If you have been following along Twitter, you might have noticed that a good portion of my days have been filled with removing virus’ and spyware from nice folks computers. I said days, but should include nights.

I don’t mind. I really don’t. It’s easy work (unless the system is completely hosed, then it’s good money) and it gives me the chance to educate the user on better practices so it doesn’t happen again.

Number 1 on the list is keeping your antivirus software up-to-date! If you don’t have antivirus software, then now is the time! I can tell you, 100% for sure that anything that comes with Windows will do nothing more than keep low-level hackers out of your computer. Nothing, and I repeat, nothing installed by or from Microsoft will keep your computer safe from virus’, spyware or other potentially bad software that your click happy fingers will bring into your machine.

If you have anything resembling security software by any manufacturer and it has the numbers 07, 06, 05, 04 or lower in it, it’s no longer working. I know what it tells you, but it’s not. In fact, your computer is probably already infected with something and you don’t even know it.

I’m going to putting up a series of posts this week that you can use to help yourself be a better internet citizen and help to keep your Windows PC safe from internet meenies that are using your computer to send boner spam or collect credit card numbers from your neighbors.

Lesson 1

For a few years you have heard me praise the goodness that is OpenDNS. There has been a banner on the right side of this screen for as long as I can remember. Look at it right now. Does it say you are using OpenDNS? (sweet!). No? Then it’s time. And this is your first lesson.

Click the link to find out how to change this on your machine. Too lazy to click? Here is the short version.

• Right click the Network icon on your desktop. It’s the one that has the work Network in it. If you don’t have that icon (or can’t find it in the mess of icons littering your desktop currently), then go into the Control Panel and open Network Connections
• Right click your connection and choose properties. If you are using WiFi, use that one. If you are jacked in, use that one.
• Find the one that says TCP/IP. Click it and click the Properties button
• At the bottom, find where it says DNS and click where it says Use the following DNS servers. In the 2 boxes below that, enter the following.
• Preferred: 208.67.222.222
• Alternate: 208.67.220.220
• Click ok a bunch of times, close the Control Panel

You are done. Congratulations! Your computer is one step closer to be safer on the internet. Next up: getting the damned things from your computer. Stay Tuned!

I use Twitter. I like Twitter. I think it’s handy to have around. But lately it seems that it is the only thing anyone can talk about.

For example, the word Twitter appears over 20 times on the front page of Mashable. I have unsubscribed.

In the last 2 episodes of TWiT, more than 50% of the stories were about Twitter. I have unsubscribed for the time being. Hopefully normal tech talk will resume soon.

Even on Twitter there is getting to be too much talk about Twitter. I just finished unfollowing about 5 of the worst offenders there.

It’s time to realize that there are more important things to discuss than how many people follow you on Twitter or what’s the best Twitter app to use or, or, or.

You people are like Pitbulls. You find something you like, get it stuck in your jaws and wave it around until it’s a bloody, limp mess that nobody wants anything to do with anymore. Time to find something else to talk about.

On Windows browsers (pretty much all of them), when you press the tab key (insert ridiculous apple symbol here), you go from field to field. This includes stops at drop downs, radio buttons and check boxes. Without doing anything, it just works.

But not so on the Mac. When I tab through a form invariably it skips drop downs and radio buttons and check boxes. This is terribly annoying. I would guess it is because browsers on the Mac more closely follow HTML standards, but I’m not sure.

I have some experience designing forms. Forms in Word, in Excel, in MS Access, even in HTML. I am of the belief that when it comes time to use a form, the user should not have to take their hands off of the keyboard to navigate. Only to check a box or click a button. Everything should be handled with the tab key (or shift-tab for backward navigation). Every form I’ve ever created does this.

The way to get HTML forms to properly navigation is by using the TABINDEX attibute. According to the W3:

The following elements support the tabindex attribute: A, AREA, BUTTON, INPUT, OBJECT, SELECT, and TEXTAREA.

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Just about every form element in HTML supports the TABINDEX attribute as you can see above. I think it might be something that not everyone is familiar with. It’s as simple as adding

tabindex=1

Forms are a big part of the user experience on the web. It’s a shame not all sites treat them as such and just cobble them together without fully checking how they navigate. Just a little something to think about.

We have covered this before, right? I am pretty sure that we have.

One of my biggest annoyances is getting asked for my opinion or assitance, only to have that opinion or assistance questioned or not taken. Made even more super-extra-hyper annoying when I invest a sizable chunk of my day to the endeavor. Sizeable chunk here would be 10 minutes or more.

Instead of laying down a huge rant this time, I thought instead of sharing a few suggestions to assist you in wasting less of my, or anyone else’, time.

1. First check any owners manual or user guide or help file. Good chance the answer you are seeking might be found there
2. Check any emails you might have. Do they answer your question?
3. Perhaps you have heard of this really cool website called Google? It’s awesome! It will let you search for things on the internet.
4. Run back through the procedure one more time.
5. Find another refernce. Magazines, websites, message boards, yellow pages

If you have run through any of the options that do not require my interaction and are still stuck, then repeat steps 1-5 above one more time. Still stuck?

