…That this sums up Palin pretty well.

The first article has been posted to PSVibes.com, with many more to come this week.

You can check it out right here.

So after a year, my WD MyBook failed. It has been studdering over the past few months, but I figured that it was no big deal, really. Today Finder nearly crashed trying to access the disk. A reformat did nothing to help it.

It’s a 500GB USB model, purchased in July of 2007. Just over a year old.

I’m quite surprised at the low quality of Western Digital’s external models, since I’ve never had an internal WD drive fail, at all.

Of course, if I would have simply Googled “WD mybook sucks” I would’ve found out about the mediocre quality of the Mybook series.

At least it wasn’t a mission critial drive, just being used as a Time Machine backup. I popped in a new-ish external WD disk, and the backup was done in a matter of minutes. I highly reccomend running Time Machine on an internal disk if you can, it backs up faster and uses less CPU while doing so.

Within a week or two…

A shot from the fence that surrounds Harvard university in Boston, from my May visit.

As an expansion on my last article, I felt the need to expand on what I said about marketing by anti-virus companies, and software vendors in general.

I find it kind of disheartening that anti-virus companies market their products as the only way you can protect yourself from viruses. They play their software off as this magical thing that will stop every virus in it’s tracks. We know this simply isn’t true. Infact, most anti-viruses only detect 80% of infections, and that percentile is only dropping more and more every day.

The truth is, anti-malware software is really only there to alert you to a possible infection. 99% of the time you need to reinstall Windows anyways. This stuff roots in so deep it’s almost impossible to remove.

By giving consumers a false sense of security, they start to take part in more and more risky activities. This is just the opposite of what we want. Of course, this gives the anti-virus software a chance to step in and say, “oh look, we found a virus in that last illegal song you downloaded!”. The consumer thinks “well it’s doing it’s job! It caught it!”, and they continue on their merry way, not realizing that the malware might be doing more stuff the security software might not catch.

This seems to come off as false advertising. Wouldn’t a doctor be in some sort of legal trouble if he said he could cure your cancer without an invasive procedure such as radiation, surgery, or chemo? I thought so.

The most important anti-virus software is you. Yes, you. If you’re smart about what you do, such as not visiting risky websites, not downloading shady content (legal or not), not opening email attachments from people you don’t know, and keeping your software up to date, you’re golden. I know many people who run a Windows PC without anti-virus, and they’ve never had an issue.

If we taught people how to properly use their computers, instead of letting software cleaning up after them, we’d have a much safer online experience.

Snapped this one in another Boston Cemetery. Was at about 4 in the afternoon, so the sun was setting behind the tree to the left. I’m surprised this one turned out as well as it did.

It occured to me recently that the magority of computer users don’t really see the computer as a tool - they see it as a challenge. A mysterious box that they don’t really know much about.

I’m still amazed at the amount of rain we’re getting here. It’s like we live under a giant hose or something.