"I inhaled frequently. That was the point."

I haven't decided who I'm going to vote for in the primary, but I do like this quote from Barack Obama. Although he's not the first American politician to admit smoking marijuana, it is a very straight forward and honest answer.

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Belkin RMA

Today the wireless portion of our Belkin N1 Wireless Router (F5D8231-4) completely died. I tried everything in the manual and everything else I could think of, including rebooting, patching, using matching adapters, changing various configurations, and removing the wireless phone from the area, to try to bring it back, but no luck. Although I'm not happy that we have had this problem with the router, I am happy with the customer service from Belkin. After only a few minutes of convincing the call center representative that I knew how to configure wireless security and that it was not the problem, I was transfered to another representative to handle the RMA process. They are sending a replacement router. It should be here in 3 to 5 days. If they don't recieve my broken router within 20 business days, they will charge my credit card for the router. Fair enough. I'm hoping that the replacement router that Belkin sends out is version 2 and doesn't end up having the same issue. In the meantime, I set up our old Microsoft Broadband Networking Wireless Router, which is much slower (5x) and doesn't have the latest security protocols, but it works.

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Soft

A young lady in a soft blue dress resting in the shade at the Arizona Renaissance Festival today.

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Add Digg vote button on Blogger Template

I was playing around with trying to add a Digg button to my posts by editing my blog's template, but I was frustrated because my blog URL was being submitted to Digg instead of each post URL. I did a Google search and found the solution in ajaxcold.

To create a Digg button that floats to the right of each Blogger post:

1. Login to Blogger Dashboard.
2. Click Layout for blog you want to update.
3. Click Edit HTML.
4. Select Expand Widget Template.
5. Find and replace
   
   <p><data:post.body/></p>
   
   with
   
   <p>
   <!-- DIGG -->
   <div style="'float:right;">
   <script type="'text/javascript'">
   digg_url = '<data:post.url/>';
   </script>
   <script src="'http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js'" type="'text/javascript'/">
   </div>
   <data:post.body/>
   </p>
   


6. Click Save Template.

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Windows Deleted File Recovery

My mom accidentally deleted a file that's important to her. Unfortunately, I'm a continent away, so I can only make a few suggestions, not actively help her, in her data recovery. There are many ways to prevent data loss and recover if it has occurred.

If you have not experienced data loss, you're lucky, but not for long. The average life span of a hard drive is only 3 to 5 years. The best way to prevent data loss is to backup it up. However, one, you actually have to do it, and, two, backup media is also subject to deterioration over time. Burned CDs, as opposed to pressed ones, only have a shelf life of two to five years. Magnetic tapes may last 30 to 100 years, but are more expensive and take more space to maintain. You have to test your backups on a regular basis if you're doing your own backups.

Since I'm lazy when it comes to backing up my computers and I want to store as little media as possible that I'm not using regularly, my favorite way to keep my data secure is to delegate the responsibility to large IT organizations for as little cost as possible. I keep as much of my data online with reputable companies as possible. For example, I upload all of my edited photographs to Flickr. For about $25 per year I can upload an unlimited number of photos, up to 10 Mb each. I use Gmail, free 2+ Gb storage, for my email, and Google Docs and Spreadsheets, also free, for personal documents. I use Blogger, which you're reading and is another free online Google service, for my diary. For our small business documents, we pay for a secure SharePoint site to store other documents and share information. Network backups are a convenient, but very expensive, option, so I don't generally recommend it for home nor small business use. However, Amazon.com has a new set of inexpensive amazon web services that are worth looking into if you're a developer or considering custom solutions. I know how to keep my data safe, but I'm not vigilant enough on my own to maintain a great backup system, so I rely on companies with large staffs devoted to IT to keep my data available to me.

There are utilities that you can install that replace the trash can with a different file deletion system that protects your files for longer, but that is essentially the same as putting files in the trash can and not deleting them. I don't recommend that kind of solution because it wastes a lot of valuable hard drive space. Just make sure that you throw away the files you no longer need and check the files in the trash can before emptying to make sure you really want to delete the files that are in there.

