Reinke Faces Life

http://www.deccanherald.com/deccanherald/sep62006/cyberspace163748200695.asp

Deccan Herald » Cyber Space » Detailed Story
Paper-based storage device
Are the days for CDs, DVDs, Zip drives over? A computer whizkid is revolutionizing the computer data storage through his Rainbow Technology, reports M A Siraj.

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A student has developed a technique for portable data whereby the data can now be stored on ordinary paper. And to boot, larger amount of data can be had on lesser space. The immediate question that pops up in the mind is how to retrieve the data. Will it be as facile as feeding a floppy disc or CD into the drive and having it on the monitor? Perhaps it will be much easier than all that. The piece of paper or even plastic sheet storing the data has just to be scanned in the scanner and read over the monitor.

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Nah, I don’t think so. I remember a similar development a while ago. It stored data in a printable format and would scan it back to life. If never panned out. I spent a LOT of time playing with it. I could see tremendous benefit in it. But, never got it to work. And scanners were no where as popular as today.

We’ll see. But it definitely not a revolutionary discovery imho.

Ahh, it was great fun to waste an hour of my life I would never get back.

Quick background. I was poa on an account for an elderly relative who died. His choice as to when; his quality of life was getting yucky so he just declined further treatment. I am the executor of his will. And general gopher as he got more feeble in his later life. (It’s provided me a lot to rant about here in my pblog!)

So, I go a probate the will. Which considering that I was dealing with the gubamint was relatively painless. It cost me 200$ to get a clerk to print some paper. This is much better than the way it used to be where you actually had to see a judge. I was in and out in 45 minutes.

So, back to wachovia and technology.

Now I take my newly minted executor form, called a testamentary letter, to the bank and say “Convert this account to an estate account”. I had the death certificate, my gubamint irs estate tin, and my new nj digital dl. So I’m set.

Oppps. They can’t close the old account until Monday because, since I do web banking, that has to be done by the “back office” in North Carolina. OK who cares. Let’s open the estate account. Then I can begin the process of “marshaling the assets” and “discharging the liabilities”. (Seriously who makes up the jargon?). When that’s done, I present a final account to someone (me?), pay off the legatees. And, I’m done!

SO, let’s open the estate account. (It’s just like opening any account. Right?) Wrong! The nice lady taps on keys for the better part of an hour and announces the system isn’t working right. She calls HQ and they can’t make it work either. She’s advised to try again in 30 minutes.

Bye! I said to call me whenshe gets it done.

Then, I’m sure I’ll have to go back and select a pin.

(Can’t use the id and authentication I set up on the other account. Too easy!)

Never heard from her today. So I assume that they are still rolling back code. See, having worked at several financial institutions, you make changes on Friday night because it gives you a modest live test on Saturday, and all day Sunday to fix it, and all Sunday night to roll it back if you can’t make it work.

It was humorous to see a front end user, frustrated in her inability to complete a relatively basic function.

Wonder how much it cost them in opportunity cost. To bad there not based in Jerzey, I could go to work for them to fix their problem. That’s how I wound up at our favorite ISP!

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— In MyLinkedinPowerForum@yahoogroups.com,
“Reinke’s Networking Persona” <V2Y2R0N27RHJ6Y@…> wrote:

<snip>

If any one is interested, I’d be glad to walk you thru the
process or answer any questions.

<snip>

>Ferdinand (Fjohn),
>This is a new approach to me.
>
>Thanks for sharing it with us.
>
>I’d certainly welcome hearing more about it.
>

{Extraneous Deleted}

>Good to have you with us.
>
>Thanks,
>Vincent Wright
>www.VincentWright.com

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Well that is an “interesting challenge”, what is my approach to email? And, remember you asked for this ramble.

