A fresh, new look
No, you haven't come to the wrong place. This is still "It's News to Me." I've just decided it was time for a new, cleaner look, and when I saw Steve Sloan's blog this morning, I really liked the look of it. I was able to locate his template in the list of possibilities at Blogger so I decided to take the plunge and make the switch. The only down side is that it may have killed previous comments to posts, but there weren't many of those anyway, so I'm willing to live with that side effect.

One of the reasons I like this template better than my former one is that it suits my style of post better. I tend occasionally toward verbal diarrhea so a wider area devoted to the text of my posts means that a long post doesn't require as much scrolling down. Also I guess I'm just old-fashioned enough to prefer the black text on the white background. The whole thing just looks cleaner to me.

Let me know what you think about the change.

- posted by Perry @ 7:20 AM 2 comments

 
Linux and Mac OS X targeted by malware writers
This article at ars technica, Linux and Mac OS X get some love (?) from malware writers, reports: "Over the past few days, a couple of exploits for Linux and Mac OS X began circulating. Some of you may have seen e-mails purporting to be from the Red Hat Security Team. The e-mail contains a link to fedora-redhat.com and prompts users to download and install a patch for fileutils-1.0.6, stating that a vulnerability could 'allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code with root privileges.' The 'patch' actually contains malicious code that will compromise the system it is run on. "

For a long time, MAC and Linux users have smiled smugly as those who use Windows wrung their hands and whined about viruses and the vulnerabilities of their operating system. Now it appears that even folks on those admittedly more secure systems may not be spared from attack.

The author concludes the article by commenting: "The central lesson is this: no matter which platform you are on, being vigilant about security is the best way to ensure that your machine remains clean of worms, viri, and Trojan horses."
- posted by Perry @ 8:13 AM 0 comments

 
A voice from the past
What a wonderful surprise! I've just gotten off the phone with Brenda Jernigan, with whom I worked at Behaviorial Systems, Inc., from about 1972 until 1978, who was calling to invite me to participate in a surprise event for a friend with whom we both worked. I won't mention his (or her) name so as not to spoil the surprise in honor of his (or her) retirement. She commented that I was really easy to find by just looking in the phone book -- sheesh! such old technology! -- and I asked whether she thought that I should have obscured my address more effectively.

At any rate, I gave her my email address and encouraged her to drop me a message letting me know what she was looking for from me for the event. I am really pleased to have the opportunity to reestablish contact with members of a workgroup that was very influential in my life ... a long time ago.
- posted by Perry @ 5:57 PM 0 comments

 
Some real news for a change
Now this is really news! Shannon has updated his blog with some interesting things he is up to.
- posted by Perry @ 10:56 AM 0 comments

 
Catching up -- Again!
Yet again, I find my self having to "catch up" my posting here.

This past week has been full of many things. My work schedule has shifted so that I work from 12:00 PM until 8:30 PM and that change has disrupted my routine. My mornings are filled with my daily rounds on the Internet, reading blogs, news sites, sports updates, and more recently listening to Podcasts. Then I rush to get myself ready to go to work. I usually get home about 9:00 PM, and this past week was filled with watching the Major League Baseball Division Series. Then it's to bed about midnight and up the next day to repeat the cycle. All of that seemed to leave little time for posting here, despite the fact that much of what I've read or seen on the Internet could have been blogged.

I've also been carrying on a conversation with my friend, David Steele, about the wisdom and value of doing a corporate blog. Robert Scoble, who works for Microsoft and is a well-known blogger, posted these comments that address why doing a corporate blog is an important way to interact with your customers/constituents. Then Mark Cuban, the somewhat-famous owner of the Dallas Mavericks, posted these ideas on his corporate blog, in which he talks about the importance of presence on the Internet in getting his attention. I passed along both of these links to David.

In one of our email exchanges David said: "So it's a company diary of sorts? But, open to the public?"

And I responded:

"Yes to both questions.

The more important one, however, is that it IS open to the public. This is in keeping with the belief that a company REALLY wants to have a conversation with its constituency rather than just to talk AT them. In other words, the risk of being real and actually listening to the public is at once its greatest positive asset and also its greatest risk. However, in this age when customers talk to each other in ever greater numbers and more immediately than ever before because of the Internet, where email can be sent to hundreds of friends and web sites spring up like mushrooms overnight, a dissatisfied customer can and WILL use the technology to blister companies who want to hide behind walls of public relations blurbs and 'official' corporate statements. That is the whole point of The Cluetrain Manifesto, that 'markets are conversations' because everyone in the world is connected with everyone else, and positive word-of-mouth advertising about a company's openness is more valuable than the security of carefully parsed 'official' propaganda.

I suppose a lot depends upon how strongly you believe, as I do, that customers interact with each other about how you treat them. There's a web site called DSL Reports, where customers of all the ISPs like Comcast and BellSouth regularly describe the nature of their experience with their provider. Neither Comcast nor BellSouth can prevent that from occurring; they can only choose to provide a means by which the customer can speak directly to them so that they can benefit from the feedback and react to it in a way that might win them some credibility and good will for trying.

