Brian Williams - six month suspension. We shall just see.

Now some sympathetic idiot on RollingStone.com is saying Brian Williams is not at fault, because he didn't write the copy that he read on-air, saying he was in a chopper that got hit by an RPG. 12 years before the 2015 imbroglio that has surfaced now. He even says Williams "has no reason to be suspicious about the copy for this story. He has not been accused of lying yet. Maybe he glosses over it. Of the things he is worried about that day, this story, just a guess, probably is not one of them." http://www.rollingstone.com/tv/features/brian-williams-and-the-smoking-gun-that-isnt-20150214#ixzz3Rwg2Xcv5

Horseshit. Williams has repeated this story, publicly, many times. Okay, so I'm me: I'm on air, and my teleprompter says "I'm Mike, and I've had a sex-change operation". First of all, I wouldn't forget that... but more importantly, having read my copy over first... or even not having read it... what do you suppose I would do? Am I so mindlessly spewing out what I read, without thinking about it, my mind lost in space, that I wouldn't even notice? I kinda doubt it, eh.

So to Simon Vozick-Levinson the author of this RS piece, I say: nice try. Fail.

Honestly, what passes for music these days...

 That's correct: not Sam Smith. Who needs a picture of him?

Bjork. Unbelievable. And Sam Smith winning all those grammies? THIS is what people think is good music? A wobbly-voiced white boy with no soul, yet everyone thinks he has it. Obviously no one who voted has every heard the real thing. The Motown gang must be rolling over in their world. I give up.

Uninstalling Avira

What is it with AntiVirus tools these days? We are swamped with "free" programs that pester you repeatedly for PAID upgrades; AVG even tells you it is time to upgrade and takes you right to a page where you can plonk in your credit card number. Never even mentions upgrading the free version.

Forget the fact that none of the free OR paid AV programs actually work (spyware is where it's at, and no one has a tool that prevents that garbage from flying in from the Web). The guys who create these attacks are way more sophisticated, obviously, than the AV programmers are, or I wouldn't have so many customers. Forget the fact that, if you use Windows, it comes with a Defender or Essentials program that works just as well as any of the others (which is to say, again, not), and there is no reason for you to download or pay for anyone else's.

Forget the fact that many of these AV tools will actually screw up your security settings so much that you can no longer get to your favorite sites (like your bank), and won't tell you they've blocked them. No, forget all that.

Just this week I've had two customers with Avira on their systems, and no way to remove the program. On one PC, it doesn't even have an entry in the "Programs and Features" list. It's just not there, and Avira doesn't come with it's own uninstall program. On the other PC, even though I turned off the auto-start for Avira in msconfig, after rebooting it had re-checked itself.

Now in this particular case, the guy using the PC is legally blind and uses the voice feature of Windows to guide him through his keyboard shortcuts. Every program that pops up gets read out loud. Including every instance of Avira, which comes up all the time, and completely interferes with his work.

The only removal methods I've found are arcane and laborious, including Avira's own method, which involves downloading its registry cleaner program. What?? Fuck you, AV programs, and double FUCK YOU to Avira for being so greedy as to promote this kind of abuse on personal computers.

WTF, CostCo? And your damned new water bottles.

Okay, I can understand using a thinner, cheaper type of plastic for your 500 ml drinking water bottles. After all, money is money. (I just hope they are more biodegradable, too.)

But WTF have you done to the twist-off caps? They require Herculean strength to open now. You in bed with Coca Cola bottlers, who here in Mexico two years ago changed the twist off cap? Oh, it's easy enough to get off the first time, but if you (like me) only require a slug or two and then stick it back in the fridge... just you try getting it open the next time.

Now I have to keep a rubber gripper and a hand-towel near me anytime I want a GD drink.

Not fair, knobs. Not fair at all.

Outlook.com fails to stimulate

August 2012 saw the debut of Microsoft's OUTLOOK.COM, a new webmail tool. It's destined to replace HotMail, and supposed to be their whack at the future of email.