First, I recognize that email is a tool that been abused, perverted, and abused from its original intent. I think, assume, and guess that the intent was the electronic substitution for a letter. Since then, we have seen the electronic equivalent of junk mail, chain letters, and a garbage dump. I too am guilty of having one email account where I just send copies of everything. To reinforce that bad habit, Google now allows me to search it. Arghh, gag me.

So what is my approach?

Basically I’m a fan of Getting Things Done, because I don’t. So I recognize that most of my data, information, knowledge and wisdom comes in via email.

(https://reinkefj.wordpress.com/2006/06/07/turkey-thinking-about-dikw-data-information-knowledge-wisdom/)

I am experimenting with RSS as a replacement for the one way information flow that is currently represented by email newsletters but it’s a work in progress.

So, here we have a flood of messages with a varying degree of value. It’s just me, like the Dutch Boy sticking his finger in the dike, to allocate time and attention among these competing interests.

So first, I recognized that just like a giant salami, you can’t consume it by just gnawing on it. It has to be “sliced” into manageable portions. So, it seemed logical to divide my inbound email into accounts by topical interest. For example, in no particular order, College Alumni activities, Personal Networking, Liberty, High School Alumni, Work, Family, Technology, Friends, Blogging, WebPage, Consulting, Gunz, etc. etc. More about prioritization later.

One thing that I learned was that I have a bunch of demands that exceed my capability. So I ruthlessly prune based on “value”. I’m NOW very careful what I get into.

Another think I learned is that spam and signal to noise issues need to be addressed. I now have “public”, “semi-public”, “private”, and “internal use only” email accounts. (Ain’t gmail great. And all the other free email providers.) “Public” is obvious; it’s on documents, resumes, and such. It gets heavily spammed from time to time. “Internal Use Only” are email accounts that I use privately and never ever disclose. Why?

OK here’s a digression. You can take a public email account, forward it to an “Internal Use Only” gmail account, and then pick that up in your mail reader for your real use. Make sure you sanitize the settings like “reply to” so that they point to that real public email account. Don’t want to confuse people. Once a week (Sunday morning), I go check these accounts online for a misidentified good stuff ided as spam. It happens maybe once or twice a week. If spam slips thru, I go to the Gmail account and identify it as such. (You wondered why GMail has such good spam filters that quickly id the junk. They have a grazillion people like me doing the heavy lifting for them.) It eliminates most, but not all, the trash. This makes spam the exception rather than the rule. Last time I studied it, I think that 900 messages were reduced to 200 “good” by GMail. Of those, 6 were spam that slipped thru. So I don’t worry about spam on public addresses much at all any more. Thanks Google.

So, to recap, I have public1 that forwards to internal1 and is picked up in LookOut (Microsoft Outlook does strange things. So I call it LookOut to remind me about assumptions!) and stuffed into a mailbox “PTY01 – PUBLIC XYZ@YAHOO”.

Semi-public are the ones, like this one used in forums or certain websites. Everyone “learns” that I am a strange duck, and will ruthlessly abandon NEHW9YRN56359O if I need to. Again, when you are using reply, or at worst cut ‘n’ paste, most people could care less if I am NEHW9YRN56359O, 87U92IDOWIR2ZD, BIGFOOTYETI @ SOMEWHERE DOT COM.

So eventually every email account maps into its own LookOut mail folder that reflects its priority, purpose, and source.

Another divergence! Since I give each financial institution I deal with (Five) a unique email address for “me”, phishing attempts are laughable. If I get a PayPal “security alert” on any email account other than it’s dedicated account, then I can just quickly mark it as junk. If the years I have been using this strategy and its predecessors, I have NEVER had a phish on a private email account. SO I don’t understand what all the fuss is about. Seems an obvious fix to me.

Back to my activities list, I allocate my email time by just working down the folder list top to bottom. So my work activities get done before my alumni ones BECAUSE its email folder is closer to the top o the list. Crude but effective. LookOut rules automagically sort traffic into the appropriate folders. I even have LookOut rules that for example if a relative uses the “wrong” email address, LookOut will put it where it belongs. And, yes, I have one for inlaws and one for my relatives. No comment which is higher!

