http://www.formspring.me/isthesitedown

My job caters well to the fact that I am old. I don't really bother memorizing anything any more. In an age when I can type in a few words to a song into google and immediately pull up the lyrics, a link to buy it, 37 mashups using it and  a video of a cat playing a keyboard to it, most things simply do not register as important enough to dedicate the attention required to memorize them. As a consequence, I believe that my memory is getting weaker. If it were up to my retention abilities, both the good and bad would be forgotten quickly. Thanks to gmail, archive.org and google web cache, however, I am free the from the responsibility of ever remembering anything that is said to me or that i said to anyone else. A little over 10 years ago, Neil Postman wrote  a talk called 5 Things We Need to Know About Technological Change, in which he explains in the most distilled way I can imagine a sort of "heads up" to the leadership of the world about what is coming in the next 10-20 years. The 4th point in his wholly amazing work is summarized below:

Here is the fourth idea: Technological change is not additive; it is ecological. I can explain this best by an analogy. What happens if we place a drop of red dye into a beaker of clear water? Do we have clear water plus a spot of red dye? Obviously not. We have a new coloration to every molecule of water. That is what I mean by ecological change. A new medium does not add something; it changes everything. In the year 1500, after the printing press was invented, you did not have old Europe plus the printing press. You had a different Europe. After television, America was not America plus television. Television gave a new coloration to every political campaign, to every home, to every school, to every church, to every industry, and so on.

The addition of an automatic stenographer for every thought I bang out to my wife or father, or friends has many benefits. I can easily refer back to see if I said something incorrectly, or missed an important detail. I can pull up emails that were sent 5 years ago (I was on the early curve of the gmail thing) and get exact quotes from people I have not seen in years. The issue is that my changed ecology allows me to easily re-kindle old grudges. Before Christmas, I was sent an email response to a note I had sent to a relative. The email I got was, in a word, inflammatory. Possibly more so than the author had intended. In the 2 months since, my anger had moved from foaming-at-the-mouth seething rage, to a much more restrained irritation. Last week, a conversation with my brother caused me to search for the message in question and the second I re-read it, I was immediately filled with the same emotions once again. This automatic record has the capacity to turn every little offense into a Hatfield Vs McCoy level feud.

I have been convicted recently about my treatment of another family member, again fueled by a perfect record of the wrongs I have 'suffered.' Even if I am justified and wholly 'right' (or as much as so as a human can be), am I allowing this shift in my spiritual ecology, the environment in which my faith exists, to be a less-Christ-like forgiver of wrongs done to me?  A friend of mine recently wrote in an article for Collide magazine on this subject. He said:

Theologian Miroslav Volf, author of The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World, says that when we try to deal with the past, we often make one of two mistakes. Sometimes we downplay what happened, saying, “Aw, it wasn’t that big of a deal. I only lost, like, six followers over it.” This way, we don’t have to forgive the event as it actually happened. Other times, when we hold resentment against someone, we inflate an event in order to make the offender look worse. “She posted that over the entire Internet.” But Volf, who underwent a months-long interrogation during the Yugoslavian conflict, suggests that a major part of forgiveness is not forgetting, but remembering rightly so we can forgive what really happened.

For Christians, this means that the Internet’s ability to help us remember rightly is a chance to practice a theologically-informed, true kind of forgiveness. Rather than downplay an incident or cut people off every time they annoy us, we have the chance to look at the past with Google-like accuracy and choose to stop holding those wrongs against those who harmed us.

Wow. For me, this is about the hardest thing in the world. I like to pretend that I never play the victim and that I will just take all kinds of abuse without saying a word. The truth is, though, that I act worse than my kids when I am wronged. The hardest parts of the Christian life are the things that fly most in the face of our instincts with no payout in return. When we give financially, we feel good about it. When we serve in a ministry, we get kudos from other believers. When we forgive someone who has wronged us without throwing it back in their face, we a) open ourselves up to getting hurt again and b) walk away from our right to be right, to be the blameless one. The hardest part for me is that second one, the one where I have to treat the other person like they are as forgiven as God says they are. I don't get to be a martyr any more. I hope that someday I will be as able to forgive and treat another believer as blameless as gracefully as our savior and some of his more sanctified children have show me in the past.