HotMail and Yahoo have become so drenched with spam and hack attacks, I regularly recommend against using those sites to my customers. So what has Outlook.com done to help stop these personal invasions, and what does it offer that improves on any other webmail service, like GMail?

Except for the sign-up process, which involves a couple of extra security steps compared to HotMail, I see absolutely no improvement in security. If there is, please, someone tell me. So don't bother switching to feel more secure that your Contacts list isn't going to be stolen.

Microsoft is playing up the new interface: cleaner, they say. Right, like Google Chrome's interface is cleaner. All they've done is manage to hide most of the previously easily-accessible icons, and changed those icons to the currently-popular one-dimensional, flat-looking, boringly-coloured, Windows 8-type icons. This "minimalist" approach does nothing to help existing or new users. In fact, it makes it that much more difficult for the average computer user to figure out what the hell to do next.

My big complaint with GMail has always been their minimalist interface, and they continue to "improve" this by hiding more and more of the available options. Kind of like car stereos: they used to have buttons for everything. With the advent of the digital age, all the functionality is hidden under various sequences of key-presses. Just changing the clock on my car stereo usually means I have to pull out the damned manual. Why is everyone under the impressions that less is better? It's not: obvious is better. But hiding the interface is all the trend these days, a trend being mindlessly bought into by creators caught in a rut. Microsoft lost the ability to be original years ago in most things, and Outlook.com reflects only some designers' idea of cool.

More importantly, there's very little new at all beside the interface. Yes, it's going to be Facebook-connected. Big friggin' deal. They've integrated the mail with Office Web Apps and SkyDrive. Big friggin' deal. I for one will never use those services, because they make me feel totally NOT in control of my stuff. Mark my words: "cloud" computing... which is simply a developer term for web-based networking... is going to fail just like "slim" PCs did, and every other attempt to make money from us by taking control away from us. The only thing that makes sense about the cloud is providing the (free) ability to synchronize the data on all your devices automatically. So my contacts list on my phone is the same as the one on my computer, that type of thing.

Where's the help for users in Outlook.com? Where's the tool for uploading images easily; resizing those images on the fly, remembering a specific folder on your PC so you don't have to dig through all your files everytime; where's the visually appealing display of thumbnails so you can grab a photo by it's look and not by its filename? There are millions of users out there who just don't know how to do this kind of stuff, and Microsoft had a huge opportunity to make that painful process a friendly one. Didn't even occur to them.

Where's the easy-to-create sub-folder setup, for sorting? Hidden, and not easy. Where's the helpful wizard to guide you through determining which emails should go where? Where's the tool that scans your emails and makes suggestions for sorting and archiving? Where's the pop-up that says "I see you used the word attachment in your message... did you want to add an attachment before sending"?

Where's the anti-keylogger tool to prevent 'bots from signing in and stealing your Contacts, then changing your password? I could go on, and I will later.

How to Stop ALL Spam... No, Really!

I want to talk to you about Spam, and then I want to ask WHY email users are not doing the obvious, most simple, most effective thing to prevent it.

Security newsletters go on, and on, endlessly, about the spam problem. And it's not helping. Companies are making a lot of money creating and selling anti-spam software, and it's not helping. What good is catching 98% of incoming spam? To me, that's like an OCR program that is 98% accurate... one still has to read the whole damn scan to find the mistakes. And with spam, one pretty much has to scan the "spambox" of collected junk mails to ensure that there are no false positives.

On top of that, the spam-masters just keep getting better at getting past the spam-filters. Let's face it; the only way you can block out the 10,000 different spelling variations of "viagra" is to include every word that has the letters v, i, a, g, and r in it. This stuff is always going to get through, to a greater or lesser extent.

I get NO spam. None. Zip, zero, nada. And I use my email client extensively, day and night. (I use ThunderBird as my POP3 client, but that is beside the point... I pretty much ignore the Junk message filter system that this particular client offers.) It isn't a question of which client has the best filters or plug-ins. Nope.

Here is how I have kept my Inbox literally free of spam for over a year now.

