So, on the bright side of things, the last round of password expirations is done. Those were some hellish three weeks, I’ll tell you what. My job decided that we needed to come into compliance with state regulations on password security. This is a good thing. They did this by force-expiring everyone’s passwords in batches,…
April 1st Conficker Worm Activates – What You Should Know and What to Do
It must be a slow news month, but the media is absolutely eating up this Conficker virus. Why? Because it’s pulling the old 1990’s “on this popular holiday X, this virus will activate and wipe your hard drive or do some other dastardly deed” schtick. This worm / virus has been out for about six…
Certifications Update
I forgot to mention that I went home to visit my family in my hometown last weekend. One of the particular purposes of that trip was to take my Apple OS X 10.5 Support Essentials exam. I am now successfully an Apple Certified Support Professional (ACSP, formerly ACHDST)! Now I can check that off of…
Bleeding Edge Technology: Vista SP2 RC Released
Today Microsoft announced that the release candidate (RC) for Windows Vista Service Pack 2 is now released to the general public for beta testing. How can that be a bad thing? It works for OSS projects like Firefox and various Linux distros. Just anyone can go and download these might-as-well-be-final versions of their product and…
Certifications can Boost Your Hireability
This is a no brainer, but if you’re struggling out there in the job market, try to get some certifications. You may find that your field experience or self-research and training qualify you for a certification already. Or, you may learn something new by studying a “For Dummies” or exam prep guide. Currently, I hold…
Crashes Happen at the Worst Time
It happens to all of us – you’re in the middle of an important PowerPoint presentation for a huge client, or an important executive at work, you are just about to hit save on an important project for school, or your soon-to-be-published memoirs due at the publisher in less than an hour. At some time…
Terrible Tuesdays
Good grief. Exam week for college students apparently makes everyone grumpy and annoying. At first I thought, maybe I’m not being polite enough, so I tried harder on the phones today. Then I heard other people in the call center dealing with angry clients, too. Apparently during exam week, everything is an emergency, and everyone’s…
Make Headers Stay Across Pages on Tables in Word
A quick Microsoft Word tip: if you’re working with a table you’ve created in Word, and your table spans multiple pages, it can be annoying to flip back and forth to remember what each column represents. Ideally, you’d like to be able to keep the column headers on the table in Word across each page,…
Consumerist: 7 Confessions of an Apple Store Specialist
Consumer watch-dog website Consumerist has an informative article about things every consumer that shops in an Apple Store should know. My favorite part: 1. If you fill out the survey and rank us 6 or lower, a manager will call you the same day or the next, corporate policy. They usually will ask why you…
The Rage You’ve Been Missing
So it was mentioned that I don’t do a lot of raging on here about crazy incidents with customers. I’ll give you a good one that’s been happening a lot lately: Our university went with Windows Live Mail to outsource our student e-mail service last semester. Students were given until April 15th when the server…