[TechLife] The End of the Internet?

"Industry planners are mulling new subscription plans that would further limit the online experience, establishing "platinum," "gold" and "silver" levels of Internet access that would set limits on the number of downloads, media streams or even e-mail messages that could be sent or received."

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Posted by TJ to TechLife at 2/02/2006 09:41:22 AM

[TechLife] They are trying to ban IM

Ever since my co-worker started talking about the upcoming ban on IM clients in the office I set out looking for away around it. Even though I am one of the IT guys here and I could just ignore the nonsense my co-worker was talking about and go on my merry way I figure I had better be nice. So being nice is to continue to use IM but just use it in a way that any eyes peering over my shoulder wouldn't know what in the world I was doing.

I ran into Meebo in its early stages but my attention span then jumped to some other new shiny tech gadget, so I forgot all about it. I can't remember how I stumbled upon it again but I'm glad that I did. If need be I can talk on Yahoo!, AIM, ICQ, MSN, Jabber, or GTalk all from the comfort of my tabbed browser. What it lacks in fancy icons, audibles, and animated emoticons in makes up for in the This-is-just-really-cool department...not to mention useful for those who need ways to get around the ban of IM clients wherever they are at. If you need help with that just check out their forums for some advice.

So don't just try it because I say its cool, try it because you want to stick it to the man!!!

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Posted by TJ to TechLife at 1/12/2006 11:16:00 AM

[TechLife] 25 Reasons to Convert to Linux

25 reasons why many institutions, companies and governments are changing to Linux.

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Posted by TJ to TechLife at 1/11/2006 01:52:18 PM

[TechLife] Play more than 10,000 Nintendo and Sega games !

NES, GameBoy, Genesis, Master System, Game Gear, Colecovision, PC Engine are all here ! Playable straight in your browser without any install !

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Posted by TJ to TechLife at 1/11/2006 02:06:14 PM

[TechLife] Color Photos taken 96 years ago!

Color film was non-existent in 1909 Russia, yet in that year a photographer named Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii captured hundreds of photos in full, vivid color. His photographic plates were black and white, but he had developed an ingenious photographic technique which allowed him to use them to produce accurate color images

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Posted by TJ to TechLife at 12/08/2005 06:23:59 PM

[TechLife] Set up Linux and OSX to login using Active Directory

The Big Nerd Ranch has posted a blog on how to setup Linux and OSX so that you can login using your AD user name and password settings.

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Posted by TJ to TechLife at 11/17/2005 12:10:57 PM

Where is my head at today?

"All blame is a waste of time. No matter how much fault you find with another, and regardless of how much you blame him, it will not change you. The only thing blame does is to keep the focus off you when you are looking for external reasons to explain your unhappiness or frustration. You may succeed in making another feel guilty about something by blaming him, but you won't succeed in changing whatever it is about you that is making you unhappy."

Wayne Dyer quotes (American motivational Speaker and Author of self-help best selling books. b.1940)

Let my actions speak for themselves

As far as work goes I have never been much of a talker, I like to do my work without all they hype. I do good work so I also like to be at least recognized for it from time to time. So I guess I didn't see a problem when I gave the president of the company my ideas for the future of the company. Before I go any farther though, let me give some background info.
The company I work for is a very small consulting company that is owned by a larger manufacturing company. Recently my immediate supervisor moved out of state and another lady was brought over to fill her role. She was a very valuable person and she pretty much did the work of 3 people to keep everything running. She did all this work because our previous business manager was fired a few months earlier for reasons I'm not really sure of. I had my own difficulties with her and we had words....so that's the gist of it.

