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Daily Cup of TechBean There, Done Tech |
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I recently read that people are starting to move away from VLC for their default media player to GOM. I plan to do a side by side comparison in the near future but I was hoping to hear from you, the reader, to see which you prefer and why.
Fill up the comments with your pick and convince me that this is the best way to go!
My daughter was quite distraught this morning. She had found a penny yesterday and she had put it in her room to before she went to bed last night. When she woke up this morning, she could not remember where she had put the penny and was in a panic to find it. We looked everywhere in her bedroom without any success.
I stepped out of the room for a couple of minutes and then returned to the search. “Miraculously”, only a few seconds after rejoining the search, I “found” the absent penny!
Anyone who has had children knows exactly what I did. I went into our change jar, dug out a different penny and then planted it in my daughter’s room where it was found and solved the problem.
The reason that this works because for people, perception is reality. My daughter perceived that I had found her lost penny so, in her mind, I did find her lost penny. The fact that he penny she has now is not the same penny that she lost is irrelevant. In her mind, this is her penny.
This same principle holds just as true for managers and employers as it does for five year old girls with lost pennies. It can be very easy for IT personnel to give the people that they answer to the perception that they are busy working on projects when, in reality, they are doing other things.
For example, it is quite difficult for your boss to know the difference between you researching for the new mail server upgrade project and researching your hobby. Or writing a post on your blog looks an awful lot like working on that server documentation.
Here’s the thing. You may get away with this for a while. In fact, you might get away with it for years! But, in the end, it will come back to bite you on the backside. Here’s why.
I know the temptation to pull the wool over your employer’s eyes is strong. It is so easy to do. But the long term damage that you could be doing to your career just does not justify it. RESIST!
As a former support tech, I know two things for a fact about support calls to my cell phone:
I am experimenting with my team at work with a new process that I thought might come in handy for other consultants. We have provided all of out techs with smartphones. We have also installed a little freeware app on all of the phones called PhoneLog. The purpose of this software is to monitor all incoming and outgoing phone calls and then transfer the information to the phone’s calendar. It also puts into the calendar the name of the person who called from the contacts, their phone number, when they called and how long the call lasted.
Now, the next time the smartphone synchronizes with our Exchange server back at the office, the information about the call is also there. The tech then calls the admin team who takes the information from the tech’s calendar and fills in all of the details from the tech. By time the tech gets back to the office, the invoice is ready to go.
Everyone is in full Chicken Little mode these days with April 1 just around the corner and the Conflicker virus poised to bring down civilization. Not since Y2K have I seen so much panic about a computer related issue. So, to help everyone out, I thought that I would let you know how you can protect yourself from Conflicker.
You can get more information about this worm at the following websites:
P.S. If you are interested in doing a bit of manhunting, Microsoft is apparently offering a reward of $250,000 to catch this virus maker!
P.P.S. How many Linux and Mac users are stressed about this? That’s what I thought!
What is the one thing that every IT guys keeps harping on? Backups! You have got to do your backups. Regularly. Consistently. Accurately.
In fact, go and do a backup this very second.
Seriously.
Stop reading.
Go and do a backup right now! Your documents, your websites, your e-mail, your pictures. Everything!
Go!
Don’t worry. I’ll wait.
Now that you’re back and you’re not worrying about backups, I can let you in on a little secret. If you didn’t just perform a backup of your website and suddenly it disappeared, there may still be hope. And this hope’s name is Warrick.
The purpose of Warrick is to attempt to rebuild your website from different sources on the Internet that make cached copies of your website.
From the Warrick site:
Warrick is a utility for reconstructing or recovering a website when a back-up is not available. Warrick will search the Internet Archive, Google, Live Search, and Yahoo for stored pages and images and will save them to your filesystem. Warrick can be ran through our website or as a command-line utility (directions for downloading, installing, and running are given below).
Warrick is most effective at finding cached content in search engines in the first several days after losing the website since the cached versions of pages tend to disappear once the search engine re-crawls your site and can no longer find the pages. Running Warrick multiple times over a period of several days or weeks can increase the number of recovered files because the caches fluctuate daily (especially Yahoo’s). Internet Archive’s repository is at least 6-12 months out of date, and therefore you will only find content from them if your website has been around at least that long. If they don’t have your website archived, you might want to run Warrick again in 6-12 months.
I don’t know if I would be willing to leave the entire security of my website in the hands of Warrick. But, if everything is gone anyway, what have you got to lose?
If you found this post useful, why don't you buy me a cup of coffee to show your gratitude?