1. I changed my email address to one nobody had ever seen before, and eventually phased out my old address.
2. I do not post my email address on any websites; not even my own. Instead, I use text-only or a special HTML tool to hide the real address.
3. I use my email address only with my friends, and never with casual acquaintances (at one point earlier in 2004, I corresponded with a guy who needed to advertise in my magazine... and that was promptly followed up with him sending me a joke email, which contained a list of at least 50 of his "friends" in the header... and to no one's surprise, the next day I got a joke email from one of those friends, thereby beginning the cycle of junk-mail-from-"friends" hell. I hastily informed both of these people never to do that to me again, under any circumstances. I got lucky: none of them appear to have been hit with a mail-out virus.)
4. Anytime I subscribe to a website for anything at all (newsletters, purchases, trial downloads), I make sure I never give them my email address.
5. Even though I own several domain names, I use a special service that hides my real email addresses from bots and others that scan the WHOIS libraries (all registered domains must provide email contact addresses; it is very easy for spybots and even casual readers to access these addresses, which are usually true addresses.) Services such as myprivacy.ca prevent this from happening. This makes a huge difference.

BUT YOU SAY: "OK, fine, anyone can just stop using their email. And by the way, pal, you can't subscribe to an email newsletter without giving up your address."

Wrong. What I do instead is use an email anonymizer, or ghoster. In my particular case, although there are a number of these services out there, I use Sneakemail (www.sneakemail.com). This is a FREE service (although you can buy a monthly subscription and receive extra tools) that generates a unique email return address for every message I write that needs one. For example, it has created the return address that I used for this email, and to subscribe to Windows Secrets. My REAL email address is never seen by anyone or anything, outside of the Sneakemail servers. And they are pretty damn secure.

BUT YOU SAY: "Hmmm, interesting... but how do you know which address you used; there must be hundreds of them. And more to the point: how does this stop you getting spam? Surely you just get spam at all those addresses."

Wrong again. For each unique address, I can add a little note that tells me who the address was for... even the date I created it. And I attach a little bit of a header that says "This might be spam..." for every address, so that I instantly know, when someone responds to that address, that it is from a place that has received my Sneakemail address... and therefore I am alerted that, well, "this might be spam".  Better yet, Sneakemail even creates a SECOND blind email address that the recipient sees... they never even actually see the REAL fake email address. Still with me?

If I ever get a piece of spam, thanks to the Sneakemail header, I know instantly which unscrupulous, lousy, stinking, rotten, lowlife company provided my email address to some entity outside of their domain. I know they either sold it or gave it away, or worse, unbeknownst to them someone in their own company is selling their mailing list off.
Because each address is unique, I always know exactly who sold my name. This lets me do two things:

1. I immediately contact the company that originally sold (or otherwise dispursed) my Sneakemail address. And I give 'em a potential blast of nastiness, couched in polite inquiries into their potential knowledge of the crime. That is, I give them a chance to tell me they were not aware, or to point out that somewhere along the line I missed the part in their Privacy Policy that said they could actually do this.

2. If I don't hear from them in a few days, I simply scrap the address. Here is the cool part: because each address is unique and applies to only one site or company, I never get any more junk mail... no matter how many junk mailers get sold that address. And I don't cancel my subscription to whatever it was, thereby allowing the offender to burden their mail servers with useless mailings to me, mailings that I will never see or even know about. On top of that, any spammer that is using that address is paying money for nothing, and weighing down their servers, too. Isnt' that fantastic?

A few caveats here: this is not particularly a push for Sneakemail; they just happen to be the anonymizer I chose. They are simple, effective, free, and offer many, many other benefits (for example, letting me c.c. any Sneakemail mail to my real address, so I have an extra record of any dealings). As well, I must point out that since I have been using Sneakemail, I have actually only received a very, very few pieces of spam to any of the unique addresses, which means to me that there are far more responsible companies out there on the Web than there are bad ones (either that  or I have been exceedingly lucky in my choices). And finally, just this week I received two pieces of unwanted junk mail trying to sell me some Men's Club party facilities, complete with pictures of comely babes in Bunny costumes... and both Sneakemail addresses pointed out that the originators (the guys who sold my name) are a pair of partners in very respectable newsletter businesses, whose names I won't mention here). The mails came from two different servers, but arrived within seconds of each other, and apart from the return addresses, were identical. Man, what a waste of everyone's time and money.

