Changes

As you can see my blog is now the homepage for our site. We have made changes and are having our e-mail hosted by a different provider and we lost our homepage because of it. We have been planning on changing to geeklog which is a content management application which will allow us to have our personal blogs and family news in one spot and allow us easier management of our photo galleries. If you have any questions, e-mail us.

Our Weekend Away

Here are some pictures of our hotel room, from our getaway. They are from my phone so I appologize for the quality

Company: Euro currency infringes on patent - International Business - MSNBC.com

I wasn't sure where to post this but I am going to post it here because here comes a political commentary.

I have a question for everyone out there, how smart is it to sue the centeral European Bank? Let's see, company vs. essentially a government bank, yeah, not so much.

I hope China is using their Intellectual Property with out permission, I want to see how far this suit makes it in the US or Chinese courts. I will keep up on this story for you.


Company: Euro currency infringes on patent - International Business - MSNBC.com

Back to School Computing, Part 1

So its almost time to send the kids back to school. Some to high school, and some to college. And guess what, they are begging for a computer, or they are taking the family computer to school and you need to know what they need. Or perhaps maybe you have had problems with security in previous years, and you don't want to have them any more. Well you have come to the right place. In this muti-part series I am going to talk about what you need, the must haves for computer for school, or even for just having a computer. In this part I am going to discuss anti-virus. I was talking to a friend of mine earlier today, and she told me that her antivirus software was telling her it couldn't run because, it is missing something. She had this problem in the past and simply uninstalled and reinstalled the software. This normally fixed it, now it isn't working. This is a major brand antivirus software. I have stopped recommending the two major players in the consumer antivirus market in favor of a smaller company, with what I think to be a very good product. But, I am not endorsing any antivirus software, instead I am going to give you things to look for, and where to research the options. First you want to make sure that the antivirus software is certified by the ICSA Labs. There lists of antivirus tested is updated weekly along with the full lab reports. You only want to choose certified antivirus software. You also want to check out the virus bulletin. Their VB100% Award Site shows all of the antivirus software packages that have meet their criteria which include detecting all virus currently in the wild and never producing a false positive. A subscription may be required however, I do believe it is free. Now I said I wasn't going to make product recommendations, however I am going to give my reasoning as to why I don't recommend the two major players, Norton and McAfee. They are bloated. They take up a lot of system resources. So, if you are running a laptop that, say shares RAM with video card, they can slow you down, so I don't like them. The other reason is they are well know, which means that the people who make virus know how to cirumvent them, and that is a very, very bad thing. I plainly recommend that anyone with a Windows computer get antivirus software, you just can't live without it. Next week, for those going back to college, and those at home, spyware how to get rid of it and how to stop it.

Ahh Summer

"Summer days have gone too soon
You shoot the moon
And miss completely
And now you're left to face the gloom
The empty room that once smelled sweetly..."

--Norah Jones, "Shoot the Moon"

I was listen to this song today at work. Ahh how time flies. I can't believe it is almost August, summer is almost over, school is almost back in session. Because of our schedules Kaylea and I don't usually get to do much through the week only the weekends. We haven't even taken a vacation this year! Ahh oh well, perhaps next year. I just can't believe that it almost over and it feels like I didn't accomplish much of anything. But, they say time flies when your having fun.

Just my rambling thoughts,

Branden

!!CONGRADULATIONS!!

To my friends Matt and Tarra Hartl (www.heartl.com) who are expecting their sixth child. Tarra has struggled with PCOS for years and was able to have this child completely without any medications at all! For more information check out www.heartl.com/letsblog.html and www.pcosliving.com.

So we are currently stuck in a 6 mile back up on the PA turnpike. So much for getting there before midnight!

Programming Frustrations

Okay so some of you reading this know that I spend my days as a mild-mannered programmer. Well..... I am not so mild mannered anymore.

Why you ask? Well because I can't get things to work! It is so infuriating. I am trying to move lots of data like as much as a few million database rows from one database to another.

I have found what technology tools work best, figured out where most of my problems lie, however, I keep forgetting to turn off the power saving settings for my laptop so I can see how long it will take for a really large set of data. So I started the transfer and left my machine for about an hour, came back and my laptop was in stand-by.

Why you ask? Because, while my laptop was plugged in, I didn't turn off the power saver features, so I have to do this all over again.

This is so frustrating! GRRRRRRRR!

Okay I feel better now!

Branden