Midspot

This may be somewhat “well duh”, but this is how I’ve organized my usage of social networks and “Web 2.0” technology (in no particular order):

Youtube: (username midspot) this is where I post all my public video content which is then aggregated as a wall post in Facebook. I anticipate using this much more now that I have a phone that takes video.

Facebook: this is my “social catch-all”. I aggregate most all of my items here as wall posts and is a collection of mostly friends that I know on a physical basis. Also where I post most of my non-technical musings.

Twitter: (username midspot) this is where my “technical” crowd exists. For the most part I post internet oddities and technical type stuff here. Most of my followers I have never met face-to-face.

Flickr: (username midspot) where I post all my public pictures. ( I also cross post them to another site I built for backup in case flickr disappears) This is also aggregated through Facebook.

This Blog: longer items of interest either I stumble across online or my own personal musings that are too long for Facebook or Twitter. This blog is also aggregated in Facebook.

LinkedIn: strictly business. Is cut off from the other “networks”. I don’t use much as I find it rather dull.

FriendFeed: (username midspot) what I used to create a combination feed of my blog and my twitter updates to aggregate on Facebook since they only allow one RSS feed (from what I can tell).

Feel free to “friend” me on any network, especially now that you know where to find what!

How do you take advantage of Web 2.0 and social network technologies?

RIM announced today the impending release of the latest version of its BlackBerry Enterprise Server. BES 5.0 will add a bunch of new features to improve the BlackBerry experience for enterprise users. Here’s a quick list of what’s been announced:

* Retrieve corporate documents behind firewalls

* Add, read, rename and delete folders on the handset and have those changes be applied to the desktop email client

* Create rules within the inbox to filter email and have those changes be applied to the desktop

* View attachments in calendar entries and meeting requests

* Download and store emails and email attachments onto microSD cards

via RIM announces BES 5.0 | BlackBerry Cool.

Ars Technica cites an “insider” in announcing that POP3 access for Hotmail users has been activated in the US. Say hello to getting Hotmail into Gmail, non-Microsoft-made mail clients, and many other places.

Microsoft has been rolling out POP3 importing access to a number of countries since mid-January, including Canada, the U.K., most of western Europe, and elsewhere. The details you need to plug into your mail client or other webmail account, though, should be the same. Here’s the list, as posted by the Windows Live team:

POP server: pop3.live.com (Port 995)

POP SSL required? Yes

User name: Your Windows Live ID, for example yourname@hotmail.com

Password: The password you usually use to sign in to Hotmail or Windows Live

SMTP server: smtp.live.com (Port 25)

Authentication required? Yes (this matches your POP username and password)

TLS/SSL required? Yes

via Windows Live: Hotmail Enables POP3 for US Users.

William Keating, a geologist attached to the U.S government’s first expedition to the Red River Valley in 1823, provided the earliest geological report of eastern North Dakota. Among his observations, Keating wrote: “The flatness of the surface that almost uniformly prevails throughout the Valley may be regarded as a defect in its character that cannot be easily remedied.” Certainly, it could be argued whether the flatness is, in fact, a “defect,” but you have to admit that it is a characteristic that would be hard to remedy

Exceptionally flat plains, like the Red River Valley, are found today in places that were once flooded by lakes of glacial meltwater. Sediment that was deposited from the lake water formed the flat lake floors that geologists refer to as “glacial lake plains.” In North Dakota, these include the glacial Lake Souris plain in McHenry and Bottineau counties, the glacial Lake Dakota plain in Dickey and Sargent counties, the glacial Lake McKenzie plain in Burleigh County, and many smaller lake plains. By far the largest of these was glacial Lake Agassiz, once the largest proglacial lake in North America.

