geeks beating each other up…fight club style: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13037439/wid/11915829

if you are the only tech person in your family, you are likely as i am the defacto nick burns of the group.  that’s okay most of the time, but can get tough at times.  you may be like me as well, that when actually posed with a question, you feel completely obligated regardless of how feasible it may be.

i found myself in the predicament recently.  my brother-in-law called me about 3 weeks ago and said ‘um, i’m using kristie’s [my sister-in-law] computer at home and it just installed something and now has a blue screen…is that bad?’ — after explaining the BSOD to him for a minute, we tried some quick things.  they didn’t work. 

his wife called me about 10 minutes later in tears (all music/photos/finances on the drive).  she told me what the BSOD said and it was a drive failure.  i asked if it was clicking…no clicks — that’s good.  anyhow, long story somewhat shorter, it was one of those problems that couldn’t be handled over the phone (they are in Indiana).  now my bro-in-law is a big hot-shot exec at his company so i suggested that he recruit an IT person from his company to help.  they did that.  net result: IT guy said drive is hosed.  i called BS on that and told her to take her drive out and bring it to me (she was coming this past weekend).

after putting it in a computer as the master and booting to the windows xp startup disk in restore mode, and ten minutes later — we were able to login to the machine again.  nick burns success!

the good thing is we were able to get the data off the drive (it is about to fail bad), the bad thing is that it reinforced my position as family computer guy — and now the IT guy at the company is in for a serious lecture by an exec :-)

if you haven’t seen the diet coke + mentos expirements, take a look on youtube or google video and search diet coke mentos and you’ll see some.

but if you want the bellagio version (200 bottles of diet coke synchronized to music) check this out:

http://eepybird.com/dcm1.html

i’ve been using gmail as a shell to my mail.  i don’t really *use* gmail, but i like their interface and it’s easy to use, so i guess i do use it :-)

anyhow, i started using it once they enabled the “from” address customization, where i could set the from address to one of my liking.

until recently when i’ve realized it isn’t exactly doing what i thought/want.  when i get a message in my outlook i see “[email protected] on behalf of [email protected]” (obviously changed the email addresses to protect spam here) which isn’t exactly the desired outcome.

a quick review of the headers shows:

From: [email protected]
Sender: [email protected]

so if gmail offers the feature, why do they need to alter the sender header?  why not make the from really who i want it to be from?  after all, isn’t that what they are selling as the feature?

argh.

Valleyschwag2 May Shipment

got my Valleyschwag2 shipment today -- check out the goods!

apparently this is the last of the burlap shipments, which is understandable when they are hand-made!
click on the picture to go to the flickr pic with descriptions of each item.

check them out -- www.valleyschwag.com