References:

http://www.mat.upm.es/~jcm/neil-postman--five-things.html

http://www.collidemagazine.com/article/print/291/i-will-remember-your-tweets-no-more

The band-aid is easy, just exclude c:\program files\logmein from your resident shield. The folks at LogMeIn also urged me to contact AVG support about the issue, as they want to get it fixed as quickly as possible and they figure that more voices will make the fix happen more quickly.

The below tool should be run from the command prompt. It should identify and remove registry keys over the 259 character limit. It will kick back any errors. If you have null keys (keys that are faulty but unremovable), you can use RootKitRevealer from sysinternals and get rid of them. I understand that regdelnull can do something similar, but in this case, it was a corrupt key, not a key with null characters.

In my case, the affected key was relating to the driver for the Intel storage controller (VEN_8086&DEV_24D3&SUBSYS_458015D9&REV_02). Not cool. I could not delete or rename the key and could not set/view permissions on it. Ran RootKitRevealer, which caused a stop error/reboot (crap) but successfully removed the key. IN OTHER WORDS, DO NOT DO THIS IF YOU DO NOT HAVE A TESTED BACKUP.

"To help troubleshoot this issue, run the HKCRScan tool (HKCRScan.exe). The HKCRScan tool enumerates the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT registry hive to locate subkeys that contain more than 259 characters. Additionally, HKCRScan helps determine if there is an invalid discretionary access control list by returning error code 0x5. This error code means "Access denied" when it enumerates a registry key. The HKCRScan tool is an internal tool developed by Microsoft."

Download: HKCRScan

Of course, I love using OpenDNS for testing, as most ISP's DNS servers just plain suck.

http://www.kwtx.com/home/headlines/72568237.html

I mean, unless the guy was a real jerk or something. ๏̯͡๏﴿

Because that is exactly what the new wave of web services are doing. See, when you write code, it doesn't normally cost you much to use it the 2nd through 9 billionth time. That first one is expensive. Stores like Amazon.com make money hand over fist because they have innovated on so many levels that they have become almost unstoppable at what they do. But thousands of little sites are popping up everwhere that are undercutting the established market leaders. Mint.com is attacking Quickbooks. MailChimp can beat out ConstantContact for most smaller tasks for free. freepdfconvert.com can handle most of the tasks that people use Acrobat Standard or Pro for.

Most people don't need a Swiss Army knife. They really just want a great knife or can opener when they need it, preferably one that is easy to use and even better, free. By focusing on very simple, individualized tasks, people can pretty easily reduce the cost of that first roll out of the software and then make a small amount on advertising revenue from there out. Expenses are very low (as are expectations), and changes can be made rapidly based on feedback.

In order to take down a skyscraper, you can either try to attack it broadside with a wrecking ball or you can go after the foundation with a super soaker.

1. Applications compatibility - Will your companies applications run ( in a supported fashion) on a 64 bit server? Any modern application should at least have a forthcoming update to support 64bit, but there are plenty of non-modern applications out there that are lagging behind. In the event that it is not supported, your best option may be to either host a VM on your new 64 bit server, or run both of them on a hypervisor. Call  your vendor and get their support statement in writing. You do not want to get halfway through a migration and find out that you will have to run beta code to make it work, sort of, in the meantime.
2. Backups - Most newer versions of BackupExec support 64 bit, so you should be fine there, if that is what you are running. Obviously if you are using the built in backup, it would be supported as well. Make sure that whatever device (especially tape drives) you are using to back up to is supported.
3. Printers - Ah yes, the lowly print server. Plenty of printers have either crap 64bit drivers or nothing at all. Either plan on replacing those printers or using plan b from item 1 above.
4. Antivirus - Don't forget this. You need it and the chances that your existing install package will work on 64bit are basically zero

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