Tag: post

  • Panda and Vince – Googles latest updates

    And… there was also a caffeine update.  Well, mid October there was an update to Panda – somewhere in there was a Vince update and then caffeine saw an update in early November.  Did you notice a change in the search results?  Do you feel like they’re better or worse?

    Panda Gao Gao in San Diego Zoo, USA
    Image via Wikipedia

    I’ve had several sites that have “fluctuated” through these updates, some better, some worse.  One or two were dramatically worse.

    I don’t seem to be alone in seeing some impact and here’s a summary of what the issue is and what to do about it.

    Panda is about lowering the importance of sites that are thin in content.  It has been easy to rank sites without much content for some time.  Just throwing a few back links (in many cases also thin on content) and you could do quite well.

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  • Gateway gt4022 Won’t Boot | Won’t Post | Dead Motherboard

    The title says most all, the system would start to act as though it was powering up. The LED would come on for a second and the fans would start. The fans stayed on, but the LED went right back off and the system didn’t seem to POST, or show anything on the onboard video. This is a Gateway gt4022 with a 64 bit AMD processor and I think was Media Center edition of Windows XP. Anyway, I pulled the memory and CPU hoping to hear some sort of BIOS beep code, but no such luck. I pulled everything at one point with the exception of the power to the main board. It still gave the same symptoms. I tried another power supply just in case, same…. So, as I started to read online it seems that the motherboard in these Gateway gt4022’s may be a problem….

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  • Virus Warning – Email Subjects – IRS Notice – Important Information from the IRS

    I’ve seen a couple of these emails today and wanted to give a post just to warn people that these are bogus and you should NOT follow the link suggested in the email. I HOPE no one reading this falls for it, but the “tax software update” that they are pushing is a virus. (SHOCK!) Only a little over half the antivirus vendors currently detect it.

    Read on for details on the message body…

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  • Back into a Routine

    I think things are settling back to where I’ll be doing some more routine posting here. I know I’ve been sporadic for the last several months, but the truth is that at one point I had poured so much time into my sites I really burnt out on them. Now I’m taking a new approach and trying to keep my goals realistic. My intent is to have 1 post per week here. (As well as some of my other sites.) So, expect to see new content here on Mondays starting with tomorrow January 21, 2008. Also, I expect the look and feel may change soon. (Don’t know I really like where I’ve got the theme at the moment, but…. there are things I’m not too fond of.) Anyway, my host is upgrading their software and so as a result it will make it possible for me to upgrade to the latest branch of wordpress.

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  • Print spool problem after windows update

    It’s been a while since I’ve had an “on-topic” post here, but as you might imagine quite a bit has been going on. I had this peculiar problem reported to me in the last week about print spool issues with certain models of printers following the official windows update day.

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  • Meniere’s Disease – diagnosed yesterday

    Update – you can follow more about my experiences with Meniere’s Disease at my Meniere’s diagnosis blog.

    Well… after several doctors visits, I have been diagnosed with Meniere’s Disease. Let me back up a bit…. several years ago I started getting a stuffy feeling in my right ear on occasion. I had allergies and it reminded me of an ear infection years ago, but I didn’t have a fever. It would come for a few days and go. Of course, it was always the right ear and I would always have a hard time hearing out of that ear. Occasionally, it would be accompanied by a roaring sound like a fan…. sometimes loud, sometimes soft. Sometimes it would feel like the ear drum was “tight as a drum” as you could actually FEEL sounds as well as hearing them slightly. Eventually I just got used to it coming and going. I’ve chalked it up to allergies…. over the years I’ve been prescribed and taken most every allergy medication I can think of and the next step was allergy shots…. well, it was a nuisance not a MAJOR problem, just a nuisance. Then… I would start feeling dizzy if my ear had been stopped up for 3-5 days running or more. That was still inconvenient, but I knew when to expect it and could manage…. Then the vertigo hit…. April 2006…

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  • X-Plane and linux

    I’ve mentioned X-Plane before – it’s a flight simulator that strives to be as accurate flight modeling -wise as possible. Realism is one of their goals and it’s also unique in that it’s available for Mac/Windows and Linux (version 8 that is). (There is flightgear also, but X-Plane has still felt like better competition for Microsoft’s Flight Simulator line.) Anyway… Version 8 had linux support. Version 9 has beta’s out now for Windows and Mac, but there are rumors in the forums that version 9 may not see linux support. (Apparently the person in charge of the linux port has been hired by Google and was working on the linux port in his free time gratis…) I hope we’ll see a version 9 of X-Plane for linux. I wish I could lend help, but bash scripting is pretty much the zenith of my coding skills. (BTW – version 9 LOOKS nice from the screenshots I’ve seen. Here come a few more x-plane related thoughts….

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  • Upcoming “thought” dump

    As you can tell, it’s been a little while since a post here. Partly due to health/partly due to being busy. I wanted to note a few upcoming posts are coming to round up a couple trains of thought that I’ve still got running (due in part to the open browser tabs that I just can’t seem to let myself close….)

  • Epson stylus photo 825 clogged print head woes

    I don’t recall if I’ve mentioned my Epson stylus photo 825 before, but I’ve had one for a couple years. The really nice feature (I thought) was the ability to print direct from camera memory cards (at the time I bought it, this was much more rare than in current printers.) Anyway, it had GREAT print quality and could print up to the edge of the paper. Unfortunately, I use my laser printer (monochrome hp 4p) for 95%+ of my day to day printing and the epson sat unused for stretches of time and eventually I’ve wound up with a bunch of jets clogged on the print head. I’ve been taking increasingly drastic steps to try to get the thing to print well again.

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