But, what if you don't have a backup or secure retrieval system? First, stop using the hard drive from which you want to try to recover data. When a file is created in Microsoft Windows, it has a file header that marks the location of the information and the content of the file. When you delete a file, the file header is marked indicating that the space occupied by the file is now available to be used. Unless you use utilities that overwrite the information securely when you delete, the content of your file will still be available on the hard disk, until the space is needed for another file, or you take other steps like defragmenting the hard drive that will overwrite that space. Do as little as possible, preferably nothing, using the computer with the file that you want to undelete until you are ready to do so.

The next step in file recovery, it to go to a different computer and copy a file recovery utility to writable, removable media, such as a floppy or USB stick, that the computer with the deleted file can read. There are many utilities available for simple file retrieval, some of which are free, for example Freeundelete and Recuva.

Bring the media back to the computer on which you're trying to undelete a file and run the program from the media. It will typically search your hard drive for deleted files that it can recover, then give a list of files to choose from and include options of where to recover files to, preferably a different drive than the one that you are trying to recover. Hopefully, you'll be able to find the file that was accidentally deleted and recover it.

Technorati tags: JanineWhite, blogs, file, Windows, recovery, technology, backups, free, online, services, undelete

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Blogger Labels Warning

Thia week I switched to using the new Blogger editor. Although it has been a bit of a pain copying over much of the sidebar content that the automatic conversion missed, I like the new template editing features. I also like the addition of labels for posts. However, I have found one thing that I consider a bug, although Blogger probably considers it a feature.

When I was checking my RSS feed to make sure everything is working correctly, I found that the entries are showing up in the wrong order. They are showing up in the order that they have been updated, not the order in which they were originally published. I have been updating some of my posts with labels, now that the feature is available in Blogger. Unfortunately, doing this updates the modified date, which Blogger uses to order the feed for my blog. The only way to get my blog feed back in order is to edit the labels for all of my entries in order and never change any of my entries after I publish them. If I had known this would be the impact of adding lables, I wouldn't have started. The posts should be displayed in the feed in the order they are originally posted, not updated, or the software should be able to determine that the update was for only labels, not content, and not update the modified date.

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Antique

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J.A.N.I.N.E.

Get Your Cyborg Name

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Wireless Adapters Adventure

Yesterday, I helped a friend purchase and set up wireless networking at his apartment. He ended up buying the same Belkin N1 Wireless Router that I have with which I have been quite happy, but he also used a Belkin Wireless Network USB 2.0 Adapter N1 to communicate with it, while I'm using legacy 802.11a/b/g wireless adapters. The difference in bandwidth potential is considerable. One of his desktops was able to get 300 Mbps. I purchased new adapters for our laptops today to see if it would help boost our weak 18 Mbps connection.

I accidentally purchased 1 Belkin N1 Wireless Notebook Card and 2 Belkin Wireless Express Cards N1, instead of 3 of the former PC Card wireless adapters. I wasn't even aware that there was such a thing as Expresscard. It turns out that Expresscard is an updated version of the PC Card interface, both of which originated from PCMCIA. Some new laptops are coming out with just Expresscard interfaces. My husband installed the PC Card adapter, which boosted his reception to 54 Mbps. It's still not blazing fast since we usually use our laptops in the living room far away from the office, but it's a definite improvement.

I considered just getting a PC Card to Expresscard adapter because I assume that most new products will be coming out in this form factor, but, unfortunately, there aren't a lot of options for converting between these two CardBus controllers at this time. Duel Systems is about to come out with an Expresscard to PC Card adapter, but I'm looking to go the other direction. There is a Novatel V640 Expresscard Adapter soon to available from Verizon, but there are compatibility issues because it only works with a CardBus with a CardBay interface, i.e., check for Smart CardBus controller, which is not supported by my laptop. Here's a thread tracking laptop compatibility with this product. Siig has announced that it has the ExpressCard/34 Card Carrier (SIIG part # JU-EC0011-S1) under development, but no date for release. The bottom line for me is that I'll have to return the Expresscard adapters and buy PC Card adapters instead for now. We're also considering getting an N1 booster or moving the router closer to the living room, but either will require either electrical or cable rewiring.

Technorati Tags: Belkin, 802.11, N1, wireless, router, adapter, LAN, WLAN, PCMCIA, PC Card, Expresscard, CardBay, CardBus, technology, hardware, JanineWhite, blogs

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