Well, first of all, I am not a doctor at all, and just took a few minutes to read some of the symptoms from some other websites.  I have two reasons to worry a bit more than the average person.

1. I work in NYC where the highest American outbreak has occurred so far (28 people)

2. I have a business trip to singapore in the works and really want to go but do not want to risk my health for the chance to see singapore, go figure right!

First, lets list the side effects of the swine virus.

• Cough
• Congestion
• Nasal Congestion
• Body aches
• Joint Pains
• Fevers
• Sore throat
• Headaches
• Fatigue
• Decreased energy
• Rarely death

These facts were taken from this website, a good read but the people posting the comments are a bit strange.  Now, before everyone panics, these symptoms are the same exact thing as the “normal flu” and treatment is not much different.  The one thing I would do differently is if you fit a few of these symptoms, it wouldn’t be a bad thing to see a doctor.  Obviously, if you fit all of the symptoms (especially death….) you should definitely see a doctor.  The disease can spread to human to human contact, so you would want to make sure that you see a doctor if you think you have a chance of having this thing.  Walking around with this thing will just make the spread worse.

The good news?  Well, I don’t know if I would classify this as good news but the people highest likely to get infected with this are pregnant women, immune suppressed, and the elderly.  So basically if you are not old, pregnant or already weakened by another illness, the chances of you having the swine flue decrease.

The end story, if you are not feeling well, go see a doctor and lets not have this thing spread.  I REALLY want to make it to singapore this year….

So I just had a user go to activate their handheld and it had a server address field.  I have done several thousand enterprise activations before, and none of them ever had asked for a server address.  I found it rather surpising that today, one did.  How to get around this?
Just ignroe it.  It is used to do enterprise activations over wifi.  This feature might be cooler once more devices have wifi, but at the moment, I like using the tride and true way.  Here is the KB from rim that goes into more information on this.

The short answer is yes.  The long answer is it depends on your comfortability level is.  The hf_mig directory handles all hotfixes that windows updates applies so as long as you do not need to roll back an update, you can delete it.  If you are not tight on space, I would hold off on removing this directory.

If push comes to shove, it is better to remove this than to have your C drive run out of space.

Choosing a good, complex, and memorable password can be tough.

Many of us like to reuse the same password, or passwords, over and over again rather than try to remember dozens of different password for dozens of different sites. Sometimes we run into problems when a site has a particularly stingy set of rules for password creation, and we have to come up with a new password, and we usually don’t remember it for the next time we want to use that site. I went through a five month streak with Verizon Wireless, where I changed my password every month when I went to check my bill online and had forgotten the old password.

So I’ve come up with a system to help you come up with a password to use consistently that meets many of the requirements, as well as being a strong password. You should still be careful with your password, and change it whenever you feel it necessary. One of the biggest ways people’s accounts get exploited is not because of password strength, but because they write it down for everyone to see, or submit it into forms in plain text, or save it on a public computer.

You want to find a 6-8 letter string of characters with numbers and letters. The string should not begin with a number, and should not contain any words within it.

Pick a letter as the first character. Say ‘t’.

Pick a number as the second character. Say ’3′.

Pick a ,four, five, or six letter word, and purposely misspell it. You can even use a word you commonly misspell, or typo, anyway. It’ll satisfy the ‘no words’ criteria while still being letters you can remember. Say ‘ctach’.

Put them together and you have a fairly easy to remember password that can be used at almost any site out there. ‘t3ctach’

I like to make my string seven characters, this way if I accidentally lock myself out of an account, or my password expires, I can simply add a ’1′ to the end of my string and have a good chance of remembering it, without having to come up with a new password.

The answer is a resounding YES!  I figured this out the hard way.  Part of my strategy is defense.  Nothing more rewarding than taking out those raiding parties one soldier at a time…am I right?  So what I have been doing is I randomly plant my hero in a village and let other players raid it.  This gets experiance to my hero and makes my raiding grounds stronger!
The downside?

