Last year when we put a machine on the Pomona network, it was the wild wild west – no control over what machines were on the net, how configured, etc. It’s no surprise that by the end of the year, the machine we put on the net was loaded with spyware and other cruft.

This year, the Pomona College - Information Technology Services has a way stricter system in place. When an unregistered machine is placed on the net, all its browser traffic is redirected immediately to an internal site which forces the user to:

* install Xp sp2 * does a vulnerability scan * forces review of use policies * takes a system inventory * slams on windows update * forces an av install if no av is present (sophos) * registers the nic and ties it to a student ID * encourages spybot and ad-aware install

A marked step up in making the network secure for students. As well as allowing the school to track all student network use which may be a mixed blessing for everyone (actually what is mixed about it? it just seems bad.)

It is rising to new highs … You guys go sob into your West Coast Made Soba-Cowa Pillows and try to find something to align differently in your feng shui to attempt to prop up the strawman argument of why the PAC-10 sucks so bad each year … cracks me up.

The Furrygoat Experience - Annoyance: Software Updates As steve says, updating software sucks, and is one of the reasons I install less and less of it. I’m surprised MSFT hasn’t seen the business opportunity here – they have the scale and infrastructure to handle update delivery and install for all Windows apps – they should run the update service for all ISVs (and of course charge them a modest fee for the service – this is worth something to ISVs and users). I’d sure rather have just one updater running on my machine rather than the billions of them that try to run now.

I get tons of traffic from people looking for product keys – I have no idea why this stupid site ranks so high in Google on this topic. But here are some pointers folks:

* Following an old posting – a little ludwig goes a long way: Recovering your product keys – Neotechcc.org has a tool to view your XP key. * From the same thread, Magical JellyBean can help you find your windows and office keys.

Beyond these tools, I can’t help you.

id Software: DOOM 3 – fun, but nearly unplayable without the sound cranked and without surround sound. The game relies on a constant stream of monsters popping up behind you, and if you can’t hear it happening, the game just isn’t as much fun. It’s actually kind of a cheap monster system, I prefer the more realistic AI in far cry, but doom3 is still a good timewaster.

Seems like I ought to learn more about [removed site] – lots of smart people are entranced with it: RasterWeb!, Jon Udell, Udell again.

Update: OK I joined and tried it out. I admire it’s simplicity. But…I already have a way that I post links with notes and tags – that is called my blog. I don’t want another site I have to dupe all this effort at. I want something that looks at my blog posts, compares those with posts of others, and gives me the union of all that posting activity – I guess that is technorati.

34 miles into our drive to LA and we hit a big whomping chunk of metal in the road – and there goes a tire. Could have been worse – we were right at the Federal Way exit; later in the drive in southern Oregon or central California we might have had a real long wait.

But AAA service was great – great call center, quick arrival, found an open tire center for us, took us right there. Well worth the annual membership fee.

I’ve mentioned this before, but again I really like the Broadband Home Report. Good review of industry activities around the broadband home. Interesting notes this month on home health monitoring; voip spam; China’s IGRS as a competitor to DLNA; Verizon’s FTTP product. Always a good read.

The good folks at Fanblogs.com (where I post most of my college football thoughts) did a nice site makeover, getting ready for this season. Good site to visit if you want passionate-but-thoughtful views on college football.

Had a good presentation in our team meeting today from the folks at Entellium: A Hosted CRM Provider with Powerful Workflow, Modular Pricing, No Contracts. What a great team, great to hear from them. Thanks for coming by folks.

NCAA College Football - Fanblogs.com: Preseason AP Top 25 - it’s out, OSU is #9 again. A gift really given the number of new faces that will be starting this year – I guess Tressel has a lot of believers

Looking for a pet sitter this past week and got some great recos from people. Here are all the services for which I got good personal recommendations:

* PetSitters Unlimited. * Whisker Watchers * All Day Dogs. * Kritter Konnection.

All the above came with strong personal recos from people we trust. Additionally we found this listing which might also have some good services.

Trying to work around the XBOX Live “you have a strict nat” problem. The XBOX team has classified NATs into three categories and apparently our Sonicwall is strict, which is bad. The xbox site is pretty quiet about what to do about this tho.

Ubisoft is just as useless.

Sonicwall has some disastrous AI-driven KnowledgePortal – someone was taking painkillers when they approved this project.

Netgear has some info that we are going to try – Port Numbers for Port Forwarding. We’ll see how that works.

All the functioning home machines have migrated. No real problems tho it was slow on one machine. Work machines today.

Love the “manage add-ins” feature for IE. Amazing amount of cruft that I found installed.

Several posts about Tivo getting limited rights to distribute copies of recorded programs – TiVoToGo goes legit - Engadget - www.engadget.com and Reuters coverage. This would be the feature that would finally get me off my butt and upgrade my Tivo box.