Daniel Voyles

The following story is true to my best recollection, and happened a couple of years ago.

I  shy away from working on personal computers for one major reason – people who are sue-happy. A PC is a machine, it breaks mechanically as well as by software. Had a woman who asked me to look at a PC, I did, and after I had her reboot, it would not come up. I left, after doing nothing to the PC other than plugging in a USB thumb drive (software tools I commonly use are on the thumb drive).

She told me I had broken it and needed to pay to have it replaced after her ‘friend’ she gets weed from said it was non-repairable. We had a few missed phone calls back and forth, but I offered to pay 1/2 of the repair cost at a neutral shop to be nice. I should point out that she suggested I buy her a ~$1,500 laptop to replace the 5+ year old desktop her weed-buddy said I broke.

Then she contacted the MVPD who told her(according to her message) that I had likely downloaded personal information from her PC using my thumb drive (thanks for that, MVPD), and was a criminal planning to exploit that information. Finally she left me a message that said she had ‘better not find me out anywhere’ and that I should ‘come back by her house because her dogs have something for me’.

Long story short, I’m shying away from doing PC work for anyone other than immediate family. Until I am incorporated and have a much better liability policy, my family cannot afford the risk even though I love helping people.

I won’t mention her company for fear of being sued, but her family runs a local pest control company, beware.

For many years in a row now the Mount Vernon Primary Center has failed to reach the NCLB standards. This leads to an option for us to send our kids to other schools in the area, however the superintendents of the districts have allegedly colluded to not accept students from any of the other’s districts.

Recently, we were also informed that our children are afforded tutoring since the district continues to fail the standardized tests. I have not read up fully on that aspect, but how long can this go on before the government comes in and just shuts them down? I would think not too long.

Not to mention all of the wonderful new tools like smartboards the teachers have, but some don’t even know how to use by their own admission. No doubt these tools were paid for with one of the many, many fundraisers they send home for us to pawn junk off to our friends and family every year. Apparently the fundraising isn’t actually helping much.

However, the majority of teachers I have interacted with are nice and seem to care a great deal about the children they are charged with educating. However, the children must have some desire to learn. That desire to learn starts at home with parents enforcing that skool larnin’s is ipo’tent.

I fear that a chunk of the children are not receiving this reinforcement at home, and thus they do not give a shit about how they do on the standardized testing.

As a result, the rest of the school suffers with a continued failure to meed NCLB standards. This leads to absolutely zero education for our children outside of math, grammar, and spelling. A snippet of music, physical education, and a tiny bit of technology are about it from what I understand.

Now, instead of pinning the failure of the school to meet NCLB standards on one neighborhood school or two, all children must suffer. Those who can afford to do it, send their children to one of the local private schools to avoid the quagmire.

In turn, this leads to the school still receiving the same amount of taxes to operate, but having to educate fewer children. Was this planned? I don’t know. Still, it is the end result.

Still, the facility looks great when businesses or prospective residents take a tour. I feel sorry for them if they are not smart enough to ask for the NCLB results though…

Christ. Apparently I can’t send Amaya or Erich to school with a peanut butter sandwich now because the Primary Center is now a ‘nut-free zone’. I have many wisecracks about that assumption, given this idiotic decision, but I’ll hold them for now.

I know that some people are allergic to nuts, fine. Sucks to be them, especially as a kid, and I agree we should accomodate them as well as is possible. Unfortunately, I also feel that attempting to make an entire school nut-free is idiotic.

This point was made very evident to me tonight. Em sent a note to Erich’s teacher about bringing cupcakes in for his birthday on Wednesday. The teacher sent home a nice little note about how that would be fine and that right after lunch would be a good time. Unfortunately, we must go purchase the special nut-free cupcakes from Kroger or Wal-Mart since the ones on the shelf are made at a plant where they may have been breathed-on by someone who had a peanut butter sandwich 3 months ago.

Yes, I exaggerate, but it’s to make a point. What happens if Erich is allergic to honey? Do we get to ban honey and honey containing products from the school, school lunches, etc.? How about gluten? Gluten is a new hot-button allergy that people are scared of.

I understand that a kid with a bad nut allergy needs to have special accomodations, but damn. There has to be a line drawn somewhere. Perhaps I’ll send him to school with peanut butter cookies.

