After seeing my parents' new ATT Uverse setup, I've made the decistion that I'm going to give Cablevision the boot.  The only decent thing about Cablevision has been my experience with the technicians I've had to meet at my apartment.  The service is overpriced and corrupt IMO (they charged me a fee to cancel HBO); and the online guide/DVR is slow and poorly designed.  The big problem is that over the years I've registered with many websites using my optonline.net email address.  So I am going through the tedious process of updating my accounts, since I won't be able to use that email address once I've discarded cablevision.

Which brings me to IEEE, a professional organization focused on computing which I joined while I was looking for work after the dot.com bubble burst.  It took me about ten minutes to figure out how to change my email address (and site opened two new windows and required me to log in twice during the process).  If you've never been to IEEE.org, it's clear that it wasn't designed by anyone possessing tremendous usability skills.  Having to log in a 2nd time isn't a huge ordeal, but it seems from the way finding the profile editor unfolded, the 2nd login wasn't intentionally designed as a security measure... it was more of an accidental security bonus.

The main problem is in making the profile editor so hard to find.  Once you've logged in, a link for "my profile" (or something along those lines) is absent from the page.  A website search revealed nothing.  Only after clicking 'membership FAQs' did I find a link to what turned out to be a different subdomain, which is where I had to log in again.

End of rant.

Here's a smattering of software I wouldn't want to be without on my Windows work computer:

FastStone Capture for Windows
This is a great screen capture utility.  Unobtrusive, efficient, powerful, simple & easy to use.

Winmerge
Visual differencing and merging tool for Windows.

SyncToy
Free Microsoft tool for synchronizing folder pairs.

KeePass
Secure password storage program.  Main build for Windows; builds available for Linux/Mac and handheld platforms.

CrossLoop
Secure screen sharing. Help family and friends with their computer problems.

Mozilla Firefox
It's not my primary browser but the developer plugins can be life savers.

TextPad
Powerful text editor.  I know there are others out there that developers like; this is one I've been using for years... it's quite good.  Perhaps if I have time I'll play with other text editors I've heard about.

Well, I'm close to being fed up with trying to get my Palm TX to play nice with Vista 64.  This is the third time in six months I've had to uninstall Palm desktop, clean the registry, etc ad nauseum; and I still can't get hotsync to work.  So it seems I must ditch the Palm or ditch Vista 64.  Looks like I'll be performing an OS install this weekend.

Just for fun, here's an error I got to click through about a dozen times when I reinstalled Palm desktop:

Sounds like a conundrum to me.

Palm has some things on sale on their website, including this dictionary - thesaurus for $9.95 after a rebate:

Ten years ago if I had seen something like this, I would have thought it was really cool (and it probably would have been a lot more money). But in this day and age, is something like this more trouble than it's worth? Even if I was a prolific writer, I'm not so sure:

• Most writers will have a laptop or desktop computer
• Most people with computers are connected to the Internet and can access dictionary.com or thesaurus.com, two of my favorite language sites
• Most computers have a built-in thesaurus
• It makes more sense to use available tools on the computer (assuming one is writing on a computer) where, for instance, one can leverage the clipboard, than to switch to a handheld device

I suppose if you do your writing on the Palm (or other handheld), then yes, it is a good place to have a lookup tool. But as much as I like my TX, Graffiti is a poor substitute for a good keyboard (I still haven't gotten used to Graffiti 2).

I didn't really intend to stay up late last night putting together the computer, but I did kind of get obsessed with the project. Since my previous post, I had to remove the power supply a 2nd time in order to connect some secondary cables, which were impossible to get in with the supply in it's mount (the Enermax PSU I got has modular connectors).

Installing the motherboard and CPU was considerably easier than the power supply. The pinless design of the LGA775 socket is a nice improvement. I did a double-take when I put the chip in the socket and it went snugly into place with no effort.

Removing the gigantic CPU heatsink I got is going to be a real issue if the need ever arises. Last night I was thinking it was going to be nearly impossible, because there is almost no room for me to get my fingers around two of the posts to do the quick release. But after getting (some) sleep, I realized if I remove the motherboard from the case, it will be not quite as impossible... a PIA but doable.

Next came the hard drives, DVD drive, video and sound cards, cable connections and LCD poster. I had to plug it in to see if it would boot up, and guess what... it booted the first time (woohoo!) It's actually a lot quieter than my old PC, but the real test for noise will come with a demanding game. Way too late to install the OS but I did pop in the OpenSUSE and Vista disks for fun; they started up no problem.

I probably will do the OS install tonight, though since I have class I won't have time to do much with it.

I've installed the power supply, made by Enermax. The PSU has a large fan on the bottom, and the cage for the PSU is in the bottom of the case. Initally I installed it right side up, but realized that airflow to the fan was very restricted (a 1/2" high chamber open only on one side), so I yanked it out and flipped it over.

I love this case. It actually came with a manual (another first for me)... has pull-out drawers for the hard drives - see the two rings in the lower right.

Next step... the motherboard.

Everything has arrived for the new computer I'm building. The components arrived in two packages... these pieces are the PC case, power supply, CPU, fanless cooler, motherboard, memory, two hard drives and video card.

My initial reaction on hefting each piece has been "wow is this heavy" or "boy is this big" (the fanless cooler is gargantuan... initially I wasn't sure if it would fit in the case but now I don't think it will be a problem).

What pushed me to build a new computer? About a month ago my hard drive kicked the bucket, taking with it my personal files, which I had not backed up in about 16 months. Rather than just buying a new hard drive, I decided to completely overhaul my system (of course I'll be backing up my files very regularly after learning my hard lesson).

The parts I decided to get are all pretty bleeding edge. The machine will be very overclockable, though I plan on running a conservative profile initially. I'm also upgrading to Vista, a move which I have to confess I'm nervous about.

I'll be posting my progress regularly.

Well, I came across a couple of articles on the web detailing an improved (over the HOSTs file) way to block web ads.  It seems to be quite a bit better than the HOSTS file method.

Use the following two together:

Bust Banner Ads with Proxy Auto Configuration
Blackhole Proxy, Version 1.05

Basically you can eliminate this pestulant adware on a Windows machine by editing the hosts file.  Search for a file named hosts (no extension) in your Windows directory, and open it with any text editor.  On my Windows 2000 machine, this directory is C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\ETC.

I've added the following lines to my HOSTS file to block the Vibrantmedia ads:

127.0.0.1 		itxt.vibrantmedia.com 		# vibrantmedia adware

127.0.0.1		devshed.us.intellitxt.com

127.0.0.1		vibrantmedia.com

127.0.0.1		intellitxt.com

Here's where I found out about this trick:
http://www.computing.net/webdevel/wwwboard/forum/480.html