Now, continuing on.... Last week we had a trade show we had to do and we were told at the last minute she was going to be brought in to "consult" this one time to get everything together. The president somehow thought that she needed to do this since she signed up for it. This made a lot of people upset but I just tried to work with it because I pretty much had no choice. After the show there were obviously rumors going around that she was on her way back into the company, I wasn't really sure if he would hire her back or not. I mean when he fired her the rest of the people in the office had a party....I mean like a real party with cake and everything, so you know a person like that was not going to get a warm reception. Again, It didn't really bother me because I found out she wasn't going to have the same job she had before and she wasn't going to be my boss.
Then all that me not being bothered changed yesterday when my supervisor informed me that the president had a plan to have her start on Monday but she pretty much talked him out of it. The biggest reason he had for bringing her back was to implement my plan......say what?!?....He was going to bring her back to implement MY plan. Oh Hell No! What in the world is he thinking? Since I was not in the meeting I only have secondhand accounts of what went on but the president that since my background is technical that I don't have what it takes to handle a lot of the sales and marketing that needs to happen. I guess I can understand a little bit but we were supposed to have a meeting to go over all of this, so I thought I could make my case there. It just seems like he wants to hire her back no matter what though..... Well, one of the stipulations to keep her gone is that we have to get a plan together to develop a partnership with one particular vendor by Monday or she comes back. I had that plan done in 1 hour.....we'll see what happens next.

[TechLife] VOIP No Longer for the Underdog

This is a good eWeek commentary on how VOIP "telephony" has progressed and where it's running into trouble.

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Posted by TJ to TechLife at 11/11/2005 04:44:49 AM

"The reason people find it so hard to be happy is that they always see the past better than it was, the present worse than it is, and the future less resolved than it will be"

Marcel Pagnol quotes (French Writer, Producer and Film Director, 1895-1974)

[TechLife] Start your own GeekSquad

Put GeekSquad out of business. Here are some helpful tips on how you can set up a remote support website to make extra money fixing people's computer problems using One Click VNC servers.

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Posted by TJ to TechLife at 11/07/2005 03:34:20 PM

Our Greatest Fear

Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate,
but that we are powerful beyond measure.

It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us.
We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant,
gorgeous, handsome, talented and fabulous?

Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.

Your playing small does not serve the world.
There is nothing enlightened about shrinking
so that other people won't feel insecure around you.

We were born to make manifest the glory of God within us.
It is not just in some; it is in everyone.

And, as we let our own light shine, we consciously give
other people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our fear,
our presence automatically liberates others.

Marianne Williamson
from her book 'A return to love'

[TechLife] Dreamcast 2.0?

Is the Xbox 360 the second coming of the Sega Dreamcast? 1up.com lists 23 parallels between the consoles that spell doom, and 10 reasons why the 360 could succeed where the Dreamcast failed.

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Posted by TJ to TechLife at 11/05/2005 03:29:35 AM

[TechLife] Could Not Parse File

I had an issue this morning when I tried to do an update with yum

[root@localhost yum.repos.d]# yum update
Setting up Update Process
Setting up Repos
dag 100% |=========================| 0 B 00:00
//var/cache/yum/dag/repomd.xml:1: parser error : Document is empty

^
//var/cache/yum/dag/repomd.xml:1: parser error : Start tag expected, '<' not found

^
Cannot open/read repomd.xml file for repository: dag
Error importing repomd.xml from dag: Error: could not parse file //var/cache/yum/dag/repomd.xml

I did a search and found out that it pretty much had to do with the file "repomd.xml" that it was downloading from the DAG mirror, so I just switched mirrors in my /etc/yum.conf and everything started working as it should have.

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Posted by TJ to TechLife at 10/29/2005 08:13:00 AM

Get the Google Web Accelerator

It's funny how when I try to go to the page of Google's Web Accelerator I get a message saying:

Thank you for your
interest in Google Web Accelerator.
We have currently reached our
maximum capacity of users and
are actively working to increase
the number of users we can support.

But the funny part about all of this is it doesn't happen when i go to the site on my linux box. When I do I get the download button and I'm able to actually download it. I even put on a friend of mines computer to see how it worked.

My Golden Ticket has arrived

Well I just got my golden ticket....alright!!! I guess some explanation is needed huh.

