Smarter Sheep

Don’t download and install free screen savers…. yes I know.. they come with pretty waterfalls, flying geese and spectacular mountain scenes. But, they also install junk on your computer that sends all your internet browsing information back to some secret website on an island in a third world country where hackers are selling your information to feed their children. Yes, I know.. you want to help feed their children, it’s a great ministry idea…but us computer guys prefer you just send them a check rather than causing more computer work for us.

Never, ever, ever…. how can I say this in a way that will strike fear into the reader… EVER load AOL on your computer. Feel free to load it on an enemy computer if your really that mean… but be careful even acquiring and handling the cdrom from which the software would be installed. I suggest wearing some sort of protection if you do. From a computer guy’s standpoint, AOL is the evil of evils when it comes to destroying computers. BEWARE!

I started writing software and working on computers about 15 years ago. I remember my first Apple computer… the Mac Classic. I was thrilled to sell off the old 286 IBM and mock my friends who were running command line operating systems while I had a mouse! My Mac had 4MB of memory and a real hard disk. Sadly, the college I attended used macs for writing papers but the computer dept had only IBMs for us geeky types and I had to go back to using DOS which stands for “Desperation Only System”. Since those days I have been a Windows guy living recently in the .net world… but a year ago I made the leap back to Apple and have lived a dual identity between managing my day to day tasks in OSX and writing and maintaining software and websites in a virtual Windows environment. I now hate it. Apple OSX is so much more stable. I’m now laying awake at night dreaming of ways to leave Windows all together.

I received an email today from another staffer here who was excited that we might have an option to use our Blackberry phones as modems for our laptops when we are away from the office. Verizon has an option for this but they charge us extra every month on top of the big bill we are already paying. The new software was iMobimac Modem version 1.2.

“Letting Mac owners use their BlackBerry as a tethered modem is
something we have been working on for well over a year”, states the
IMM development team. “No longer do Mac users have to rely only on
Bluetooth dial up, which has a marginal success record and poses a
security risk. Now they are able to access the internet whether at
home, a coffee shop or a golf course. The sky is the limit!”

I jumped through all the hurdles to register with them and download the software. I had to install on my MacBook and then download another application to my Blackberry and install there. The installation instructions were fairly simple, however I realized that the software wasn’t quite what I expected and appears to be just a custom proxy server that you have to assign settings in for each of the OSX applications that you want to use with it. In any case, I connected my phone and…. and… nothing… neither portion of software recognized my 8830. I tried several more times re-installing and configuring as well as updating my PocketMac app to see if the connection would help but it didn’t.

Maybe next time IMobiMac…