ongoing McAfee scan and downloaded the trial version of Trend Micro. It took a little over three hours to scan my computer, then removed all of the malware it found, including my Trojan guests and various adware/spyware intruders that CA had not detected and removed.

Happiness is a search that comes up empty! I searched for the Pupar virus and all the companions that accompanied it when it came for a visit. None of them are now present on my computer. Trend Micro sent them packing without the benefit of lovely parting gifts or even travel insurance. I can only hope that they don’t survive the trip to their next unwilling host! I probably don’t have to tell you I’ll be buying the full version of Trend Micro before my thirty day free trial expires. Your experiences may be different, but Trend Micro is what worked for me. I may be a non-geek, but I know a good thing when I find it!

Technorati Tags: anti-virus programs, computer virus, getting rid of trojan virus, trojan virus, virus

August 21, 2008

I’ve been invaded

This is what appeared in my computer last night (click the photo to view large enough to read.) I was in a search engine and found an entry that was exactly the phrase I had entered. I clicked on it and a video box came up, but with a notice that I needed to install a new software upgrade in order to view the video. I wanted to see the video, so I installed the stupid thing. As you can see from my scan log above, I opened up Pandora’s box.

I guess my AV protection is pretty good. It deleted the Win32/Puper!generic trojan right away. Here’s the problem, though: it keeps coming back. Literally every thirty second or so I get the above pop-up telling me that it’s back but my AV protection has deleted it.

This has happened hundreds of times since it started last night. If I’m typing when the infection alert pops-up (like right now) I have to stop what I’m doing and close it before I can continue. On the info page for this monster I find that:

The file “intmonp.exe” is usually accompanied by the file “popuper.exe”. Both files are used to re-launch the other in-case any of them are terminated. “popuper.exe” also drops “intmonp.exe” if it is not found on the system. It also sets the following registry value in order to execute itself when “explorer.exe” is started:

This registry value is also monitored by the trojan. If it is modified in any way, the trojan sets it again.

So, that explains what’s going on, but doesn’t tell me anything about how to fix it. I’ve found nothing on the CA site that tells me how to block the blasted thing so it will quit coming back. According to what I’m understanding, it won’t even do any good to open my registry and delete it there because it will continue to re-install itself. Isn’t that what it’s saying? I should tell you the idea of opening my registry and deleting anything scares me to death. I’ve don’t even know how to open my registry, much less how to find the right stuff when I’m in there. I greatly fear that I would do the wrong thing and end up erasing myself from the universe.

If you know what I’m supposed to do, could you help me out here, please?

Technorati Tags: computer virus, trojan, pupur trojan

July 21, 2008

School talk

I know that quite a few of my regular readers have children in school and that a few of your are in education. You’ll be doing your school or school district a favor when you recommend that they consider VoIP Services from one of the largest providers of telephoney services for schools in the country. Trillion will provide design, installation and day-to-day management of your secure broadband Wide Area Network (WAN) and Voice over IP (VoIP) services through Priority One E-Rate funding, allowing your school to free up more tax and tuition dollars for classroom needs. That seems like a sensible plan to me. Check out the link, then forward it to your purchasing officer. Your kids may even thank you for that some day!

Technorati Tags: communications, education, school services, VoIP, WAN

February 5, 2008

Lifelock

My closest friend just had a very bad weekend. She awoke to a phone call early Saturday morning from one of her credit card companies inquiring about some unusual purchases charged against her account. She confirmed that the charges were not legitimate. The company removed the charges from her account and she’s already had a new card issued. Problem solved, right? Wrong! She doesn’t know how someone got her credit card number and, more importantly, what other personal information they may have collected in the process. She’s nervous and concerned about further repercussions, as she should be. It was a topic of our conversation when she came over to dinner on Sunday night. I reminded her of a television commercial we had recently seen and discussed. In the commercial a man points out that his real social security number is shown on the billboard-sized side of a passing truck. He explains that he is confident that publicizing his personal information will not result in his identity being stolen. That’s a pretty bold statement! Todd Davis is able to speak so confidently because he has a lifelock on his personal information. He’s the CEO of LifeLock, a company that provides security against your personal information being used by others, and that backs that committment up with a million dollar service guarantee.

I’ve just watched videos of several news reports that feature LifeLock. I’m impressed with what they do, but I’m equally impressed by their honesty. They freely admit that you can protect your identity yourself by following certain steps … or you can have them do it for you. That leaves us with the question of why anyone would pay for the service. The answer is obvious to me. Most of us don’t follow up on many important things that we intend to do. I’ve discussed my cluttered life and my propensity to procrastinate many times on this blog. If I followed the necessary initial steps to protect my identity, would I remember to renew my fraud alerts with the three major credit bureaus every ninety days? Would I order credit reports from time to time so that I could look for unusual activity? Would I react promptly and know exactly what to do if my identity ever gets stolen? “No” to all three questions. My life is just not that organized. Neither is my friend’s. Would it be worth $10.00 a month to have LifeLock do that for us, and to guarantee that service? Absolutely!

Go check out the site. You’ll find out everything you need to know about how the program works. Watch the news clips. Read the brief testimonials from some satisfied clients. You be the judge. Can LifeLock provide you with the peace of mind that comes with knowing that you won’t be victimized by identity theft? I think it can.

Will I be sending a link to this post to my friend as soon as I hit the “publish” button? You bet! Friends do that sort of thing for each other.

Technorati Tags: fraud prevention, identity theft, identity theft prevention

November 25, 2007

Intranet software solutions

If there’s anything better than stuff, it’s free stuff. Whether for business or personal use, I’m always on the lookout for free samples I can let my readers know about. Epazz is offering a 30 Day free trial of their intranet software, BoxesOS, a hosted solution to your website content management needs. I just watched a flash presentation of the system in use and it’s quite impressive. At the administrative level intranet communications, email management and scheduling can all be handily accessed on one page, allowing for efficient work flow.

Take a look at what Epazz brings to the table:

October 23, 2007

Protecting your space on the web

The widespread distribution of information and technology through the internet has changed the face of business forever. That same exposure, though, has created vulnerability for those who use the internet within their corporate environment. Open Invention Network (OIN) has announced that they have signed a license agreement with Barrracuda Networks which will enhance the protection they offer for the stated purpose of “creating a shielded Linux Ecosystem that is a deterrent against organizations looking to harm or slow the pace of Linux and open source growth and adoption.” Barracuda Networks, a leading provider of network security appliances, has won the Community Choice Award for Anti-Spam Applications in Business from Windows IT Pro two years in a row with their innovative Spam Filter. This new partnership combines Barracuda’s powerful, cost-effective and user-friendly network security appliances with OIN’s shielded Linux Ecosystem, providing a protected environment where web developers, software vendors and their clients can continue to embed and use Linux to host specialized services or create complementary products.

“As we grow the Linux Ecosystem, we are pleased to have Barracuda Networks become a licensee. Barracuda Networks is one of a growing number of companies that value the openness and collaborative culture of the Linux and open source communities.” said Jerry Rosenthal, CEO of Open Invention Network. You can read the entire press release for details of the new partnership.

Open Invention Network plus Barracuda Networks equals security for your creative innovations. Check them out to start protecting your work today.

Technorati Tags: Barracuda Networks, internet security, internet technology, Linux systems, Open Invention Network, spam protection, web development