In conclusion, I urge everyone around the world to kill the Spam problem immediately. You don't ever have to give out your real email address; always use an anonymizer, and you will never be bothered again. Wouldn't you like to hook up to your messages in the morning and not have to worry about skimming through all the crap, wasting all that time deleting the stuff that gets through your well-intentioned but hopeless filters? And for God's sake, don't post your address anywhere.

If we all did this, wow, what a wonderful world this would be. Now if only the solution were as simple in the fight against crapware...

... Mike Riley

--------------------------------------
Protect yourself from spam,
use http://sneakemail.com

Drowning in a sea of rednecks.

What is going on with these red- necks, any- way? I was born in '52, and the prom- ise of a better world was everywhere. Everything was to be better, cleaner, brighter. Yeah, the 60's was a nightmare in many ways, but they also gave birth to a new way of thinking for young people: freedom from racism, from war, from hunger. Educations for everyone, international aid, faster communications bringing us closer together.

Yet now, these kids are running for president, and running the businesses, and trying to turn it all around, send us marching back through time into some kind of Conservative hell.

Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, once on the side of gays, is fighting same-sex marriage as part of his campaign. Fred Thompson, actor/senator presidential candidate, proudly proclaims his anti-abortion and pro-Iraq war stance. I know there are lots of dickheads out there already (see FOX News) who believe we should all be locked up for even having sex... but these guys are running for President of the United States (formerly a great world power). And they have support, for Christ's sake.

Well, maybe it's a good thing, I don't know... once the U.S. completely caves in upon itself, the rest of the world can move on.

But I still want to know --and nobody seems to be able to answer this-- what is their motivation? What is this going to get them? Are there truly that many voters out their who give a damn about these issues? And if there are, what is their motivation? Who does this kind of thinking actually help? I mean, what the @#$%@#$&!!?

Penn and Teller's BULLSHIT Show is just that

Wow. I loved Penn and Teller for years. Even went to see them with Bro Chris. Fantastic, fun, devilish. Even loved their BULLSHIT Show, wherein they have taken on everything from anti-Mexicans to professional colonicists (is that a word?).

But tonight they did a show ravaging Alcoholics Anonymous (and all 12-step groups), and they went too far. Their "cool tool" of obfuscating the issues by interviewing dorks with degrees, and making them look stupid on camera, now is obvious as just another way a couple of rich fucks can shape things to look different than they are.

Don't let their status in the entertainment world fool you anymore.

I'm a "recovered" alcoholic; haven't had a problem for over 25 years. P & T called AA a "religious group"; they interviewed a pissed-off lawyer (at one point in his career, he was told to quit drinking and join AA or get fired) to describe AA's use of the term "higher power" as only GOD, and a specific type of God, who would ruin your life if you didn't follow His ways.

BULLSHIT.

Nobody every pitched me that the higher power was God, unless I wanted it to be. AA members told me that higher power could be anything or anyone. Their definition of a higher power? "Whatever lets you admit that you are powerless over alcohol." Yes, you read that right: whatever. I chose the AA group as my higher power. And all that meant to me, was that I no longer had to worry why I was there, or what a bad person I was.

I quit drinking; I stayed in AA for over a year. Then I had had enough, and moved on. But I still don't drink.

P&T's BULLSHIT extends to them having us believe that AA teaches us we don't have a mind of our own, that without them, we are nothing. Fucking preposterous.

They showed two people, one pro AA and one anti-AA, arguing at a bar about whether or not it was a disease. And when the anti-AA gal finally said `Look, even if it is a disease, isn`t it your responsibilityÉ`, the other guy didn`t have an answer... because YEAH, and what`s your pointÉ

P&T's BULLSHIT tries to convince us that this almost-70-year old organization is strictly religious because it's headquarters are now in some church-organization building. Well, guess what? LOTS of people believe in God (I'm pretty atheistic myself), and so what? Whatever works. And it works.

