Yes, it’s that time of year again … UPGRADE TIME!

With the release of Fedora 12 a few months ago, I’m taking the holiday break from work to get my servers up to a more current version of Linux.

The fact that Fedora 10, the version of Linux I am currently running, is no longer going to be updated added a little more incentive.

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It’s nice that many of the major mail providers give you the ability to report a message you’ve received as spam … but some of them make it far TOO easy to report something as spam.

I’ve noticed that many of the big names put the “Report as spam” button way too close to the delete button.

Let’s take a look at some of the providers …

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For those of you who are playing around with Windows 7 (like me) and use Norton Ghost to back your machine, you’ll probably be interested in the next version of Ghost.

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Last week I decided to start playing around with Windows 7 on my laptop … just to see how it’s going to work.

Luckily I have a spare SATA hard drive, so there was no risk that I would damage anything permanently.  If the Windows 7 install went bad, I could simply switch back to XP on the original hard drive.

Well, it’s been a little more than a week with Windows 7 and I’m quite impressed.

One thing I noticed is that the hard drive controller wasn’t for the AHCI I thought was configured.  Then I remembered, when I had the motherboard replaced due to the video problems, the default hard drive controller settings would be in place … and the default is to use ATA instead of AHCI.

Theoretically, AHCI should give me better performance than standard ATA.

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For the past few weeks we’ve had a lot of static & interference on our home phone line … it doesn’t effect the Vonage line, so I figured it was coming from outside the house.

Well, it turns out the ‘NID Splitter’ we have in the phone box is giving out.   A NID Splitter is a device that plugs into the Network Interface Device that acts as a DSL filter for all the inside phone wiring.  A NID is the box where the telephone companies wiring interfaces with the house wiring.  Everything on the ‘Customer’ side of the NID is is your responsibility, anything on the other side of the NID is the telephone companies responsiblity.

It’s called a NID Splitter because it lets you split the phone line signal into two parts … one part that goes directly to the DSL modem, and the other half that goes to the house phone wiring.  The NID Splitter filters out the voice data on the phone line so it doesn’t interfere with the DSL signal.

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While doing a little searching, I found some information on email feedback loops for other major ISP’s.

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A few months ago I commented on how much I liked the Yahoo Complaint Feedback Loop.

Well, I think I’m going to revise that statement slightly.

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In general, I’ve been quite pleased with the technical support I get from Dell’s Small & Medium sized Business division.

They usually adapt quickly to my level of technical expertise and take my word for it when I report a problem.  Once the failing component has been identified, they quickly setup the appropriate dispatch to get the problem corrected.

Yesterday, however, was an exception.

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Since both Ginny and I are trying to get to the health club more often now … we were thinking about how being a computer geek could be leveraged into a more healthy lifestyle.

Here’s a short list of geeky actions that could be transformed into something healthy …

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After dealing with Ginny’s older computer, I took stock of the various bits & pieces of computer hardware that I have lying around.

I noticed that there were a fair number of unused hard drives.  Some were defective and out of warranty others were so small as to be next to useless.

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