by alec on December 11, 2005
Thanks to all of you who cast your votes in the Canadian Blog Awards. It was a tight race, methinks, but yours truly won the coveted third prize in the Business Blog category! I am not sure why Transit Toronto (a blog about the TTC) should win first prize for a business blog. Clearly it must be popular among the fickle electors of Canada. They probably all voted Liberal too…
Some of my personal favorites also won prizes: Accordion Guy (Best blog overall), Colby Cosh (Third place, Conservative Blogs and Third place, Media Blogs), Rick Mercer (Best New Blog, and Best Humour Blog), Ghost of Flea (Best Culture Blog), Game Certainty (Third place, Sports Blogs). Special mention goes to Mark Evans (Fifth in Business Blogs). Mark’s blog certainly deserves more accolades than it received. Amongst Canadian bloggers covering business, his is a standout.
by alec on December 11, 2005
I downloaded the Windows OneCare Live beta last week. This is Microsoft’s new managed service for PC maintenance. It includes backup, antivirus, firewall management, and "tune up" — at this moment, simply disk defragmentation. And, it provides it all in a simple, easy-to-understand and easy-to-use, package.
The install experience was very easy. It beefed up some of my prior firewall settings, however, and some utilities such as my VPN no longer worked. The VPN was easily fixed by turning on support for the GRE protocol in the firewall advanced settings dialog.
The first virus scan I ran found a worm in my email inbox. The worm had been marked SPAM by my SPAM filter, and never opened, but the fact is that it had gotten past my recently expired Norton Antivirus.
All in all, it seems an effective tool. Many of the things it does, like disk defragmentation and firewall, are already available in Windows. However, it’s nice to have this simple user oriented application to manage them all. And it’s very heartening to see Microsoft spending time on making the use of these important tools easier.