Like its namesake – Louis Agassiz 1807-1873, the father of glacial geology – glacial Lake Agassiz’s influence was felt far

and wide. Evidence of glacial Lake Agassiz occurs over an area of roughly 365,000 square miles, an area five times the size of the state of North Dakota, although at no single time did the lake ever cover this entire area. Ice margin positions and lowering of outlets by erosion combined to limit the size of the lake at any given time. Glacial Lake Agassiz was the latest in a series of proglacial lakes that must have formed in the Red River Valley many times during the Ice Age, each time north-draining rivers

were impounded by ice sheets spreading south out of Canada and again as the glaciers receded.

via GLACIAL LAKE AGASSIZ.

While reading the paper version of ComputerWorld this morning, I stumbled an article reporting that more than half of Gen Y employees regularly bypass corporate IT usage policies at their workplace, and a quarter of them face no repercussions for doing so. These results came out of a study performed by Toronto-based research firm Harris/Decima, which surveyed more than 1000 workers with ages between 18 and 29 about their attitude towards technology.

Now, I’m a sysadmin, and I don’t know about you, but I think the percentage of 18-30 year old IT workers violating IT policies is probably much higher than that. Ballpark figure? Probably around 100%

via Are you bypassing your company’s IT policies?.

WASHINGTON – The Senate voted Wednesday night to give a tax break of up to $15,000 to homebuyers in hopes of revitalizing the housing industry, a victory for Republicans eager to leave their mark on a mammoth economic stimulus bill at the heart of President Barack Obama’s recovery plan.

The tax break was adopted without dissent, and came on a day in which Obama pushed back pointedly against Republican critics of the legislation even as he reached across party lines to consider scaling back spending.

“Let’s not make the perfect the enemy of the essential,” Obama said as Senate Republicans stepped up their criticism of the bill’s spending and pressed for additional tax cuts and relief for homeowners. He warned that failure to act quickly “will turn crisis into a catastrophe and guarantee a longer recession.”

via Senate OKs $15,000 tax break for homebuyers – Yahoo! News.

Scientists have discovered the remains of the world’s biggest snake which was over 13 metres long and weighed more than 1,140 kilograms.

The experts say the monster Boa named Titanoboa was so huge and fearsome it makes modern anacondas and pythons look cuddly by comparison.

Living in the swamps of South America 60 million years ago Titanoboa would have spent much of its time in the water and snacked on alligators and crocodiles.

The fossil hunters – who made the discovery in orthern Colombia – say that the monster was so huge if it slivered past you it would come up to your waist.

via World’s largest snake snacked on crocodiles – Odd News | newslite.tv.

It appears Google is testing ajax search for Google Search on the US version of the site, great right? No. If this goes ahead, firefox extensions, various tools and virtually every website analytics tool would break. Why?

Let us explain…

When you search in Google normally you’ll notice the URL’s after you search look something like this:

http://www.google.com/search?q=test – when you search for “test”

well, in Google US, which for most people, has the ajax feature enabled …the URL turns into this:

http://www.google.com/#q=test – with a “#”

See, web browsers won’t sent anything after the ‘#’ and therefore applications such as analytics tools can’t receive information as to what people are searching for leaving competitors to Google Analytics, dead.

Clicky, one of Google Analytics competitiors is right to be concerned. As Wayne Smallman, of Blah Blah Technology blog points out this a “game changer and not in a good way”.

via Is Google Being “Evil”? Plans to Annihilate their Analytics Competition with Ajax? – The Next Web.

If you’ve ever thought of finding a simpler way to help your friends or relatives with your computer skills, rather than having to be physically there to assist them with the installation of an app or the removal of spyware/viruses, then remote support to their PC might do the trick for you.

We’ve previously covered other remote support programs such as Crossloop, PCHelpware, Schnitz Remote Lite and Teamviewer but today we are going to look another one – Instant Housecall.

Instant Housecall allows you to connect to a friend or relative’s computer. All they need to know is your unique Instant Housecall specialist ID.

via Instant Housecall Helps You Give Free Remote Support For A PC | MakeUseOf.com.