Well, another school year has begun. The kids are enjoying their time, and I think sissy is taking to the learning better than she had previously. Things are definitely looking up in that department.

The sad part for me is that I’m not going back to school. I have my degree, a few certificates, and no job. Thanks to the state not paying their bills (I love Illinois), my internship-that-would-have-been-full-time-after-graduation has evaporated. Heck, I still haven’t received my pay from the last two weeks of work. It’s only been 3 months, and I’m sure a non-operating company needs the money more than I do.

To this point, I have been to several interviews. One of them I blew by being late (pretty sure) thanks to some construction that started the same day as my interview. No warning from the employer, nothing on Google, and I had actually allowed myself an extra 1/2 hour in travel time to be safe. Ah well, live and learn.

Unfortunately, I still have no employment to show for all of my applying and interviewing. I’m not expecting a miracle living in Mount Vernon, as there aren’t many decent employers. Something would be nice though. I’m almost to the point of shoveling horse stalls. Somebody has to pay the mortgage, and I’m not getting it done with applications or interviews.

There you go. Venting some frustration. I’m not whining, really. Just frustrated that finding employment is so difficult in our area.

El yay. I finally got my AAS degree in the mail today. I now have proof that I spent two years fine-tuning my IT skills with official curriculum. Rend Lake definitely has a great program in my opinion. The instructors go out of their way to help you learn material.

While at RLC I picked up quite a bit of knowledge about networking, VoIP, and LAN/WAN design. While most of my Windows support experience was at my job/internship, that’s normal. Most of IT is basic knowledge with a lot of real world experience thrown into the mix.

It was a strenuous path to keep going sometimes, but well worth the trip. I met a lot of great people in the program too. Most of us are still in contact via the various social networks. Perhaps we can all have a reunion at some point.

I have to say that I’m kind of proud of myself for attaining a degree. Yes, I know an Associate degree isn’t a huge accomplishment, but it’s what I’ve got and I worked hard for it.

Now if I could just get this job thing worked out…

This is a reprint of an article from my Ask a Geek column in the Mount Vernon Register-News. It is written for a general audience, and I hope you like it.

You’re sitting in front of your computer after booting into the operating system and cleaning out your extra startup junk. Now what do you do?

If you are like most people, you either start a web browser or email program. Even if you open a web browser first, most everyone I know goes to check their web-based email. I think that we still get excited at communication with others, even if it’s just letters on a screen. Just like people get excited when they get a package in the mail, we get excited at email from friends and family.

So what do you use for email? There are a great many programs that would like to be your email handler: Outlook Express or Mail, Outlook, Thunderbird, Eudora, Opera Mail, and others. Each of these have their positives and negatives. Some are expandable, heavy, light, built-in to browsers (Opera) and everything in between.

Everyone has their own preference about how they like to access their email, and deciding on a client may require you to try out a few different applications before you figure out what is right for you. I’ll give you my opinions and some overviews here, but try them out and see what you like to use.

Outlook Express (Mail in Vista) is the free client that Microsoft includes in Windows. It is effective at downloading your email and keeping together for you. OE is not a grand program by any means, but it will download email from Hotmail (now Live), which is a big plus if you use that service. Otherwise, it is an extremely simple program that does not do much for you.

Outlook is Microsoft’s professional email program, and rightfully so. I am not a fan of giving Microsoft money, but their Outlook software is excellent. Outlook can keep track of your email, mark it for follow-up, keep track of tasks, and archive your email in files so that you can store them however you need. All of this it does out of the box, and many companies make plugins for Outlook so that you can do even more. Put simply, if you have the money, this is an email program that you should check out.

If you don’t have the money to invest in Outlook, I strongly recommend Mozilla Thunderbird (http://mozilla.com) as an alternative. Thunderbird is a free and open-source email program with many add ons that help it be more productive. Out of the box, Thunderbird is a lot like Outlook Express, but it is expandable by the many add ons available. The great thing about this is that you can add in only what you want or need instead of taking it all in a giant lump like with Outlook. Realize that if you take Thunderbird for a spin, it is not quite as polished as Outlook, but Thunderbird 3 is due soon and promises to be much improved.

There are some quick takes on a few email clients. Each of them has their own unique way of handling email, and one may be more suited to your tastes. I would suggest trying them out and finding what is best for you. Let me know what you prefer.

