HTM Blog

Have you heard about someone hacking into Gov. Sarah Palin's email account and posting the information on the web? This is totally outrageous! It just makes me realize how important it is to have a strong password.

Can you keep every hacker out? Maybe not, but you can certainly keep the small time guys. Be sure your password has a combination of upper and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols. Just use an exlamation point at the end and you'll significantly increase the strength of your password.

I love iTunes, and I use it on my Mac and PC for managing my music. I recently rented a movie from iTunes just to check out the technology. It was pretty slick as I downloaded a movie before a long flight and watched it during my flight. I paid $3.99 for the download even though I thought that was a little high for a movie rental. $2.99 seems more like it to me.

The movie played fine and the near-DVD quality that Apple promised was okay. I thought I could purchase some movies but was shocked to see the $14.99 price that Apple charges. I think this is simply too much for a download. I can purchase DVDs for $10-$12 most times, and you get the DVD with inserts. To charge the same price for a lower quality file, and have no backup DVD is just ridiculous. I say Apple is too proud of themselves and I won't be buying from them until they lower the prices. I suggest others do the same.

I have to admit to being very disappointed yesterday at McCain's VP pick. I wanted someone with the stature of Colin Powell and thought the pick of Palin was a purely political pick. However, the more I find out about her the more I like her. She does have executive experience and is apparently scrappy and tough.

Only time will tell if this is a good pick for McCain so I'll hold further judgement for awhile.

Multiple stories have come out in the last few days about the possibility of Colin Powell being McCain's VP. Unfortunately, the stories are probably bogus. I wish they were true because Powell is about the only individual that could add so much gravitas to McCain's ticket, that it would offset the celebrity of Obama. Powell could have been the president in any of the last 3 elections if he wanted it. Unfortunately, he just doesn't want to hold elective office.

Someone please convince Powell to accept a VP position with McCain. We need him.

I've been frustrated for weeks as Neil Cavuto has been off the air with no explanation. I finally found out the reason for Neil Cavuto's extended vacation. Without any notice Neil Cavuto stopped appearing on his show on FOXNews in June. I kept searching the Internet for news about when he'd be back and I finally stumbled on something.

It appears that Neil has been off the air since June 24 and is recovering from Surgery related to his MS disease. He's expected back in late July or early August. Can't wait!

Get well soon Neil!

Will it happen? Probably not, but John McCain's best VP candidate would be Colin Powell. Secretary Powell is a mainstream conservative and has the obvious experience to be President should something happen to McCain. In my mind Secretary Powell is the best person we have to be President at this time, but he's not running. The next best thing is for John McCain to put him on the ticket.

The Republican party should be ashamed of itself for putting McCain up there against Obama. He just cannot win (unless of course, he choose Colin Powell). McCain is to be admired but he's simply too old to be the President. Didn't we learn our lesson with Bob Dole? We have to stop voting for people just because we think it's their turn. We need someone fresh but competent.

Please Mr. McCain, ask Colin Powell to be your Veep. Twist his arm if you have to. He's the best man for the job.

Everyone should watch this video of Boone Picken's white board presentation. We simply cannot continue to import the amount of oil that we import. We need to drill everywhere, use every biofuel, ethynol, etc., and conserve like crazy. BUT, we HAVE TO DRILL EVERYWHERE!

This guy was simply the best in his field and will be missed! Meet the Press was my favorite show on television and it was all because of Tim Russert. Gone too soon!

I hate to say it, but it's true. I've been a loyal and avid user of PGP for over 15 years now. I started with command line PGP and moved to all of their Windows and Mac versions of the years. I was using PGP 8.0.2 for a long time and then finally decided to upgrade to 9.5. I'm very disappointed.

I don't know who's doing the programming over there at PGP these days but I'm sorry to say the latest version is terrible. I've had nothing but problems from the beginning. I've installed it on an XP computer and a MacBook Pro and both versions are lame. It's not the encryption that's lame, but the interface. The new PGP Desktop interface is just too confusing.

Since installing 9.8 I keep getting lockups and errors. I create a PGP Disk and then it can't be mounted. Or it's mounted but I can't see it. On the Mac version I go to try to do a whole disk encryption and it can't see any of my drives so I can't encrypt them.

In the new Desktop interface all the commands are so NOT logical. For some commands the only option is to right click to get a menu and then go through a sub-menu. It used to be so easy to double click a pgp file and then enter my passphrase. Not anymore. Now if I double click on an existing encrypted file the PGP Desktop opens up into PGPZip mode. It seems that any file with a .pgp extension is now treated as a PGPZip file instead of just an encrypted file. This adds another couple of steps to the process of unencrypting files. How LAME! And, it makes the whole process slower. It takes too long to open PGP Desktop even though it's residing in memory.

The messaging program is so confusing. It says to let disable SSL in Outlook and PGP handle my SSL connections to the server, but it never tells me if it's successful in getting an SSL connection. The documentation says PGP will "try" to upgrade all of my pop and smtp connections to SSL but how do I know if it's actually doing this? If I set the SSL myself, then I know it's working.

I've been a big fan of this software in the past but as the title of this post reflects, I think it sucks. It seems as though they've tried to dummy it down but in doing so, they've made things more complicated. Most of the people who are using encryption want to do it in the least amount of steps possible.

One thing PGP still does well is encrypt messages on the fly to people who happen to have PGP keys.

If you're looking for a no nonsense encryption package for file encryption, Google TrueCrypt. Awesome program!

I usually hate adding plugins to Outlook. I've tried a few that claim to organize my email for me but I'm so organized already that I rarely have to search for things. I usually know where they are. I read about Xobni (Inbox backwards) and thought I'd give it a try. After watching the demo video I installed it and have been playing for it for awhile. It's very nice.

Yes, it does slow down Outlook just a tad, but it does a really nice job of searching and giving you all kinds of information regarding your email. If you are using IMAP with a large account the indexing time will take quite awhile. If you have POP mail, give this thing a try.

Xobni