It took about 30 seconds with Google to establish that you are Timothy Lord. There's an MP3 I found of you giving a talk where you even identify your Slashdot ID. So we can get that right out of the way.

Now then.

I Googled Timothy Lord, Tim Lord, both with and without quotation marks. You know what?

There are roughly 7 billion (Timothy Lord) and 10 billion (Tim Lord) hits on that name without quotes. It goes down to close to 100,000 hits to 17,000 hits when you add quotes.

Timothy Lord isn't that uncommon a name. "Tim" and "Lord" by themselves are very common. I have a hard time imagining any employer going through all those search results when there's not really any way of knowing that the Tim Lord they're reading about doing something somewhere at a university computer some time in the past is the Tim Lord they're interviewing for a job. And even if they did, you could always deny it, unless you're under oath or something, but I guess that's a moral question you only have to think about if they went through the hassle of Googling you and getting this hit to begin with.

If your name were, oh, "Cornelius Mytzlplyk" I'd say you have a pretty valid concern here. But "Tim Lord?" I don't think so.

Remember the Thinkpad 701 with the folding, "Butterfly Keyboard?" Combine that screen with this keyboard and you'd have quite the portable "transformer." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dj-5OI2tPlY

I have a small-but-nice vintage arcade game collection in my living room, and it occurred to me a few years back that these old upright cabinets would make for a pretty good coffin, especially my beloved Sinistar.

Then genius struck: remove the monitor (and I guess the boards too - let another collector use 'em), slap my lifeless remains in there so my face is right behind the glass, and BOOM, we have the makings of a great open-casket for what will surely be a somber wake.

Extra points for the nerdy friend who manages to get the game's synthesized voice to occasionally cry out BEWARE! I live!.

I love my old keyboards, and not just the Model M's.

I have 4 Model M's, and two of them have the EraserHead/Pointer Nipple dealie built-in like a Thinkpad. I have one classic Chicony AT with similar bucking springs inside. And I have 5 First-Generation Apple Extended Keyboards (model M0115) which I use with modern computers with an ADB-USB Converter from Griffin. As a professional writer, I've come to learn that a great-feeling keyboard actually adds the the writing experience, and makes the time pass by much more quickly.

That said, when I work in a cubicle farm (which happens from time to time as a tech writer), my Model M's are a problem. Their "clickety-clackety" machine-gun staccato usually irritates the hell out of everyone in earshot, and it doesn't take more than a hour or so for someone to ask me to use another keyboard. So do consider asking your office neighbors about it before shelling out big bucks for one.

On top of that, and this sounds like something right out of Office Space, but a Model M destroys the illusion of "constant productivity." Good managers know that you can't be typing for 8 hours straight, but Pointy Haired Bosses have no clue, and soon start to figure out when you're typing and when you're browsing Slashdot when you use a Model M. Quiet keyboards don't give your down-time away.

A good Apple M0115 (now nearly 20 years old) is a good combination between great key action and relative quiet, (it just goes "tappetty-tap") and as a bonus, it still works on your old Apple IIGS!

A new Muppet Show is obviously on the way...

I'm...going...to...see...it...again...and...again.

+1 if you get the reference.

(Hint: SNL)

First of all, let's not resort to namecalling here.

Neil tested the the software on 12 different infected systems, and found that one resulted in an endless-loop problem requiring support, whereas it installed and worked properly on the others. That right there alone is a better than 90% success rate for Norton. That's hard data. What hard data have you come up with after your extensive testing of av products, Killall? Yeah, I didn't think so.

But this isn't a story about the program's performance (that's in the linked product review). This is a story about the failure of support and a support staff's overzealous attempts to make an extra buck from a desperate customer.

No one expects any free or retail software to clean out all problems all the time, but when you pay for a retail software package, a modicum of free support is part of the deal after a failure to install. Contrary to the tech's assertions, the purchase price include support to install a retail product. If the tech doesn't want to go through the hassle of installing AV products on infected systems via telephone or remote, then the tech should search for another line of work. (And I know - I did this sort of support for 5 years.)

If there were truly no free solutions (and it turns out there were) AT A MINIMUM the tech support person should have offered the option to refund the customer's money after establishing the software wouldn't install. That's not great "tech support," but it at least fair "customer support."

There's also the matter of the tech offering paid services rather than directing the user to free services offered by Norton themselves for just this sort of problem. Offering paid support services for free products is an established business model (SugarCRM anyone?), but ignoring free solutions offered by your own company in order to make an extra buck with a paid solution for a retail product is simply disrespectful to the customer, as is not offering a refund, and Neil called 'em on it. What is your problem with that again?

And finally, there's the little act of plagiarism where the tech represented a third-party free antispyware cleaner as a Symantec product. Also disrepectful, especially when Symantec has its own free tools that are supposed to do the job too. And again, Neil called 'em on it.

Most product reviewers just rewrite press releases without any real testing these days - Neil is one of the few that really tests these things out on banks of infected systems, and then goes through the trouble of pretending to be a normal customer going through tech support to see how it works. There just aren't that many tech reviewers doing that anymore. Personally, I can only think of one other, and modesty prohibits me from mentioning who.