Whoa there turbo. Don’t go all question askin’ on me yet. Before you do, take a minute to think about the possible answer you are going to get from your askee. Do you think you will like the answer? Do you think you will take the advice? Or, will you ask the question, question the answer and do what you first thought you would anyway?

If you are 90% sure you will take the advice, then go ahead and ask.

If, however, your mission is to be a douche bag and ignore or question any advice given by your askee, then keep it to yourself.

I am done with the iPhone.

Did you see the period? Did you see the word done? This is to serve as your official notice that I will not listen to anything anyone says about the iPhone. I will no longer read posts that contain the word iPhone in them. I will no longer listen to podcasts that spend too much time on the iPhone. I’m going to stop following people on twitter that talk about the iPhone too much. After this post, I will no longer use the term iPhone on my blog or any site I work on unless I am paid to do so.

If all I had to listen to or read about was how awesome the phone is, then I probably wouldn’t be too upset. But that’s not all.

It’s the people that complain about it. That jailbreak it. That, for all intensive purposes, hate it. Yet they still carry the damned thing even though they get bad signal or have to jailbreak it to work the way they need it to, or have more problems than should be allowed by law. I don’t care.

I’m done. You can comment here about iPhones one last time. Go ahead, get it out of your system. After that, I’m done.

I’m probably going to switch back to Windows too, but that’s for another post.

Why are you people still trying to support software that is almost 10 years old?

By supporting it, you are slowing down the migration to something better, safer and more stable. Whether its IE7 on XP/Vista or getting those last Win2K folks to migrate to Firefox, you are, in effect, encouraging people to not update.

I’m not sure when IE6 goes EOL, but it can’t happen soon enough.

As I’ve mentioned, I have pretty much already stopped supporting it. This is primarily because I don’t have anywhere to run it.

If you are stuck on IE6 (still?) for any reason, especially if it’s at your work place, it’s really time to start bugging the system admins to upgrade. Really. And, if you are stuck on Win2K, then it’s seriously time to start thinking about moving up to XP. If that’s not possible, then someone at your organization needs to research Firefox for your everyday browsing.

I know those .net guys need components in IE6 for their stuff to work, but that doesn’t mean you have to be stuck with it for browsing.

You see, just about everything I read anymore has the word iPhone in it. Post after post after post after mother f’ing post is about the iPhone. Testing a new app in the iPhone or just doing something that is tagged uploaded/posted/tested/lovingly created on my iPhone.

It’s annoying. I know y’all have a brand new shiny toy to play with, so I’ll try to be understanding. But honest to robot ninjas gang if it keeps up much longer it’s going to be a whole lot easier to go through my feeds every morning, and my iPod will be practically devoid of podcasts.

It’s a cool device to be sure. I’ll give you that. Just hurry up and get used to it already won’t you? I’m honestly tired of hearing about it.

It seems several different companies have renamed their iPhone games to begin with either a space, a quotation mark, or some other symbol so that they appear first in the list of 197 games on the iPhone portal to the App Store.

Really? It’s good thing they don’t advertise in the yellow pages.

I’ve actually worked with people like this. Had a domain name that started off with 3 A’s because he thought it would help him get to the top. Idiot.

And, this is no different than the way iTunes handled podcasts when it first started. Before there were categories or any organization, you would pull up a list that was complete rubbish at the top with all of the silly names starting with all manner of punctuation, the letter A and spaces. Most of those shows are gone now, as you can imagine.

But, really, make good software. Promote it on your web site. Link to it on your website. Encourage your customers to spread the word. Something.

Just don’t get all pissy because someone is thinking they are being clever because they are faking out the system. Sheesh. Pull your skirt up already Alice.

Besides that, I just checked the app store and I didn’t see any of that silliness. Maybe the good folks at the apple store decided they didn’t want your panties to get in a bunch so they fixed it for you.

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Not dating your blog posts.

Do you have any idea how annoying that is?

I do a fair amount of research using the Goog. Much of the time my search will lead me to a blog or 5, usually covered with ads and not showing the date of the post.

I need the date. I want to know if the information I’m finding is still relevant or still applies to a certain application that I’m researching. I don’t want to have to look at the comments for the date, I want to see it at the top or bottom of the post.

Using excerpts on archve pages? Ok, I can see that. Changing the layout to make sure the content is at the top when you look at the source? That makes total sense to me too. Even making sure the title is relevant to the site. All make perfect sense.

But not dating your posts? Can anyone tell me a good reason why you would want to do that? How does excluding the date increase your page rank? Increase traffic?

Like I have recently mentioned, I think a blog is useless unless you can easily get to the content. Part of that is having the ability to check if it’s relevant or not by looking at the post date.

Hiding it, to me, seems a lot like blocking your phone number when you call out. I’m sure there is a good reason, but I will never be able to wrap my head around it. If you can give me a good explanation for that too feel free, ’cause I’ve never understood it.