Icon Michael Jackson Dies

Wow.

Michael Jackson was pronounced dead at a hospital Thursday after suffering cardiac arrest at his Los Angeles home, marking a sad end to the life of a man who had been a global pop icon since childhood.

“Thriller” was the first album (cassette) I remember buying. My sister and I went in on it together. And I’m still a little ashamed to admit that I owned a zipper jacket similar to the one he wore in the music video for “Beat It” (except I had a black one). šŸ˜³

Yeah, he was weird, messed up, and downright crazy over the past two decades, but he’s still a legend. RIP.

And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the passing of another icon, Farrah Fawcett, on the same day. šŸ™

I hate those fake AV trojans!

Today I had to clean another one of those fake anti-virus programs off of a machine at work. This one was called Personal Antivirus and bore a striking resemblance to AVG Free (which I use myself and usually recommend to others).

Here’s the AVG console:

AVG Free (real)

And here’s Personal Antivirus:

Personal Antivirus (fake)

Look familiar? In this particular case, neither our corporate Symantec anti-virus nor Malwarebytes (both with current definitions) detected the fake program. I eventually had to clean it off manually myself.

These things are really sneaky. How can we educate the average user to tell these two apart? I mean, other than the fact that they had to click on something in a web browser to get the fake one installed in the first place, once “installed” they look and act like the real thing (well, except for all the fake alerts they throw up). Arrrrgh!

A river reborn

Cleveland may still be waiting for that next sports championship, but at least some things are looking up. Today is the 40th anniversary of the Cuyahoga River fire that sparked (sorry, bad pun, I know) the “Mistake on the Lake” moniker that residents (including myself) had to endure for so long.

Today, the Cuyahoga is home to more than 60 species of fish, said Jim White, executive director of the Cuyahoga River Community Planning Organization, a nonprofit group that coordinates cleanup efforts. Beavers, blue herons and bald eagles nest along the riverā€™s banks. Long sections of the Cuyahoga are clean enough that they no longer require aggressive monitoring, regulators said.

ā€œWeā€™re very impressed with the progress made in the Cuyahoga,ā€ said John Perrecone, a manager of Great Lakes programs for the E.P.A.

Thanks for the link, mom!

Two thumbs up for “Up”

Today on Father’s Day we went and saw the latest Disney Pixar movie, “Up.” It’s an amazing stat: every one of Pixar’s movies have been consecutive hits. “Up” is the 10th and it keeps the streak going.

From a technical standpoint, once again the animation quality is incredible. Clouds, fire, sweeping vistas, the physics in a group of balloons … you’ll forget you’re watching something generated on a computer. And the 3D? It was cool … it wasn’t full of “in your face, try to make you jump” 3D effects, just added depth to these amazingly beautiful scenes. The entire movie wasn’t in 3D either (as my daughter attested to because some scenes “weren’t blurry” when she took her glasses off … I confirmed this myself) but wearing the glasses the whole time wasn’t really distracting at all.

What about the story? Let’s just say that the first 10 minutes is pretty powerful, emotional storytelling (moreso even than the first half of “Wall-E“). You might find yourself tearing up a bit …

Some random thoughts:

  • this is the first time I can recall seeing blood (twice, no less!) in a Pixar film
  • John Ratzenberger keeps his streak alive
  • squirrel!
  • caught a few Star Wars references
  • why does every young woman in a Pixar film (i.e., Ellie)Ā  look like Elastigirl?
  • I want a few of those dog collars for my own pups šŸ™‚

Strange cloud-related side note: one of the previews shown was for “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs,” the Pixar short before the film was “Partly Cloudy” and then the film itself had a lot of clouds in it. Coincidences?

Windows 7 Problem Steps Recorder

I stumbled across another neat feature in Windows 7: the Problem Steps Recorder (PSR).

Run psr.exe from the command-line and you’ll see a utility window you can use to record your session:

Problem Steps Recorder

Click “Start Record” and then replicate the problem. Click “Stop Record” when you’re done and the tool will prompt you to save a zip file that has an HTML document in it containing screen shots and descriptions of the steps taken. Also cool is that the tool automatically highlights important areas of the screen:

PSR report

This is obviously targeted toward help desks and IT support professionals (without remote access to the machine) who need to solve problems like “I just clicked the thingy and shows it some error message and disappears!”, but I could see myself using this as a quick and easy way to generate user documentation (like how-tos) as well.

Tech Republic has a good, detailed article on the PSR. Check it out.

WIJFR: Eastern Standard Tribe

Cory Doctorowā€™s Eastern Standard Tribe is a soothsaying jaunt into the not-so-distant future, where 24/7 communication and chatroom alliances have evolved into tribal networks that secretly work against each other in shadowy online realms. The novel opens with its protagonist, the peevish Art Berry, on the roof of an asylum. He wonders if it’s better to be smart or happy. His crucible is a pencil up the nose for a possible “homebrew lobotomy.” To explain Art’s predicament, Doctorow flashes backward and slowly fills in the blanks.

