Today MSN Messenger 7.0 Final is out. I really don't like messenger to begin with (I'm a Yahoo! junkie), but all my co-workers use messenger, so I must to. Anyways, one annoying thing with the latest version for Secway Simp users is that messenger restricts you from launching Simp. If messenger is running, it will prevent the Simp process from starting as well as the Simp installer.

So kiddies, what you have to do is close down messenger 7. Goto Secway's website and get the latest dot release of SimpLite. No, SimpLite will not tell you there are updates. The latest version is 2.1.5 (most people are still using 2.1.3, which SimpLite reports as the latest version). Get 2.1.5 and install it. After that, start SimpLite and it should auto-start messenger for you. You should be golden after this!

Download SimpLite 2.1.5
Download MSN Messenger 7.0 Final

Yup, almost there. Tomorrow is Thursday the 31st, and what marks this glorious day? None other then the end of the quarter, when I can finally take a break. It has really been a long run this entire month. It started with taking on some extra projects that had to be done outside business hours. After working three weeks with two days off, I got a nice three day weekend this past weekend. Man I was looking forward to that, I think all I did was sleep and lay on the couch, drinking beer and watching TV.

Then this week was a crap shoot, the busiest week of any quarter is the last one. Everyone all of a sudden wants everything done before close of business on Thursday. Not to mention that final drive to see how much more revenue you can generate and in how short of time. But seriously... while this week has been stressful, I have had a great time! At least it's almost over. Hopefully it will snow this weekend and I can goto "the hill" and forget about it.

A few months ago I turned yet another friend into a Apple user. A big change for me, since I'm a long time PC user (since I was like 3). Not to mention a hardcore Linux advocate, running the OS as my primary desktop since 1996. Since 1999, I have not run a Microsoft OS on any of my machines, limiting my use to when I am at work (as most companies still require it unfortunately). But, my Linux box still sits proudly beside my Windows box at work (I do almost ALL of my development in Linux).

Anyways, I was checking out Apple's site so I could recommend the best system possible for my friend, when I noticed the "Switch Stories" section of their site. I hadn't checked it out before, but it looked interesting, so I submitted my story of switching to Apple products. That was back in January, and I haven't thought much more of it. All I wanted was someone at Apple to get yet another positive story, nothing more.

Well, I got this email from a guy named Justin at Apple Research yesterday asking me if I was interested in doing a follow-up phone interview to get more information. I promptly responded and received a call from him this afternoon. The call lasted about 10 - 15 minutes and we just talked about Apple and why it's superior to it's competitor in Redmond. Anyways, I was pretty stoked, since I didn't expect to ever hear anything from submitting my story on their site. Guess I was wrong. Hopefully I'll see my name up there some day =)

If you want to read other people's stories check out Apple - Switch

Looks like PGP isn't as secure as we all thought. Pretty interesting... I would like to see more about how they were able to exploit the hash function however. Guess I'm glad I don't use PGP to encrypt my personal data.