Work lappy

UPDATE: Jon said I can't refer to Lau in the future as 'my wife' yet.

After travelling home the other week I enquired about getting a work laptop so that once I moved up to Leamington Spa I would be able to leave on time (if not a little earlier) and work on the train so I could get home to my wife the woman to be at a reasonable hour (also so I could play some disc golf after work in the summer ... woo!!).

Well last week I got given a new machine! Its not the latest from Dell, but its a reasonable machine and I am quite surprised by it!

The machine I have been given is a ...


...Dell Precision M65.

Spec rundown ...
2Ghz Dual Core 2 Pentium
2.5GB ram
NVIDIA Quadro FX 350M

The thing which has surprised me the most about it is the battery life currently at 88% while I write this and it claims it could do another 3 1/2 hours! I worked on the hour train home the other day, and back with a stop over in Leamington station as the train was running late, restored a 4gb database and worked on the train; and still had 25% battery life remaining. Along with the usual typing I also had music playing, 2 instances of Visual Studio 2005, sql server 2005 running , outlook and other stuff and still worked like a dream!

I hope this can continue and I get lots of work done on trains and the wife woman likes it when I get home from work on time :-)

PS. Only just over 7 weeks to go!!! :-)

CRM and Spam!

About the spam situation, I didn't do a post at the beginning of May due to the fact that I was on my stag do which was great!!

Another reason was that it was a lot lower than it had been previously; ~ 28000 mark. This kept up for most of the month and had nothing spectacular going on. I've come back after a weekend of sorting out my new house (more to come in another post) and no internet connection at all to a wh00ping 31,636 spam. An all time high!!

It pretty much reassures my thoughts on what spam is; its just a very bad marketing campaign. Somone behind these plainly stupid blanketing emails have obviously had their CRM software popup with a new campaign.

CRM software is good for business; bad for spammer!

Symantec employee spams friends

DISCLAIMER: I'd just like to start off by saying I'm not going to name names as I don't want to get my friend into trouble with his employer, but I think what I'm about to discuss is not without a sense of irony.

DISCLAIMER #2: If anyone has any legitamate reasons for this post to be removed then please do leave a comment and let me look into it.

Most people in the world know the names 'Symantec' and 'Norton' and know that each area is associated with anti virus software and computer protection; spam filtering and general computer wellness. No one is excluded from being attacked from attack injection and trojan infiltration, even Symantec employees.

Over the past couple of months I've had some spam which hadn't been filtered out by gmail spam filter. After looking at the email I realised it was from one of my friend's email addresses and not picked up. I assumed that it had been used from some sort of phishing attack or he'd not read the small print of a website he had signed up to and they had sold it to a 3rd party and they were spamming me; but no ...

After looking at the other email addresses it had been sent to, yes lots of people in the to: section of the email, it became clear that it had come from his email client or msn client. I recognised some of the addresses of people we know in common and that they could have only come from this address list ...

... had someone hacked his email address?
... had an ex-girlfriend gone up against him? (that was a stupid idea, he's not that much of a ladies man ;-))

... nope, he'd must have downloaded something dodgy and been infected! Someone who works for such a high profile company which supplies a large number of small, medium and enterprise companies with corporate anti spam and anti-virus software and being effected was shocking!!

So just to say to everyone, be careful where you sign up for; be careful which plugins for MSN messager you use; be careful of the small print when signing up for legit reasons, you never know who will be spamming friends in the near future.

March Spam

Yup, another month has gone by and I've hit the magical 30,000 spam mark!

I've got the workings of an idea around the spam total to help with the beer freeness (or smaller amount at least) and will explain further in future posts when I've decided whether to do it or not ;-)

February spam

well it seems to have leveled out a bit and Feb's spam count was approx 23,500. I say approx as it happened over the weekend I was busy playing in the second BDGA National Tour event at Quarry Park in Leamington spa. Was a great weekend, as usual up in Warwickshire, and thanks go to Del, Sue and Ivan! :-)

Right, off to see the mrs and then drive back down to Reading :-)