Welcome to my Rants From the desk of DKStewart

I want that job

April 21

The grass is always greener on the other side and looking at the title of this book it makes 1001beersme think. What a great job this would be!  How nice would it be to travel around and sample the different beers of the world. I must admit a recent trip to St Louis had me at the Anheuser-Busch brewery and taking the brew master class which was a blast. Not only did we sample the various beers but the instructor talked about how to taste beer (not just chugging) and the different brewing techniques.

The grass is greener on the other side and this looks freshly fertilized and watered to perfection.

D

Viruses, malware and worms

April 4

win7virus

Was up at 2:30am due to a message on my computer screen warning me it had detected several viruses on my computer. First look with my sleepy eyes I thought what is all this? It took a second glance to see the messages while they looked real were indeed fake. Someone did an excellent job designing this.

I know if I clicked on anything there would be a risk of this spreading and creating potentially further problems so I decided to find it, kill it, delete it by hand. After I finally found the program hidden in a directory and killed it dead I started a fresh virus scan (my real virus scan) and this morning I am working to remove the remaining crap left behind.

I did some research on this malware and found that had I clicked on the screens it would have spread further. There are people that after being hit with this particular version could no longer run any programs and their internet browser would only take them to the malware website asking for money.

No matter how secure you think you are there is a risk you can be infected.

Got lucky this time!

D

Its time for Change

March 26

Yes everyone its time for “Change”! This is not a political rant by no means but clearly it changescould be. This is not the Obama change to push us into Socialism. The change I am referring to is with this website. Yep time to move on and get a face lift.

Why change? I have been thinking about a change for some time but it wasn’t until blogger.com decided to end their support for me hosting my own site that I started looking around sooner vs later.

It took time as I wanted to preserve my old stuff and move into the current age. Well I was doing good until I ran into problems with the “current age” technology change I was looking for. This forced me to move my website from yahoo.com to another host. It took some time to find a host that would let me “play” the way I wanted to and I found this with hostgator.com.

OK now I have moved from blogger.com to WordPress, found a new host and decided to move my domain register from register.com to godaddy.com at the same time. Trying to coordinate all this took some time and after nearly two months of part time working here it is.

Now some good news…. I am now saving $$ by making the change. Cheaper domain name registration and cheaper web hosting. Its all good.

Welcome aboard and excuse the dust as I bring this site up to speed.

D

Its been a while since my last update. This site was created to keep family and friends up to date on what we have been doing and well with Facebook’s popularity I have not been doing a very good job keeping this site up to date. So here I am switching to a new hosting provider and working on new pages which I hope will allow me to keep things better up to date. We will see and this is my playground for a while so please be patient.

Please note the link to my previous site may have some broken items. I will fix them as I catch them and some just may not be repairable. Sorry but you can still get to my previous posts.

Its Me!

Hobbies:
Computers stuff – My first experience with a computer was in Jr High School (circa 70’s) and did some simple math programs using punch cards. In HS I took my first computer programming classes and then went off and learned Electrical Engineering. This has allowed me to understand the workings of a computer from hardware, operating systems and software. I have worked in hardware repair, operating system design, storage drivers, multimedia, speech recognition…. Jack of all trades?

Amatuer Radio – Started off my interest in radios back in the CB radio phase and then went on to getting my amatuer radio license. Again I have modified radios from tube based to digital, built antennas and amplifiers….

Cars – Started getting into cars during High School. Had several Z-28 camaros, trucks (including 4×4), motorcycle. Did my own customizations and focuses on the tuning side. Rebuilt engines, built lift kits (vs purchase) and worked in a machine shop for a while.

Firearms – I have been shooting since I could walk (or so it seems). During my early teens I took up competitive rifle shooting and ended up nationally ranked before my High School days where this took a back seat due to other interests. Today its more of a hobby.

What makes thing work – Yeah I like to know what makes things tick. When I repair things around the house I am known to take the old parts into the garage and take it apart for no other reason than understanding what makes it work.