My latest e-book read was Cory Doctorow’s “Eastern Standard Tribe” (actually I finished his group of short stories, “A Place So Foreign and Eight More” a while back but I guess I forgot to post about it, oh well!).

“Eastern Standard Tribe” tells the story of Art, a UE (user experience) consultant and member of the EST tribe (meaning his loyalties are to those people living in the eastern standard time zone and he tries he schedules his life accordingly). One part of the story takes place in the “present” and is told in the first-person: this is Art currently in the mental institution. The other part of the story takes place in the “past” and is told in the third-person: this is Art and the series of events that culminate in his being placed into the asylum.

In this semi-futuristic world, some people are double agents pretending to be a member of a different tribe (say, GMT or PST) so they can slowly undermine the competiting tribe from the inside. In Art’s particular case, he is working for a client in London (GMT) and his proposal is not so off-target that the client won’t accept it, but off enough so that overall the project will fail and he can sell the better version to a different client back in his own EST tribe (trust me, Doctorow does a better job of laying this out than I do).

Each chapter alternates back and forth between the present Art in the nuthouse and the actions in the past that Art was involved in with his partner and girlfriend. Both storylines intertwine as we slowly put together the whole picture of Art’s fate. It was a good read.

Next up on my e-book list: Doctorow’s “Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town.”

The science of Folding at Home

I found this interesting article via slashdot that explains the science behind the Folding at Home project.

I folded my first workunit almost two years ago on June 19, 2007. Since then I’ve contributed about 580 additional WUs by running the F@H client on my various PCs and servers at home (you can see some of my stats at the bottom of my sidebar over to the right).

Back in the day I used to contribute my spare CPU cycles to the SETI@Home project, but I switched. Don’t get me wrong I still think finding alien life would be cool, but folding proteins seems like a nobler, more pressing cause for the time being.

Microsoft isn’t making Money anymore

Don’t worry, they’re making plenty of cash, but Microsoft announced this week that they will no longer be producing their personal finance software, Microsoft Money.

This makes me sad as I’ve been an MS Money user for about 13 years! I switched from CA Kiplinger’sĀ  Simply Money to Microsoft Money 97 back in 1996 and have faithfully purchased upgrades every other year around tax time. I use it to download all of my bank, credit card, and brokerage statements, pay bills, balance the checkbook, generating spending reports, etc.

Microsoft says that more people are using their banks’ own websites and services nowadays so maintaining a standalone software package just isn’t worth it. That’s fine, and I do use my own bank’s or credit card provider’s web sites, but I like having everything consolidated in one place. When my current version of Money Plus expires in Feburary next year, I’m going to lose that convenience. Sure, the software will still work and I can manually enter transactions, but I won’t be able to use any of the online features. Instead, I’ll have to jump around to different web sites. On the bright side, if I move my finances into the cloud (scary though that is, from a security standpoint), I won’t have to deal with installing and activating Money on multiple PCs and then not having access to it when I’m on one of my Linux machines.

I’ve got 8 months to figure out my next step: maybe an online service line mint.com or switch to Quicken? Time to start researching alternatives. šŸ™

DTV is finally here

A moment of silence for analog TV …

… ok, that’s enough. If you didn’t realize it, today was the official (finally!) switchover from analog to digital TV broadcasting. If you’ll recall, the original February 17 deadline was delayed by Congress to give households more time to prepare. What’s strange is that back in early February, when the 17th was fast approaching, all of my local stations were running crawls and news stories reminding people of the upcoming transition. Then, after Congress delayed the switch, it fell out of the news. I don’t think I saw a single news story or crawl this week about today’s switchover. In fact, I had completely forgotten about it myself until the anchor on the morning news said “if you’re watching us right now you’ve successfully survived the switchover to digital television.”

From what I’ve read, about 6 million homes were unprepared for DTV back in February. Estimates are that 3 million homes are still unprepared today. I guess those people will figure it out pretty quick today when all they’re receiving over their rabbit ears is snow.

If you’re trying to sell me something …

… you really should know the product!

I just got cold-called at work by a gentleman with an Indian accent:

“Sir, I am calling on behalf of SAP because you are qualified to receive a free white paper about SAP and how …”

Since my primary focus is PeopleSoft system administration and development I am always getting calls like this, so that’s not unexpected. What prompted me to interrupt the guy earlier than I usually would was that he was pronouncing SAP (the company’s name) as the word “sap!” For those not in the industry, it’s pronounced S-A-P. You wouldn’t pronounce IBM as “eyebum” would you?

I’m sure SAP would be thrilled to know that their off-shored telemarketing firm is mispronouncing their name. šŸ˜®