This is a reprint from my Ask a Geek column that appears weekly in the Register-News. It is written for a general audience, and I hope you enjoy it.

Once your computer has booted into the operating system, most people think it is just sitting there waiting for you to tell it to do something. This is not quite the case.

Many programs are already active and doing things you may not even know about. For example, your antivirus and firewall (you do have both, don’t you?) start automatically with the operating system. That is great and they are protecting you just as they should, however there are other programs that you might not even be aware of that do the same thing and slow down your system.

Adobe, RealPlayer, iTunes, Google products, etc. all install onto your system and are free to download. Unfortunately most or all of these programs also make a setting in your operating system that automatically starts them without your input. They do this under the logic of ‘checking for updates’ or ‘quick-starting’ so that you don’t have to worry about these tasks. Unfortunately every one of these tasks will eat up memory (RAM) and processing power that your computer should be using to do whatever YOU want it to do.

The easy way to see this problem is to look in the lower-right corner of your screen by the clock. Almost every one of those little icons is eating up power that will make your PC run slower than it did before. The sneakier of these programs will not even have an icon in the corner, but will run ‘in the background’ without any easy way to see what it is doing.

Personally, I dig into the Windows’ registry and delete these items so that they don’t start automatically, but there is an easier solution for anyone to use: CCleaner (http://ccleaner.com). CCleaner has been mentioned here before to clean out temp files and help clean out your PC, but it will also clean out these ‘autostart’ or ‘startup’ entries so that you can have back the power that your computer has been robbed of without your knowing.

When using CCleaner, you do so at your own risk. It is generally safe to use so long as you read what you are doing, and it even offers to make a backup before performing tasks so that you can restore if you break anything. Still, you can break things if you are careless.

When cleaning out startup programs, everyone will have different choices to make about which programs to remove or keep. For example, you should keep the startup entries for your antivirus and firewall, but probably not Adobe or Apple Update. Some entries will not really say what they do or what program they are associated with in any way. It is advised that you DO NOT DELETE those entries. It is safer to leave something there than to delete it and then have to go back and fix it later.

When you go to download CCleaner, they ask for a donation. No donation is required, but they ask so that the development can continue. If you can, drop them a buck or two if the program helps you. Thanks to Ms. McClintock for reminding me about this fact via email.

This is a reprint that originally appeared in my ‘Ask a Geek’ column for the Register-News. This is written for a general audience, and I hope you enjoy it.

Your computer is stupid. Yes, for all the wonderful tricks you can accomplish with it, your computer only understands two things ’1′ and ’0′. On and off. Yes or no. Computers at their simplest are binary switches that do a certain thing in response to 1, and another in response to 0. That’s it. There’s your explanation of how a computer works. Everything that you accomplish with a computer is based upon those ones and zeros.

The first part of your computer to use those ones and zeros is the Power On Self Test (POST). When you power on your PC the first thing you usually get is a tiny beep before anything happens most people understand. That beep is your POST completing successfully. It signals that ‘all systems (or pieces) are go’ and the computer can start loading information from the next part.

The Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) is the second phase of your computing experience and may be completely hidden from you. As noted above, your computer is stupid. The BIOS contains simple commands that tell your hard drive, monitor, and everything else connected to the computer how to ‘talk’. You could almost call it a ‘translator’ for making everything communicate.

Once the basics are out of the way, your BIOS points to a ‘bootloader’ that then points to your operating system – Windows, Apples’ OSX, Linux, or even BSD. At this point, most of you will see your operating system’s loading screen showing the Windows or other logo.

From there you will be taken to your graphical user interface (GUI) where most everyone is used to interacting with their PC. This is where you open your email, surf the web, write on the Register-News forum, or perform any other task you need to get done.

When you add a printer to your PC, you must usually install drivers. Drivers are instructions to tell the operating system how to talk to the BIOS so that the printer or other device will do what you ask. So, the path of communication goes – Program > Operating system > Driver > BIOS > Device. I warned you that the computer is stupid, and that long trip to print a report or picture proves it. Four steps to accomplish one task. Still, I think we all can agree that computers make our lives much simpler and easier.

There you have a simple explanation of how your computer talks to itself. There is a lot more ‘behind the scenes’ action, but hopefully this will get you a working understanding of how your computer operates on the inside.