So let's direct that anger to Symantec rather than the reviewer, eh? Symantec dropped the ball on this one.

I guess I am missing something, but Boxee is ultimately software, right?

So why can't the Boxee people program their software to look like a regular web browser on a regular computer to Hulu's servers, making Boxee indistinguishable to those providers who would care?

Sort of like a User Agent Switcher for a media player? It seems to me that would be a big "FU" to the content providers, a big win for viewers, and Hulu is left out of the loop altogether so they're not to blame.

Look, I know how you feel. I'm a professional writer and journalist, and the digital files I save are pretty much the only result of my life's work, so I try to save them for the future. I'm in the same position, but I seem to have a system that works.

Amazingly, (or sadly, depending on your opinion) I also have all of the documents and material I've ever created (starting with the disks from my Apple //e from high school in the mid 80's, to my emails and my first book's Word files from the early 90's, and everything since including about 300GB of photos) still immediately accessible and viable. It comes from the following understanding:

Hard drives (or basically any storage medium) can and do fail, but they tend to do so in a predictable pattern, but rarely at the same time, so the key is duplication and regular maintenance.

For example, hard drives tend to have a 5-year lifespan, but two identical hard drives in two different machines aren't going to fail on the same day unless there's a fire or natural disaster that wipes out your room/building/city/whatever.

So what I do is have a system where your data is regularly backed up or duplicated at least two times to at least two devices, and then regularly check them. These days I use syncing software that copies my files to a second drive (internal or external - doesn't matter) and then to a second drive to another computer on the LAN. If the syncing software can't read the destination disk during the sync process, then I immediately know something's wrong with that disk, but it's no big deal to replace it and resync, because the chances of the original disk and the first duplicated filestore of both going bad in those couple of days is basically nil. The syncing happens every night. (And I know, I'm already up to three drives, but two drives would be fine, and drives are cheap anyways.)

Every few months or so, I grab a portable external drive from my office a few towns over and make a new copy of my files, and then return the portable drive. The chances of both all my home copies of my files AND the external drive at my office going bad at the same time is practically nil. And the chance of a major natural disaster destroying the disks at both locations is very remote too.

And then replace any drive that fails as the years pass. The new drives will be much bigger than the originals, allowing for more room for more data as the years pass.

Frankly, I think the notion of keeping digital data store that remains inert for decades is silly. You're always making new data. You (probably) always want it backed up. So the data store should always be changing. Once you accept that, and then accept a storage medium that allows for regular changing and updating, and then accept the need for duplication, then data storage isn't risky. Add automated software to do the syncing for you, and it isn't even troublesome.

(And what about those Apple // files, you ask? I have two working Apple //s I still play with to read the duplicated original disks. But those disks were also copied to a Compact Flash card, which I now use on the IIGS as a hard drive. The CF card is backed up to the PC, which an Apple II emulator reads just fine. The backup image of the CF card is always synced between the hard drives. I know, TMI.)

Before the efforts of Internet Watch Foundation, I had never seen the image they were all worked up about, which is at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Virgin_Killer.jpg.

And now, thanks to their tireless efforts to protect me from myself, I have seen it.

Good work, IWF!

Sorry about that last post. Apparently I have a free plan that's been grandfathered into the new pay plan schemes for transcriptions.

It's still cheaper than phonetag.com, but it isn't free.

My apologies.

There's a service called Youmail (over at, wait for it, youmail.com) that does basically the same thing, but they have a free plan. The free plan's transcription service isn't as accurate as the paid plan, but it's quite acceptable (and sometimes pretty good for a laugh). And they can text you, email you, and even attach an MP3 of the recording.

Here's a typical example of the free transcription:

"So what it's jim the reason I called use I was i'm trying to figure out if maybe you actually picked up my day planner when you were here last time. I'm going crazy because it can't find it if I lose it um. Really shop so wanna choose maybe scooped it up and stuck in your bag and. What did you check your bag before you had it over anyway talk to it or not by. "

So when I get this message in my email box (I use a Treo, so it arrives within about a minute of my missing or ignoring the call) I know it's not a call about the SQL server going down or the RAID filseverver making funny noises, and I can get back to him when I choose to. Plus in this case, I can check my bag for his daytimer before I even call him back.

Why I was marked a Troll for mentioning Youmail earler when I said basically the same thing as Feepness is beyond me...

I know how you feel (I hate having to drop everything and listen to a message - especially when the freaking message is nothing more than "Call me"), and I hate to sound like a commercial but...

Youmail has made voicemail and my cell phone a lot more livable. It takes over for the voicemail functions of your provider and records the incoming message. It optionally sends you a text message with the details of the call (phone number, duration, message left or not) and optionally texts or emails you a transcription of the message. The free version uses what is at times a comical transcription, but it is still normally enough to figure out what your caller was trying to tell you (and sometimes it is spot-on), and the texts and emails are free too. The $7 a month version uses a more accurate transcription method.

It also emails you an MP3 of the message. Of course, you can also call them up and listen to your messages, or go to the website and listen to them online rather like visual voicemail. It makes voicemail almost as good as a pager in a lot of ways. ;-)