As you might imagine, I could go on and on, but I won't. However, you have hit upon the primary value of a corporate blog -- making itself available to its customers in an open and straightforward way, so that the words that pour forth from it have some authenticity because they are spoken by an individual in a "real" voice.

I hope that helps to stimulate your thinking. At the very least, it should provide you some material for your next presentation to some group somewhere about how the Utility industry interacts with its public in the 21st century."

One very valuable resource that I've discovered in the last couple of months is a site called IT Conversations, where Doug Kaye hosts a number of audio presentations of discussions and interviews with leaders in the IT industry. One of the weekly presentations at that site is The Gilmor Gang, hosted by Steve Gilmor. The Gilmor Gang presentation on October 22nd was particularly interesting to me because the participants were Dave Winer, Adam Curry, and three members of The Firesign Theater, and the discussion was about Podcasting, its short history, the ideas behind it, and its future possibilities. Of course, I've blogged about Podcasting before here and here. If you haven't yet tapped into sites like IT Conversations or these podcasts, I think you are missing one of the easiest ways to consume information from the Internet, and I'd encourage you to give it a try.


- posted by Perry @ 9:00 AM 0 comments

 
I learned something today
I participate in a mailing list, called TBUDL, which stands for The Bat! User Discussion List, so that I can keep up with developments taking place with my favorite email program, The Bat!. And I'm not just there to learn about what is new; I also find that reading this list is the best way I have found to learn how to use the many powerful features of the program. Occasionally I learn about other things that I didn't know by reading the messages that are posted there. Today proved to be one of those occasions.

One of the participants had posted a comment in which he said he wished that the latest version of the installation program for The Bat! had a version number on the installation file that he had downloaded, because he couldn't recall which version he had downloaded. I wrote the list to let him know that when I download something that has a name like, setup.exe, I usually change the file name (but not the extension) to something like setup_Program_XYZ_ver_1-0.exe, so that I can recall what the program is and what version I have downloaded. But I added this paragraph:

"What I'd really like to see though is for the OS (Operating System) to provide some way to enter a narrative description of each DL (download) as metadata so that I could enter a paragraph of information about each thing I download and what motivated me to do so. There are some programs, I know, like Total Commander for example, that provide the option to enter a one-line description, but that's not quite the same thing. I am not, however, optimistic that the option to enter metadata tags about downloads is on the horizon."

In short order, I had a reply to my "wish" from a physician and fellow participant named, Allie Martin, that said:

"XP does this for you.

Right click the download and look at the properities. You'll see a summaries tab. You can type what you wish under Comments."

Then he added, "What's even nicer is that you can display these comments in Explorer's details view. Enable details view and then right click the details view list colum header bar. From the menu, select comments. All you comments are displayed.

I think you can search on this attribute as well."

Here is a graphic that illustrates what Allie is describing. You can click on the image for a larger view.


The Properties Dialog Box 


Like on many other occasions, participating in this mailing list has taught me something that wasn't even related to the general purpose of the list. You just never know when you are going to learn something new and useful.

I hope you find this information that serendipity threw into my lap to be as useful as I think it will be for me.
- posted by Perry @ 8:50 PM 0 comments

 
Google's Desktop Search Tool
Google has released a beta version of their desktop search tool here. The idea is to use the power of Google searches for finding information on your hard disk. As usual when a tool like this comes out, those concerned about the potential abuses of it are many. This thread on the Metafilter web site, presents a number of the arguments, both pro and con, about this tool. It's probably a good idea to read these comments so that you can make an informed judgment about whether you want to experiment with it or not.

After reviewing them, I have downloaded and installed it, and I am experimenting with using it. My first impressions are that it is very fast in pulling up information on my system. I have chosen not to allow it to send any information back to Google about my search habits, and I have excluded secure web sites from having Google index them. So from my perspective, I'm not really concerned about the information it may have indexed on my computer. In the preferences section, you can also exclude specific web sites where you don't want it to index the temporary Internet files, so there are safeguards there too, if you want to use them.

The only down side from my point of view is that it only indexes Outlook and Outlook Express emails, so because I use The Bat! as my email program the searches don't include my emails. For those who do use either of those two email programs, and there are a lot of people in that category, I would suspect that it would prove even more useful for you than it is for me. Also it will index AIM, AOL's instant messenger application, but it doesn't apparently index any of the other IM clients. Again, this is unfortunate from my point of view, simply because I don't use AIM.

Whether this is the right tool or not, the need it is designed to address is very real, so it will be interesting to watch what happens as companies compete to meet this need.
- posted by Perry @ 3:00 PM 0 comments

 
Handling tech escalations
As I approach the end of the first week of handling escalated calls where the first tech agent couldn't resolve the customer's issue, causing the customer to ask to speak with a supervisor, I've a couple of observations.

First, if you call for technical support, you should never be reluctant to ask for a supervisor if a reasonable amount of effort and trying what the front-line agent suggests doesn't resolve your issue. Sometimes those of us at the next level up have tools and options that the first line does not have.

