Category: Internet & Technology

A couple of times a month, I’ll get a bounce-back from Microsoft mail servers where an email I’m sending to a Microsoft person, usually a reply, will get rejected. Here’s today’s rejection:

#< #5.7.1 smtp; 554-5.7.1 Rejected, id=04110-50-2 – BAD_HEADER: 554-5.7.1 Improper folded header field made up entirely of whitespace: 554 5.7.1 References: …0@NA-EXMSG-C…> #SMTP#

So if the problem is improperly folded headers, how exactly do I un-fold the headers? 😉 It’s ridiculous to have to email a Microsoft person at their Hotmail account because I can’t reach them at their @microsoft.com email address. And the Microsoft people I’m trying to contact can’t do anything about the problem because apparently dealing with Microsoft email support is like drinking acid (as in, not pleasant).

Email is do damn unreliable nowadays, it’s driving me nuts. I emailed someone about voice lessons, a week went by without a response, so I emailed again, and it turns out my email was in the woman’s Gmail spam folder. Same thing with a friend of mine who I email several times a month – Gmail spam folder. Did you know that Gmail doesn’t have a “white list” function? I think it only allows email through 100% of the time if you have them in your contact list.

Someone really has to fix the email/spam problems – this is all so incredibly frustrating.

I was browsing through Dell’s monitors, checking out what their latest 24″ displays had to offer (I was curious if they had SDHC support; their tech specs don’t actually mention that point – irritating!) and I happened to notice something that made me chuckle:

So why would I find that amusing? Because it took me 12 monitors to get three flawless 24″ monitors, and if Dell had this policy in place last year I would have had much less stress. Good to see Dell improving their system, albeit fairly late in the game. One of my 24″ Dell monitors has a nasty flickering problem that comes and goes, and I was very wary of returning it and getting sent a replacement that has a dead/stuck pixel – I wonder if Dell honours this policy on older Ultrasharp monitors that are still under warranty? I guess I’ll find out soon enough…

I’m fighting with a trashed install of Windows Vista on a laptop and it’s a complete nightmare – one of the things I needed to do on the road to getting it working again was to update the BIOS. Since Windows Vista wasn’t booting, however, I was left with a quandry: how do I update the BIOS? Booting from a floppy disk to update the BIOS was a common thing a few years ago, but I haven’t done it that way in a long time. I found the solution in this forum thread: the only thing different that I had to do was right-click on the “RunThis” file and run it as an administrator. It worked great, and I’ve now updated the BIOS. Now if I could just get the Vista repair function to run (it keeps locking up – and I’ve used the Dell hardware testing software to confirm that the laptop has no defective parts).

Yes, it’s true! Diablo 3 is coming…there’s no firm release date announced, but at least we know now that Blizzard has decided to do more than just think about doing it. Lots of videos and screen shots on this site (including a 19 minute gameplay video that looks amazing, even in craptastic Flash video format). The game looks awesome! I don’t have the time for gaming that I used to when Diablo and Diablo 2 came out, but I think I could find some time for Diablo 3… 😉

“June 12th, 1897: Karl Elsener legally registers his “soldiers’ knife” for use by the Swiss army. In an age when nationalism was fashionable, Elsener, a Swiss manufacturer of surgical instruments and cutlery, was a very fashionable man indeed. So he was less than thrilled to learn that the Swiss army was importing Solingen blades from neighboring Germany. Elsener set out to develop a homegrown multifunctional tool worthy of being carried by his local Alpine troops. His prototype of what became known as the Swiss army knife appeared in 1891. The original — made with a wooden handle — included a blade, a screwdriver and a can opener. But Elsener was not happy with it and tinkered endlessly, adding a second blade using a revolutionary spring mechanism, and strengthening the housing. The addition of a second blade necessitated extra space for the spring, which also opened up more room for other tools.” – Source: Wired.com

Ahh, Swiss Army knives – old school geek. Myself, I carry their 2 GB USB Flash drive + combo tool in my pocket every day. It’s amazing how often it comes in handy!

I wish the makers of Firefox would give me, the user, control over what Web sites do to the size and position of my browser window. I was checking out HP’s new notebooks and clicking on a link suddenly made my browser window move to the centre of my screen and become 20% in size. I hate that! Why should Firefox honour code that resizes the whole window? There should be a user override function.

Some of the earliest memories I have of computer gaming look like this:

On the top, we have Ultima IV, and on the bottom we have Autoduel (based on the Steve Jackson pencil and paper RPG “Car Wars”). Both were games I played for an amazing number of hours, and both games had such rich and vibrant story lines, I wish someone would bring them back to life. I think both types of games would be perfect for Xbox Live arcade titles…

Wondering why all my sites were down for most of the weekend? Just when I thought our significant down-time days were behind us, something crazy happens:

“An explosion Saturday evening at a Texas-based, privately held server hosting provider has caused server outages effecting 9,000 servers and 7,500 customers. According to The Planet’s website, at about 5 p.m. Saturday electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding their electrical equipment room. No injuries were reported and no servers were damaged or lost. The Houston company, which provides servers for small and medium sized companies, said it has its entire support team working around the clock to get the servers back on line. They estimate they will be up and running by Sunday afternoon.”

I spent most of my weekend checking this forum thread hourly, trying to determine when my server would be brought back online. It didn’t happen Sunday afternoon – late Sunday night everything was still down, but this morning when I woke up I was happy to see things were loading again. Big thanks to our server admin volunteer Jorj Bauer for keeping a close watch on all of this and getting us back to live status while I was just waking up. Back to our regularly scheduled programming…

That’s the speed I saw yesterday morning when I did a speed test – 29.3 Mbps? That’s some fast downloading – too bad I never see anything close to that from any source, though when I see 1.5 to 2 MB/s downloads I certainly don’t complain. But look at that pathetic upload speed – not even 1 Mbps! That’s the thing I complain about to Shaw once every few months: I want more upstream bandwidth. When I’m uploading photos and videos, 1 Mbps just isn’t fast enough. And what’s ironic is that I’ve felt like my Internet connection has been a bit sluggish this week… 😉

The. Best. Superhero. Movie. Ever.

(more later, gotta’ pack for Seattle, heading to Mobius 2008)