Lawrence's Corner

What a waste of taxpayer dollars

Lawrence — Sun, 20 May 2012 05:39:11 +0000

In a nutshell, the state of West Virginia spent a huge amount of money on equipment that was extremely overpowered for the application. You can watch the entire webcast from the oversight hearing here http://energycommerce.house.gov/hearings/hearingdetail.aspx?NewsID=9508

I have been reading supporting articles that flesh out the story. In these articles it is stated that 366 of the routers purchased have yet to be unboxed, two years after the original purchase. This means that the valued added benefit of a full five years of support from Cisco for these 366 routers has been wasted. From my time in the IT industry, I can tell you that Cisco SmartNET is NOT free and it is NOT cheap. The Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information & Administrator National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) Department of Commerce, Lawrence Strickling, defends the purchase that West Virginia made by saying that keeping the router model static across all of the locations it saves money on training and implementation. He also said that the price of the routers were not $22,000 as the chairman suggests, but rather $12,000. I haven’t delved deeply enough yet, but I’m sure this is the pricing of the router without SmartNET and the pricing with SmartNET. What I can say is that if Verizon gave you 100 of these routers at no cost (a savings of $1.2M on the conservative end) then you have no idea what a ride you have been taken for.

While I can understand the attempt to standardize equipment across locations of similar size, I can’t understand trying to standardize locations with 500+ computers with sites that have 5 computers. Mr. Strickling also goes into his defense of the methodology of the purchase by stating that the state determined that the amount of time to research what type of router was needed at each location would have required more money than the “savings” of the purchase of the routers. Who cares, it’s free money so let’s spend it guys! The real people at fault are those who made this decision in West Virginia. I applaud the oversight committee and it’s chairman, Communications and Technology Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden (R-OR), for bringing this story to my attention.

This girl didn’t need a $22,000 Cisco router to surf the web.

How to restore the classic event viewer in Windows 7

Lawrence — Tue, 15 May 2012 20:41:41 +0000

“It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out nor more doubtful of success nor more dangerous to handle than to initiate a new order of things.” —Niccolò Machiavelli, Italian philosopher

Just like most people, I am not a huge fan of change. However, in the technology business everything is always changing and advancing. While I may love Windows 7 and think it’s the greatest operating system that Microsoft has ever released…I absolutely despise the new Event Viewer. My first complaint is that it’s slower than the original event viewer and secondly the detail panes are too small for my liking no matter how I configure them. If you agree with me then you might be interested in learning how to use the classic Event Viewer that you are used to from Windows XP.

Here is how you do it:

Open a command prompt as Administrator.
Type Regsvr32 els.dll (if you get error code 0×80070005 then you didn’t run as Administrator).
Start mmc.exe and goto File | Add/Remove Snapin.
From the available Snapins choose “Classic Event Viewer”.
Right-Click Classic Event Viewer under Console Root and select New Window from Here.
Choose Customize from the View menu.
Deselect the Action Pane and Click OK

Voila! You have your old warm and snuggly Event Viewer back and it works just as well as it always did.

I will probably learn to love the new Event Viewer in time, but until then I will resort to the classic Event Viewer when I have a lot of research to do in the event logs of a Windows 7 computer.

Saturday fun at the airport

Lawrence — Mon, 14 May 2012 20:03:54 +0000

The local airport was offering airplane rides for $10 each. We arrived a little late so we have to wait until next Saturday to go flying. We both had a good time and are looking forward to going up in the air soon!

I just found my new favorite social media client

Lawrence — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 18:28:23 +0000

It’s called sobees and is in beta now.

Download it from http://www.sobees.com/

The best email client is still Microsoft Outlook

Lawrence — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 01:32:41 +0000

I recently switched my color theme to a darker color and I love the way Outlook 2010 looks now (not that it was bad with the default color theme.) This is what it looks like:

There are plenty of people out there who disagree with my opinion that Outlook is the best Email client out there. There are also plenty of people who don’t know how to get the most out of Outlook. There is also a small subset of people who don’t work in Microsoft-centric environment but for most of us, we do work around Microsoft products. If you are still using Microsoft Outlook 2003 (which has an end of life in April 2014) or Microsoft Outlook 2007 you should consider giving Outlook 2010 a try. There is a free trial available from Microsoft at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/try/

I must admit that for years I tried not to use any alternative to Outlook and I was fairly happy with replacements. However, over the past decade I have embraced the product and I am much more happy reading my email with the product.