Not calling Microsoft enough?

No worries, more opportunities to call them will be here soon.

Before you know it, you'll have to call Microsoft before going to the bathroom.

Demand better security from vendors

I was helping a friend this week by checking to see if his wireless network was secure enough. He followed the standard installation and I was surprised at what I saw.

Encryption was not turned on.
MAC addresses were not filtered to only allow certain MAC addresses access.

In essence, anyone within range of his wireless network could access the network without any problems at all. Things need to be secure by default. Have a description during the install that mentions what this setting does and allow the user to make a decision, knowing the consequences of choosing one option or another.

What about the Xavier OS?

http://www.anandtech.com/news/shownews.aspx?i=23595

Would you trust a piece of software that is code named after an X-Men villain*? I wouldn't.

* - Granted, last I checked, he was a good guy again, but he goes through an alignment change like people go through clothing.

Deja vu all over again

Scientists give a theory about why deja vu happens. http://www.expatica.com/source/site_article.asp?subchannel_id=26&story_id=16910&name=Deja+vu?+Scientists+have+the+answer

There's more whats being answered in here than whys. While I believe a good number of deja vus are a result of remembering dreams, who's to say those dreams might not be our consciousness, or soul, going into the future? I actually had a sense of deja vu today - I was just leaving work when some of the events that happened today at work hit me as being familiar. I believe I had a dream about it some long time ago, but who knows, that dream may have been soul time travel.

This stick in the mud brought to you by Saudi Arabia

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20050213/od_nm/saudi_valentines_dc

Religion should never get in the way of one human being expressing their love for another.

Global consciousness, physics, and predicting the future

http://www.rednova.com/news/display/?id=126649#121

A nifty little article that describes machines that appear to be predicting the future also goes into the power of the mind.

Pompeiians Gone Wild!

(Link) An interesting look at the artwork of Pompeii. Has the human race really gone forward or are we really going backwards and fooling ourselves into thinking otherwise? Might not be safe for work unless you are an archaeologist. ;)

Firefox to the rescue at work

One of the computers at work, for whatever reason, refused to have Macromedia Flash working in Internet Explorer (Exploiter). It looks like it would install, but would refuse to load any Flash files. IT took a look at it, tried many things, but was unable to fix it. This was at least a month ago. The need for this particular computer to view Flash came up again, and last night as I was playing around, I noticed that Firefox used a different download for Flash than IE. I installed Firefox on this computer, then Flash, and it played Flash files just fine. Needless to say the user for this computer was pleased. I was pleased to see Open Source software once again succeed where proprietary software has problems (in case you were wondering, ask about my adventure in formating my brand new hard drives when I first got my current computer).