CHRISdotTODD

The Net Neutrality bills are not fairing well in congress, but states are still pushing. Anne Broache published an article today, " State governments push for Net neutrality laws ," that talks about the push by New York and California for the feds to adopt a net neutrality law. It is great to see states step up where the feds have failed us. I have been pretty worried that this would be one more thing that the average consumer was going to lose out on. News.com seems to be following this rather closely, with a special website covering the issues, including some videos. I found an opinion piece by Cory Doctorow , published in Information Week that does a good job telling how folks will lose out if there is no protection from the bandwidth providers. This is a great quote from Cory, " It's a dumb idea to put the plumbers who laid a pipe in charge of who gets to use it." And he concludes with, "This is the start of the network neutrality fight, not the end o...

I wonder how popular is RSS? Does the average person now know what RSS is? And if so, do they use it? I have been using Feedreader for some time now, and I like the preview of headlines that appear in the lower-right corner of my screen every hour. Occasionally, I even read the articles associated with the headlines. I have had trouble matching up my interests -- finding feeds on topics of interest -- as well as making the time to read them. I find my self most often reading the headlines while I am waiting for another process on my machine, and therefore my computer is slow to respond to reach the details to read. I find that I tend to follow technical related topics more than other items, but I wonder if my adoption would be even higher if it was even closer to the work I do. I hear surprisingly a lot that managers in my organization do not want to go to a website to get status on a project or to get data -- they want it fed to them via email or even worse, invite them to a meeting....

On Friday I installed Microsoft Project Standard 2003, and the main view window was completely blank. I went through the menus and options, tried updating Windows and the Project Service Pack, and tried to repair and also re-install. Nothing helped. I called Microsoft -- they give you two free calls for their $600 package. It took 20 minutes to get an agent (roughly 10 minutes of hold and 10 minutes for a Call Taker to start a trouble ticket). I spend another 35 minutes with a Project Specialist, and nothing he had me try worked. He promised to call me on Monday, and he did, but after another 20 minutes, he was stuck again. He promised to have a more senior person call by Tuesday. During the two calls, I learned that through disabling the Display Project Guide feature, everything else works. I also learned that this feature requires Internet Explorer -- I wonder why that is? I mean apparently Microsoft has not learned their lesson about making applications dependant on IE. And further,...

I have been using a 3G (3rd generation) iPod for some time that would not hold its charge. I was forced to always keep it plugged in and miss the advantages of listening where ever I wanted. Then in April I ran across an article that said there are replacement do-it-yourself batteries. Sure enough, I found one at Fry's. [I just searched Google on "ipod replacement battery," and got over 5 million results.] It was not easy, but I did successfully change the battery. The not-so-helpful instructions within the package were line drawings, so I went on a search for better instructions. Most of what I found was not any better. Take for example the instructions from ipodbattery.com . They have a much better visual representation than my original instructions, but they never really help you understand how to remove the case and just how hard it is. I eventually found eshop.macsales.com , and they provided a video -- once I learned how to navigate to the right video. In their exam...