Browsing Category: Misc.

Here’s My Three Cents…

July 30th, 2010 // 4:11 pm @ Jay

When I left full-time employment with New West back in September 2009 to start my own company, I went on a COBRA insurance plan. This allowed me to have full insurance coverage for my family. A couple of months ago, New West hired Ceridian to administer its COBRA insurance program.

Once I accepted my new position at Power Creative, I called Ceridian to cancel my COBRA insurance policy. They told me that they couldn’t cancel my coverage because I had an outstanding balance of $.03 (I later found out that they had sent me two invoices. The second one was for $.03 more than the first.). Guess which one I paid?

I was told that I couldn’t cancel my policy until I paid the $.03.

Seriously? Let’s think about this for a second. I had to attach a $0.44 stamp to my payment, postal workers had to sort and deliver the envelope and then Ceridian had to pay someone to sort through all the mail and put my payment in the correct box.

After I got over the silliness of the whole situation, I mailed in my payment…

Update: I canceled my policy today. I guess they accepted my payment.

Category : Misc.

Protect Yourself from Malicious Email Attachments

March 3rd, 2010 // 11:35 pm @ Jay

Lately, I’ve been getting a lot of SPAM emails with attachments. The “sender” tells me that I need to open the attachment to provide them with information.

This might sound obvious but you should never open attachments from people you don’t know, especially if it’s a weird-looking attachment (i.e. download.exe or certification.txt). No reputable organization is going to get information from you this way.

You can’t assume that your SPAM filter or software is going to keep all malicious emails out. The examples below were successfully delivered to my inbox:

Example #1 – There are a lot of tell-tale signs that this email from “Bank of America” is fraudulent.

1. The email is from auto.bot@verify.com. Does that even sound legit?
2. It’s sent to “undisclosed-recipients”
3. There is an HTML attachment (restore account.html)
4. I don’t bank with Bank of America

Example #2 – This one from “UPS” isn’t quite as obvious as the first example. Here’s what I saw:

1. UPS would have probably left a notice on my front door. How would they have possibly gotten my email address anyway?
2. The notice is almost three months after the supposed delivery date
3. There is a text file attachment (_Certification_.txt)
4. The copy in the email just doesn’t sound like something that would come from UPS. I don’t think they even say “United Parcel Service” anymore

Here are some things you can do to protect yourself from malicious email attachments:

1. Don’t open emails or attachments from people you don’t know or that seem “fishy” (Pay special attention to the subject line and who the email is supposedly from)
2. Have anti-virus software installed on your machine. Most of them will check incoming email (assuming you’re using Microsoft Outlook) automatically. AVG is a good free one
3. Make sure that whatever email program you are using blocks images in all incoming emails (In Outlook, go to Tools>Trust Center to block images). Blocking images does two things. First, the spammer can’t track that you’ve opened the email (even if it was previewed in your preview pane). Without getting too technical, spammers need images to display in the email to track whether or not the email was opened. Second, malicious programs can’t automatically execute in these emails when opened

Just be careful with attachments. It it doesn’t feel right, don’t open it.

Category : Misc. &My Blog

Problems With Microsoft Word 2007 Crashing

January 22nd, 2010 // 3:37 pm @ Jay

I’m a big time user of Microsoft Office. I’m constantly using Outlook, PowerPoint, Word and Excel. For the past couple of years, I’ve been using a PC laptop running Microsoft Vista.

If you’ve used Vista, you know that there always seems to be a problem (at least there has been for me).  Once every couple of months, Word crashes on me. I can’t open documents by double-clicking on them and I can’t select text. It’s very frustrating. Each time this happens, I have to go and look for the solution online. I found out that it’s a problem with a corrupt file in my registry.

Even though I’m planning on upgrading to Windows 7 eventually, I thought I’d go ahead and post instructions on how to fix this problem:

1. Exit all Office programs.
2. Open the Registry Editor by clicking on your “Start” button and typing “regedit” (without the quotes) into the “Start Search” box.
3. Locate the following registry subkey: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Word\Data
4. Right click on “Data” and rename it to something like “olddata.”
5. Exit Registry Editor.
6. Start Word.

Category : Misc. &My Blog