Feeling proud of myself today in a McGiver-ish kind of way ;).

You know those semi-fun, semi-annoying Hallmark birthday cards with sound? The ones that make you wonder whether it's worth spending five bucks on a birthday card?

Well I was about to toss one today when I thought, hmm, I live in California, I'm not supposed to toss batteries in the trash. So I ripped open the card to pull out the battery and lo and behold, it's a Newsun CR2032 3V Lithium battery. CR2032 is the size of the CMOS battery in all the Dell computers I've checked. Sure enough, it's working fine as a replacement in an old Dimension desktop.

Woo-hoo! Free CMOS battery! Now, I wonder what I should to with the miniature speaker that was in the card...

Occasionally on my Windows XP Pro SP3 machine, Outlook 2007 SP2 will tell me that it has had an error receiving POP mail from my SBS 2003 server, which resides on the same network.

I started a command prompt and typed "ping myserver.mydomain.local". Sure enough, I get back the message "Ping request could not find host myserver.mydomain.local. Please check the name and try again."

An nslookup works fine, so I know the SBS server is there and is responding to DNS requests.

In fact, I can "ping myserver" without problems. But for some reason, pinging the fully-qualified internal name doesn't work.

Sometimes, I can just type "ipconfig /flushdns" to clear this up. Today that didn't work. However once I actually stopped and started the DNS cache, ping started working and so did email:

net stop DNScache
net start DNScache

Years ago, I learned to follow a simple procedure for creating secure passwords:

1. Think of a sentence with at least eight words. Include capital and lowercase letters, numbers, and punctuation.

2. Use the fist character from each word, along with the numbers and punctuation, as the password.

For example, "More people are driving Toyota hybrids 2 work!" becomes "MpadTh2w!". "Mom spent $20 on groceries @ Vons" becomes "Ms$20og@V".

How Secure Is That?

More...

Racing through the Colorado Springs (COS) airport yesterday, I just had to stop and snap this picture of the Arrivals screen:

Sure enough, a common Windows error:

Fortunately I was not trying to check the 4:10pm arrivals!

Another blogger caught this error and an actual BSOD in Bangkok:

Airport Digital Advertising – Does The Media Match the Medium?