P&T's BULLSHIT says that 70 years of never changing your technique is just stupid; after all, cures are improving all the time. And they use an old manual hand drill as a prop, trying to tell us that if doctors still drilled us to get out cancer, then we certainly wouldn't do that, would we? That's just redirection, my friend. Where's the logic in that argument? Look: if doctors still drilled us (and I have to look that one up... I don't think they ever drilled us for cancer), then we would still believe in it, and we would still do it, wouldn't we?

And they didn't offer us any indication that either science or medicine has any methods at all to cure addictions. More redirection.

Then they played the Big Brother card: lots of people have been ordered by the courts, by insurance companies, by employers: either get into a 12-step group and get cured, or lose (you fill in the blank: insurance, family, jobs). And they tell us that this is against our Constitutional rights (American, eh?). They forget to mention, again, two things: one, it is not our constituional right to abuse a substance so badly that we endanger our lives, our familys' lives, or our employers' well-being. Two, the damn programs work; always have worked; that's why people get ordered to go there.

Worse, P&T continue to attach this so called personal-rights thing to organized religion. So at the beginning of the show, they claim AA is a religious group... so by the end of the show, you are agreeing that we shouldn't be forced into religion against our will. Wow, obfuscation, redirection, and entrapment.

This may work for stage gags, but it doesn't work for me. Looks like these guys could use a 12-step group of their own: Bullshitters Anonymous.

'Nuff said.

Harumi: Psychedelic Rock

"one of the wildest and most unbelievably ambitious recordings to come from the psychedelic era."

"Simply put, there is nothing at all like this record in the known universe."

Thus arrives a re-release of an album by a Japanese rocker named Harumi (interestingly, that seems to be both a boy's and a girl's name in Japan). When I lived with Nanny & Grampa Weiss, Grampa had purchased a stereo that came with 100 free record albums. He was given a free membership in a record club, and every month he allowed me to pick two or three albums for myself. What a great guy.

Most of the records were way off any charts, so I chose by album cover. Harumi was a double-album set. I never knew anything about the guy, but the music was fantastic. Just what I was looking for in the age of psychedelic music. This would be about 1968. It was a huge relief to actually get a record that was good; there was a lot of crap available. I played it for Chris on a trip to Camp Petawawa; together we were thinking this guy was pretty good.

Imagine my surprise the other day when the All Music Guide informed me that, not only was the record now out on CD, but that the reviews were air-gaspingly good. Take a listen to an MP3 that someone thoughtfully has made available. If you are a 60's pysch-era rocker, you owe it to yourself to hit the record store and pick up a copy.

Cheevy Impalah

Lease is up in early July. Click here to see more photos of new house, Sunday April 29, 2007.

Moving is such sweet sorrow...

New House April 5 07

Click on the photo to see more...
April 12, 2007. Packing taken care of by Chapala Movers, we leave Los Angeles #93, and take the long journey (all two blocks of it) to San Mateo #25. Mom spends that night and the next few at Pat and Terry's house, with the doggies. Mike spends one night in the new place, and during the next few days does a bunch of stuff: organizing workers, and moving crap around to make it look like he's been working. Then he spends the first weekend, nights only, at Cecilia's.

In between he tries to do as many customer PC service calls as possible, working until late into the evening hours to catch up on the backlog. It promises to be many weeks before all is settled... especially since the Impala decides to vent its weariness by allowing a short, rusting wire to keep the gas pump from working in the mornings. Ah, dear. Mexico... .

McAfee a Bust

So what, prey tell, is up with McAfee? I have been uninstalling McAfee security software all over town, to give my customers their computer freedom back. McAfee (and let's be fair, Norton even more so) takes over a PC or laptop and eventually grinds it to a halt.