So my email strategy is to use automation and free accounts to be more productive.

Hope this explains me, my approach, and why I need to adjust my tin foil hat from time to time.

Fjohn

I gave them this comment.

> the key thing that thinkfree online doesn’t do is email. in order to
> truly replace microsoft office, it has to “do” email. I made this
> observation a while ago, and it’s still a key deficit imho. Fjohn

hat’s the same comment I gave them when I first tried it. Sigh.

Put up ZOHO, as part of killing a Sunday afternoon, and all it does is pin the cpu percentage. And, doesn’t appear to do email with gmail. YMMV but I nuked it. It has some strange web interface that conflicts with the wiki web server I have on luggable.

Dear 1&1 Hosting Company:

Care to comment on PcMechanic’s “tip”?

http://www.pcmech.com/newsletter/viewtip.php?tipid=671

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Do Not Let Web Hosting Companies Register Your Domains

… purchase your domain from a registrar such as GoDaddy.com or Register.com separate from a hosting package.

If you let a host register your domain for you, sure they will
register it for free, however if you ever decide to move to another
host they will either not transfer control of your domain or charge a
ridiculous amount for transferring it. Because they registered the
domain, they own it and are not obligated to transfer it to you.

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I recommend 1&1 and would like to know the policy on exiting domains. I’ve never had a problem, but there are always “first times” for everything.

Thanks,
Reinkefj

XDRIVE, now part of AOL (ugh!), has always been tough to use. Not that the interface was hard; no, just getting it to complete was a bear. Today, I was able to make it back up my new data partition. It ran for about five hours (double ugh!) on a high quality office. Sort of “closer” to the heart of the internet. I’m not planning to renew XDRIVE when my contract expires. But, I did get it to finally work. My trick was to delete ALL the backups. That seems to have cleaned up all the trash it was trying to deal with. Sort of like, “oh here a brand new backup”. It worked. So maybe that’s what it needed. A fresh start. FWIW!

I’ve discovered an entertaining use for PRINTERANYWHERE.

I defined my printer at work as sharable. At night it’s offline! (I have to lock up the Company’s laptop)

When I am home, I check my Company’s email via the web. Last night, I saw something that needed follow up. I printed it intending to stuff it in my bag and chase it in the AM. When I left home this morning that fact that there was nothing on the printer never registered.

This morning, when I got to work, and reconnected, (poof!), it prints.

Very kool. Like a delayed steal in baseball. Not thought required.

I don’t know if this is a design flaw, but I hope they keep it.

http://software.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=06/08/14/202229&from=rss

Open Source
Why proprietary software is dangerous for business-critical applications
Monday August 28, 2006 (05:00 PM GMT)
By: Robin ‘Roblimo’ Miller
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But the real point here is that an entire medium-sized company’s executive staff has learned a hard lesson about the dangers of proprietary software, and members of that staff who previously resisted open source are now ready to consider it — and for business continuity reasons rather than as a money-saving measure, no less.

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So to summarize: (1) ALL “activation” schemes limit your recovery ability. (2)  ALL proprietary software is dangerous. (3) Open Source Software give you maximum flexibility. (4) Copyrights, as well as copy protection scheme, don’t protect bit do make life difficult for anyone who’s honest.

I use printeranywhere successfully. However, at night, when I hibernate my note book, the next morning it doesn’t “reconnect” printeranywhere. If I stop it and restart it, then it picks up like a champ. If I just do my usual morning routine and flip it open, it doesn’t relogon. If I go to the “show” and then to “relogon”, it doesn’t’ seem to remember my userid or password despite the remember me setting. Since it is in it’s own little world, I have to look up the userid and password. (Who remembers these things?) Then everything is hunky dory. Please fix this little dementia that the program has.

—

They said they would.