Remember where you planted your hero.  I was not thinking and raided a village and my hero wiped out my troops!  It sucks that I lost all of those presious resources, but my hero got more experiance!  All in a days work…

I don’t know about you, but I find it annoying to walk users through how to boot windows up in start mode.  Instead, I have started to implement this technique.

Click on Start and then Run.

In the text box in the Run window, type msconfig and click OK. This will open the System Configuration Utility program.

Note: Do not make changes in the System Configuration Utility other than those outlined here to avoid causing serious system issues. This utility controls a number of startup activities other than those involved with Safe Mode.

Click on the BOOT.INI tab located at the top of the System Configuration Utility window.

Check the checkbox next to /SAFEBOOT and click OK.

You will then be prompted to either Restart, which will restart the PC immediately, or Exit Without Restart, which will close the window and allow you to restart the PC manually.

After the restart, the PC will automatically boot into Windows XP Safe Mode.

Note: Windows XP will continue to boot into Safe Mode until the System Configuration Utility is configured to again boot normally.

When your work in Safe Mode is complete, click on Start and then Run. Type msconfig in the text box and click OK.

This will again open the System Configuration Utility program.

Choose the Normal Startup radio button and click OK.

You will then be prompted to either Restart, which will restart the PC immediately, or Exit Without Restart, which will close the window and allow you to restart the PC manually.

After the restart, the PC will boot into Windows XP normally and will continue to do so

For information about this can be found here.

In the middle of creating my second major webgame, SimDerby, I am finding the challenges to be much different than SimYard.  This time around, the balancing act is in creating a schedule of races that has a variation to it that matches as closely as possible the variation of horses.  If there are only three 2-year-olds in the game which can run at a mile and a quarter, then there shouldn’t be any of those races on the schedule, for example.

I’m finding that successfully mastering a task like this all comes down to having the right tools.  It all seems easy looking at it from the other site now that these tools have been built, but it was rough trying to figure out what they needed to look like before they were built.  They tell me which races are being canceled because there aren’t enough horses so I can remove them from the schedule.  They tell me a cross-section breakdown of horses which went a whole day without running in a single race so I know to schedule more races of those types.  They show me the schedule of races for each track and allow me to fill in the missing races with the types that I need.

Currently, there are seven tracks in the SimDerby universe.  Each of these tracks will have a race every five minutes and the schedule will be the same every day.  That’s over 2,000 races a day that need to be hand-crafted to match the balance of horses that can run, and there will probably be more tracks added.  This seems like a daunting task, but ultimately this schedule will be what horse breeders and owners interact with.  More importantly, computer horses running on this schedule will represent the claims pool that owners will choose from to begin breeding.

I expect these numbers to only grow.  It’s a good thing I have these great tools to help, because they sure do save time.  The schedule is one of the most important parts of the game, and it’s deserving of lots of attention.

I don’t know about you, but I use and abuse my computer until it can barely perform, and then I still refuse to reboot the thing.  Because of this, after the computer has been on for about a month or so, you begin to notice all the processes that take up resources and try to optimize the resources to cut down on memory leaks.  I mean, if it isn’t for the memory leak, the computer can stay on for years instead of months.  The one thing that always bothered me was SearchIndexer.exe and why it always consumed so much RAM.  This morning, I check and it is taking 400k of memory.

Why?

I’m glad you asked.  The reason being is that SearchIndexer is Windows Desktop Search utility that is supposed to perform better than Google Desktop.  Due to my huge email size and amount of emails I receive, it takes up a lot of resources to index it and perform faster searches.

Lets think about that for a second.  The Windows Desktop Search is supposed to make my searches and windows experience better, by making my computer run slower?  This just cannot be the Microsoft way.  Once I realized what this utility does and how it is not appropriate for my usage (I may use the search utility 1 or 2 times a year, if I’m lucky) I decided to give it the axe.

Here are the directions on how to remove the Windows Desktop Search

Go to add/remove utilities

Remove Windows Desktop Search

The end…simple right?  Oh Microsoft and their silly ways.  To be fair, I hate google desktop too.  I don’t know why people can’t just remember where they put their documents or emails…