Well a while ago I put my name on a list on wordpress.com to pretty much get an invite whenever it becomes available so I can create a blog on wordpress.com. My invite came today so I went ahead and set it up. We'll see what I can do with that one and see if I can do what I originally planned to do with this one over there. I somehow thought that I could be honest with myself and even honest with the world right from the start and spill everything onto this site....of course that didn't happen. So we'll see how this one goes, I even gave it the original name I had here.

::: Mindstates :::

I have 1 invite for anyone who is interested.....

Friends

Since I've put myself on a journey of self-awareness I have been going through books and things looking at different ways of understanding me, pretty much. I was on Selfcreation.com going through their articles when I came upon their list of questions dealing with self awareness. The two questions that I'm going to touch base on now are "Where have I met most of the friends I currently have?
(family, work, community, childhood, online, etc.)" and "What does where I met these friends tell me about myself?"
Answer for question #1: I would have to say that the majority of the friends that I have are friends of some of my closer friends and the others are people that I meet online.

Answer #2: I think in a way I need to get friends from a trusted source and if they are not from a trusted source then I need to test them from a distance to make sure they are trustworthy enough for me to be friends with them.

The next question after that was "Why am I still friends with those people?" and I guess the answer to that is that since I've put them through these series of tests I feel I can trust them to a certain extent.

Mad Man

Mad, adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence. I consider myself to be a Mad Man... I have a tattoo that says it too lol

The Power of Thought

Well I first would like to say that Yes, I have been reading a few too many self-improvement books in the past few weeks. I guess its not really too many but enough o where people think you're sounding like Dr. Phil or something if you start talking about them. On top of the self-improvement I've read a few on succeeding in business, finances and pretty much being happy with life in general and they all share the same underlying message that it all starts with where your mind is?

A good place to start would definitely be with yourself, even the first chapter of "Tony Soprano on Management" is about knowing yourself. Know who you are, know what you've got, and know how to use it. This is echoed through many many different works by many many different people, but its still something that people don't really tend to do. The reason all those people feel it is so important to know yourself is because knowing yourself is where you'll receive true knowledge that will better help you understand everyone else as well. It seems funny how knowing yourself can lead to a better understanding of others.

Setting goals is another thing that is shared among the books I've read. Without a clear definition of where you are going, how are you ever going to get there? Most people just tend to wander long enough until they bump into something and get stuck. Setting goals and actually writing them out gives you a framework for a plan and it shows you what you're aiming for. With that it is also said that once you have your goals in mind that it seems that everywhere you turn there are opportunities that help you get one step closer to that goal. Its sort of like the thought of your goal flips this switch in your brain to where you start to see all the opportunities around you, that may have already been there in the beginning. The same concept when you get a new car and then everywhere you turn you start to see other people driving the same car.

So knowing yourself, setting goals, and then your thoughts will show you opportunities, what else? Doing what you love and what makes you happy is next on the list. Now I know a few people (me included) that aren't always on the path to do what you love or what makes you happy. The things we do are based on other peoples' feelings, their thoughts, could be based on money...bills, willingness, determination, dedication... there are so many different reasons why people don't do what they love and they end up just doing what they are told. Even with being happy we all want to get there but it seems no one has a map, and then some of the people with the maps don't want to get there because the road is seemingly difficult. To some true happiness may not mean a mansion overlooking the ocean off the coast of Spain, it could be something very small and simple like being able to help people that can't help themselves. With either one of those though people will find it equally difficult to do. The goal to help people may have to come at the cost of a lower paying job and the mansion in Spain may only come about after years of saving money and strict financial planning. Either way people have to really know themselves to determine if their true happiness is something their willing to sacrifice for.
I won't go into every topic that I saw in the books but a lot of what you do in the world, what in the world, and how you see it beings with your thoughts. It affects so much of our lives but people don't seem to use them effectively.

[TechLife] Slashdot is losing its edge to digg.com

Digg.com is quickly reaching Slashdot when comparing daily visitors according to Alexa's Traffic Rankings (see link). Slashdot isn't as cutting edge as it used to be: stories get barely 200 replies. Maybe that CSS update was too little and too late.

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Posted by TJ to TechLife at 10/17/2005 04:31:18 PM