So I went up to us. mcafee.com to talk to tech support, because on one customer's machine today, I could not remove the program. It crapped out halfway through uninstallation, and then I was left with no ability to remove the program completely. And the damn startup files insinuate themselves into the startup routine all by themselves.

So guess what? They have no tech support, at least none that is accessible through their website. I even created an account and logged in to see if that would get me somewhere. Nope. Nowhere.

Any software company, especially a so-called security company, that doesn't provide access to the general public, is just a piece o' crap as far as I'm concerned. I'm not talking about the software itself, mind (although it is). I'm talking about the company.

I will pass this information along to my customers from now on, at every opportunity. Humbugs to you, Mc.

Bugs in AntiSpyWare tools

Everyone on the web consistently recommends Lavasoft's Ad-Aware SE and Spybot Search & Destroy, for protecting your PC. I install these two programs for most of my customers. Ad-Aware Pro, the version that includes Ad-Watch, is better because Ad-Watch loads at startup for live protection.

But I have yet to read anyone's comment, including the developers of these programs, about serious BUGS that each program has:

Ad-Watch often refuses to unload itself from memory, so when you click on Shut Down, it never does. This is a major pain in the ass. (Savvy users discovered a tool to unload all memory-resident programs, like Ad-Watch, to cure this: Google for Windows User Profile Hive Cleanup. It didn't work for me; maybe it will for you.)

Spybot version 1.4, which has been around for quite some time and is still the latest version, has a display bug that effectively hides half its message windows, so you can't properly make selections.

Both these bugs have been around for months and months, so now I don't install Ad-Watch for anyone (including myself), and I use Spybot 1.3.

Should I be complaining? Both these programs are free, yes, so never look a gift horse in the mouth, right? BUT my confidence in the ability of either of these programs to perform effectively and protect me and my customers from malware is seriously diminished, when the developers can't even be bothered to issue a fixed build.

Which brings me to Microsoft: not on the subject of anti-spyware, but their damn MSN Live Messenger. Did you know that early in October Microsft updated their server side, which immediately placed a bug in most user's client versions of Live Messenger, which in turn refused to allow them to connect! The little people heads that signify MSN just kept spinning, and spinning... When questioned, a Microsoft employee said he hoped that MS would issue a statement and a fix... but two weeks have gone by with nary a word from them. You'd think that with the millions of MSN users, this would have become an issue. I just don't understand it.

(You can fix this bug if you have it, in Live Messenge: Google for remove_wlmpolicies.reg)

Michael Caine in ZUNE

Oh, wait, that's wrong. He did a movie on the big screen called ZULU. But now you can watch it on Microsoft's tiny new ZUNE video player... .

Wow, Apple doesn't stand still long. Just when I was looking at picking up a 30Gig shiny, black video iPod thingy, for over $300 U.S., Steve Jobs comes out in a button-down shirt (I have it on good authority that his butler, Cato, put all his regular black turtlenecks in the drier and shrunk 'em just before the announcements) and tells us about a new video iPod, bigger, better, faster.

http://reviews.cnet.com/4326-6490_7-6546236.html?tag=cnetfd.mt&tag=nl.e501

At the same time, Microsoft announces their new Zune, an iPod fighter. Zune has wireless, so you can share tunes in the classroom or at work. Too cool. All these totally unnecessary items in our lives, enriching our futures.

http://reviews.cnet.com/4326-6490_7-6546547-1.html?tag=nl.e501

2006 TV Season

In the old days of rileyfamily.ca, I would post the full fall TV schedule for everyone to enjoy. Not much I like better than the anticipation of a buncha new shows. Usually, only two or three survive and they are often not ones I like.

In the absence of updating to our website, here with some great links you will find useful, as they hold everything you want to know: shows, weekly listings, and premiere dates... and even some reviews.

Network listings:
http://www.metacritic.com/tv/seasons/2006fall/networks.shtml

Premiere schedule:
http://www.metacritic.com/tv/seasons/2006fall/index.shtml

Yahoo! preview with video ads of all shows:
http://tv.yahoo.com/feature/fall06/