Shaking Things Up A Bit

I know postings here have been a little sparse. This hasn’t been by choice, of course, it’s just a culmination of several things that have made writing somewhat difficult. Like most things in life, it’s not just one reason that causes things to break down, but a number of things that cascade together to cause the problem. I’ve thought long and hard as to why my posts have been few and far between and I think I have a plan to get things back on track.

Issue #1: Too Many Blogs
For starters, I have two other blogs that I write on, so often times I just don’t have the bandwidth to write on this one. One is at TV.com and the other is at NPUG. The blog at TV.com really deals with my activity with TV.com and isn’t really all that interesting, unless you’re a member. I’ve thought about combining it with this blog, but do you really want to read about how many points I have as an Editor for “The IT Crowd?” Yeah, I didn’t think so either.

The “Director’s Log” at NPUG is going to be going away though. The idea was to have a place to talk about running a PUG, much like the TV.com blog is about being an Editor at TV.com. Unfortunately, there’s so much work that goes into producing the monthly meetings and maintaining the site, that everything I want to say has already been said. There’s simply too many other areas in which I can and do have a voice that the Director’s Log is a bit redundant – so it’s going away.

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Upgrade Complete

I just upgraded the software which I use to manage the content on this weblog. I use MovableType and they recently released version 3.2 in beta, so I installed it. There’s a ton of changes with this version and so far I really like it.

However, you never know if something has gone wonky after an upgrade, so if you run across anything that doesn’t work, or is just a little off, please contact me and let me know about it.

Thanks in advance!

Comments Should Be Fixed

It was brought to my attention that some of you may have been having difficulty posting comments to the site. It seems the culprit was a plugin I installed to help throttle comment spammers called MT-DBSL. If you tried to post a comment you may have gotten a message something like the following:

I’ve removed the plugin since MT-Blacklist is working so well at moderating comments, so there’s really no need for the extra layer of protection.

While I was making changes, I also installed the MT Moderate plugin so that trackbacks will be moderated by default as well. Trackback SPAM seems to be the biggest plague for MovableType right now and most of my friends have turned off Trackbacks all together. I’ve been tempted to do the same, but every now and again I do get a valid ping, so I hate to kill them all together. Now that the Trackbacks are moderated and don’t actually appear on the site automatically will help a lot and make the cleanup not so urgent.

While on the subject, I have high hopes for Brad Choate’s new plugin SpamLookup. It looks to be the successor to MT Blacklist and once it’s out of beta I’ll give her a test. I’m just leery installing the beta version at this point, even though Jay Allen gave it high marks. I’m no Jay Allen, so if something goes wrong, I don’t know that I could fix it with ease, so I’ll wait until a full version is released.

Well, that’s about it, I just wanted to let everyone know that the comments issue has been fixed and give a quick update on some of the other fixes. So post away!

And The Winner Is…

Well, the little contest of “Guess What’s In My SysTray” is over. Didn’t get quite as much attention as I hoped it would, but for those that did participate, they sure gave it a good shot. Since no one guessed every item and not all items were guessed, I’ve decided to award the prize of a free Gmail account to the two people who contributed the most – Raena Armitage and Merlin. Congratulations you two!
So just what ARE the final answers you ask? Well, I guess I’ve kept you on the edge of your seat long enough, haven’t I? Without any further ado, here are the final answers:

01 = WhatPulse
02 = AveDesk (freebie)
03 = Trillian (Raena Armitage)
04 = Google Desktop (Merlin)
05 = HotSync Manager (Raena Armitage)
06 = Rainlendar
07 = WinPT (Merlin)
08 = UltraMon
09 = Palm Desktop Alarm Manager (Merlin)
10 = Windows XP Network Status (Merlin)
11 = NoIP (Merlin)
12 = StyleXP (gfox)
13 = AVG AntiVirus (Raena Armitage)
14 = Windows XP Volume Control (Raena Armitage)
15 = Picasa2 (Raena Armitage)
16 = Gmail Notifier (Merlin)

Thank you to everyone that participated!

Last Chance At The Contest

There hasn’t been quite as much interest in the contest that I started last month, so I guess it’s time to bring it to a close. The contest will end this Sunday, so if you want to guess, NOW is the time to do it.

To lend a little help, I’ll give everyone #2, which is AveDesk. It was a little bit obscure, so I thought a little help was in order. So here’s all the right answers thus far with credit to the person that provided the correct answer.

01 =
02 = AveDesk (freebie)
03 = Trillian (Raena Armitage)
04 = Google Desktop (Merlin)
05 = HotSync Manager (Raena Armitage)
06 =
07 = WinPT (Merlin)
08 =
09 = Palm Desktop Alarm Manager (Merlin)
10 = Windows XP Network Status (Merlin)
11 = NoIP (Merlin)
12 = StyleXP (gfox)
13 = AVG AntiVirus (Raena Armitage)
14 = Windows XP Volume Control (Raena Armitage)
15 = Picasa2 (Raena Armitage)
16 = Gmail Notifier (Merlin)

This leaves only 3 more to guess!

Update: In the comments, gfox guessed number 12 correctly, so I updated the list. I also put links to the programs as well in the list so you can find the software should you want to try it.

Contest: Guess What’s In My Systray

Borrowing an idea from my friend Craig Froehle and since a snapshot of my systray was in the previous post, I thought it might be fun to have a little contest. My main workstation is running Windows XP Professional and in the image below, I have numbered all of the applications running in my System Tray (aka SysTray). The first person to come the closest to guessing all of the applications correctly will win their choice of either an XL Palm T-Shirt, or a free G-mail e-mail account.

Feel free to guess as many times as you like, but all guesses must be posted as a comment to this article. Of course others can take your guesses and combine them with their own, but it’s all in good fun.

Happy guessing!