When I was a toddler, I played in Stan Musial’s swimming pool.
Yes, I really did.
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A cheap kitchen makeover
The kitchen cabinets in the house we live in have seen better days. They were reasonably well-built, but 50 years of raising families–mine is the third family raised in this house–took their toll on them. A couple of years back we painted them, to cover the scars of the years. It was an improvement, but the color dated itself pretty quickly, and we didn’t use the highest-quality paint, so the finish wore fairly quickly.
This time, we repainted them white. We used an expensive Benjamin Moore Decorator White in semi-gloss, because it looks good, but also because we’ve found it to be durable in other projects. And you’d be surprised how many half-million-dollar houses have white-painted cabinets. I’m an estate sale junkie, so I’ve seen a lot of half-million-dollar houses over the years, and I would estimate 40% of them have simple, white cabinets in their kitchens. It’s a look that doesn’t date itself, and is cheap and easy to take care of. (As a point of reference, a modest three-bedroom ranch house in the same county costs around $125,000.)
I’ve also seen people do this to improve the appearance of a house prior to flipping it.
If you needed another reason not to buy Windows 8….
I’m still waiting for someone I know to tell me they like Windows 8. I’ve seen some strangers online say they like it, but not a lot of them, and many of them appear to be astroturfers because they just like it too much. I’m sure Apple loves it, because, like my boss told me, a lot of older apps (like anything older than Office 2010) won’t run on Windows 8. So, if you have to re-buy all your software anyway, what advantage is there to buying a Windows 8 machine over a Macintosh?
In fact, that’s exactly what his parents did. They gave up on Windows entirely and bought a Mac Mini.
The other approach, of course, is to buy a Chromebook. A lot of people seem to be doing that too, seeing as it’s the best-selling laptop on Amazon–so much so that they don’t have any stock, and third-party sellers are scalping them for $80 above retail like they used to do with Nintendo Wii consoles. Read more
My Wright City adventure
My wife and I trekked out to Wright City this weekend for a surprise anniversary party for one of her uncles. It was in a park in Wright City. Wright City is a small town roughly an hour west of St. Louis on I-70. It’s most famous for Big Boy’s, a roadside hole-in-the-wall restaurant that predated the national chain by a couple of decades, and for the defunct Elvis Is Alive Museum, an old laundromat that a Baptist preacher converted into a tribute to the other Elvis (Presley, not Costello), where he spun theories about what Elvis did after faking his death.
I’ve driven through Wright City more times than I can count, since it’s along I-70 in between St. Louis and Kansas City, but up until this weekend, I’ve never stopped there, even for gas.
More on all that in a minute.
Follow-up on the Insignia NS20EM50A13 monitor
After about a month with an Insignia NS20EM50A13 monitor, I still mostly like it, but can note one annoyance. When booting up a system, the monitor sometimes likes to switch from the DVI input to VGA, without warning. If you happen to be sitting there when it happens, you notice it and can switch it back. But more than once I’ve rebooted, walked away, come back a few minutes later and wondered why I have a weird black screen in front of me instead of a logon screen. Read more
Up and coming low-end Android chips
I decided to dig into what the low-end Android chipmakers like Mediatek and Rockchip are up to, since they’re the ones who are likely to drive prices down.
Long passwords aren’t necessarily good passwords
Well, crud. Not all long passwords are good passwords.
I’ve suspected for a long time that street addresses aren’t good to use–the formula is too simple–but now it seems that even mashing together a sentence into a long password doesn’t work. (That isn’t something I do often, but I’ve done it at least once or twice.) Read more
How to get your first job in IT
I helped a friend of a former coworker with his resume this week. He’s looking to get their first jobs in IT, and found it difficult, even though he was applying for an entry-level helpdesk position.
His resume certainly indicated he was educated and able to hold down a job, but that wasn’t quite enough. Here’s what I had him do to beef up that resume to get past those initial rounds of screening and get interviewed.
How to calculate what a screen’s specs don’t tell you
If you want to quickly and easily calculate the pixels per inch of a display, here’s a useful tool:
Java is patched now, but still not very safe
Rapid7’s Chief Security Officer, HD Moore, estimated it will take two years for Oracle to fix all of the current issues with Java, not counting anything new that happens in that timeframe.
Futhermore, Kaspersky states that 50% of cyberattacks in 2012 utilized a Java exploit. Among those is the newly discovered Red October.
Think for a minute. Antivirus software is anywhere from 75 to 90% effective. Assuming the worst, that means the simple process of removing Java from your computer does 2/3 as much good as running antivirus software. Of course, you shouldn’t do one or the other; you should do both.
If you have a legitimate need for Java in your web browser, such as commercial intranet applications built with Java, enable Java in one and only one browser, then use that browser solely for accessing those Java-powered web sites.
But the best thing to do is just get rid of Java. And if you have something that uses Java, find something else to use.
It took Microsoft about two weeks to fix a critical vulnerability in Internet Explorer. It took Oracle five months. I never thought I’d say this, but Oracle needs to be more like Microsoft.
Yeah, you can quote me on that if you want.
But until Oracle gets religion on security like Microsoft did around 2002, we really have two choices: Avoid Oracle products whenever practical, or keep getting hacked. I’d rather you not choose the latter option.