Second, a lot of people who are getting slammed by Spyware. It can be so damaging that you won't even be able to surf the web. Here's the program that we recommend you download and run regularly to get rid of Spyware -- Spybot Search and Destroy. If you don't have it, you might want to go ahead and get it, just in case you become beset by this latest obnoxious Internet scourge. It is not the only useful program out there, but it works rather well, and for some people it is the only thing we can do to help them be able to surf again.

A second site that we in tech support find very useful is ModemHelp.net. The main advantage of this site is that provides screenshots of a large number of programs on which you can "click through" the menus to go to the next screenshot. In other words, it acts just like the application. So when you are talking with a customer, it is very helpful to be able to see the screens they are seeing and to follow them as you give instructions for which menu item to click on. Even if you are not doing technical support, you might find this site worth looking at.
- posted by Perry @ 9:00 AM 0 comments

 
More about Podcasting
Yesterday I mentioned how hot Podcasting is on the Net. This morning I decided to set a "watch" in FeedDemon, which is a feature whereby you can have the program scan all the feeds you subscribe to for key words. I chose to put two key words, Podcast and Podcasting, into the watch, and then I ran it. It pulled 85 entries that mentioned the subjects. I was surprised by the number of references, even though I suspected there would be a lot of them. This watch feature will now alert me to any new mentions of these subjects each day when I open FeedDemon, and I can check out what is being said.

Also this morning I listened to Adam Curry's latest Daily Source Code podcast of his conversation with Dave Winer of Scripting News from October 12th. It was about an hour and ten minutes of their discussing, as well as a good deal of rambling, about what is going on with Podcasting and where it is headed. I find it interesting to try to keep up with what leaders in the field are thinking and although much of the conversation felt as if I were eavesdropping on a telephone conversation between two friends, it did give me a feel for how these things develop.

Podcasting is spreading like wildfire and is in its infancy, being only about a month or two old, so maybe it will flame out at some point, but I enjoy trying to keep up with developments that may become significant in the future on the web, which if you think about it is also only in its infancy. The World Wide Web is only about 10 years old at this point and just pause for a second and think how pervasive it has become in such a short time! It's an interesting time to be alive, I think.
- posted by Perry @ 9:30 AM 0 comments

 
Odds and Ends
Like having a book that's overdue at the library and dreading facing the music and the fine that inhibits taking it back, it's now been long enough since I last posted anything that I need to catch you up on what's up but because so much has happened it's a bit of a drag to have to cover so much in one post. (Note to self: short, frequent posts are easier than catch up posts.)

In no particular order, here are a few of the things that are going on in my life now.

You, my regular reader (note the singular noun), know that have been agonizing over how I will continue to make a living in the future. Friday, October 1, was the last day of the BellSouth campaign's Outbound Customer Service function at ClientLogic. It was a foggy morning as I drove in, sort of appropriate to the mood of the day. As soon as I arrived at 8:00 AM and began to export the email and letters dispatched the previous day as agents worked the accounts, I realized that because there was not going to be another day in which to dispatch the emails and letters that were produced on this the last day someone, namely me, had to stay after the close of this day and export those letters and emails and get them sent to the customers. Therefore my "last" day would be a 12 hour day. I resigned myself to that fact.

At around 3:45 PM that day, Mark Gross, the head of the training group at ClientLogic in Oak Ridge, came to me and said that because of the likelihood that we would be getting new business in the near future and if that were try that he would need an additional trainer. The powers that be at ClientLogic had therefore decided that if I wanted to I could move over to the BellSouth Technical Escalations group for the next 6 to 8 weeks until that trainer's position opened up. He gave me 30 minutes to decide whether I wanted to accept the offer. I discussed it with my former Operations Manager, Doyle Seiber, who encouraged me to accept it. Cutting to the chase, I took the offer. Therefore I continue to be employed at ClientLogic now. I told Mark that I had already made arrangements to go out of town the next week, the week of 4th through the 8th, so I would need that week off. That was acceptable to everyone, so I took the week off.

During my time off, I went over to visit with David and Lynne Steele at Lake Lure, NC, where they spend a week annually. Here's a link to some of the pictures I took while there. Dave has recently taken a position with Vectron Corp to assist them in developing their utility business, and while I was visiting with him, he graciously offered me the opportunity to work with him in that task. We have yet to figure out exactly what I can do remotely to help him, but we are still working on the specifics. I'll let you know more as we figure it out.

Now on to something of probably more interest to the general public. One of the hottest new memes on the Internet is podcasting. Intended originally for users of the IPod, Adam Curry, who is a prime mover in the whole meme, has developed a program called IPodder that automatically downloads the podcasts you have selected so that they can then be listened to on any MP3 player. Once you set up IPodder, you can forget it because it will go out and pull the content to your hard disk.

Well I've run out of time for this morning. More later when I have the time to comment.
- posted by Perry @ 9:15 AM 1 comments