Bauer-Power is NOT Dangerous!

This one kind of gave me a laugh. I may have taken it more seriously if I felt it would cost me some traffic, but I am not too worried about it. Mainly because I just about get zero traffic from this particular search engine anyway.

I am talking about Yahoo! I had an old Navy buddy shoot me an email. He told me that he did a search for Bauer-Power on Yahoo. Of course, Bauer-Power showed up as one of the top on the list. That was expected. What wasn't expected was the fact that Yahoo thinks Bauer-Power contains dangerous downloads!

Check out this screen shot!



I think I would be worried about it if I got a significant amount of traffic from Yahoo, but I don't! No, me, like most tech savvy folks do our searches on Google. True, Google had a similar issue Saturday, but they got that resolved. This one, doesn't seem to be going away any time soon.

I don't know, maybe I should look at it like a badge of honor! What do you think? How would you feel if a major search engine told people you were dangerous? Let me know in the comments.

Read more »

VP Candidate Got Her Yahoo Email Hacked!

This is a rather hard blog article for me to write for two main reasons. Reason number one is that I am an admitted Republican, and number two because I really don't want this blog to turn into a political blog. So just to be clear, even though I am leaning more towards the McCain/Palin ticket, I am perfectly okay with you voting for Obama/Biden.

Anyway, enough with the preamble, so I was driving in this morning and I heard on San Diego's Mikey Show that Sarah Palin's Yahoo email address got hacked! WTF!?!?

When I got in this morning I decided to check into it, and according to the Associated Press, Palin was using a Yahoo account for official business as Alaska's Governor. Yahoo email for official business? Oh Really? That is a little disconcerting considering the sensitive nature of government correspondence even at the state level.

The McCain campaign released a statement saying:

This is a shocking invasion of the governor's privacy and a violation of law. The matter has been turned over to the appropriate authorities and we hope that anyone in possession of these e-mails will destroy them.

According to The Guardian, "The hack has been attributed to an activist group known as Anonymous, a loose grouping of internet pranksters, vigilantes and anarchists that has previously locked horns with scientologists and internet paedophiles."

Now this doesn't really sway my vote at this time as I am certain that presidential/vice presidential correspondence WILL NOT be done through a public freebie email service like Yahoo. However it does have me seriously asking, "Sarah, WTF were you thinking?"

What's your take on this? If you were going to vote the McCain ticket, does this sway your vote? If you are an Obama fan, does this just help to strengthen his cause? I am curious to know your thoughts on this one.

Read more »

Don't feed the Pidgin's!

Let's dive right into the fun stuff. That's right, no pre-amble, no mumbo jumbo. Just pure unadulterated fun stuff. I'm talking about things we do on the computer for fun. There are several things right? Games, myspace, email etc. I'm going to talk about instant messaging! We all have our favorites right? My cousin and my brother like Yahoo messenger, while some of my friends prefer ICQ or IRC. Personally, I'm an MSN guy myself. So what are you supposed to do? Install three or four instant messenger clients on you computer? You can, but then they all eat up resources and eventually slow your computer down.

No, the solution is to get a client that will handle multiple Instant messaging services all bundled into one client. There are a few out there, Trillian is one, but to get all of the good fetures you have to pay for it. Let me introduce you to Pidgin. You may have heard of it by it's former name, GAIM. Pidgin services multiple instant messaging services ( AIM, Gadu-Gadu, Group Wise, ICQ, IRC, MSN, QQ, SILC, Simple, Sametime, XMPP, and Yahoo). Of course, like everything else I write about it is 100% free.

The only problem I see with Pidgin is that there is no video conferencing support like with the new MSN Messengers (More accurately Windows Live Messenger), or Yahoo messenger. The old version of the program, Gaim had a version that supported video and voice conferencing. That version is called Gaim-VV and is currently only available for Linux.

So do the math; multiple IM clients equals multiple processes running simultaneously which equals slower computer. Less Clients equals less processing power requirements which equals faster computing. If you are looking to consolidate IM clients, and aren't concerned with video conferencing, then you should probably check out Pidgin.

Read more »