April 03, 2002

Communications Breakdown...

Occasionally, people will comment that it's hard to get hold of me. When I stop and think about it, this seems impossible. By my count, there are the following ways to reach me during the average day:


  • Work phone

  • Home phone

  • Cell phone

  • Email page to cell phone

  • Work email

  • Personal email (which actually has several accounts that all alias into one account)

  • E-Fax

  • Work fax

  • icb, aka fnet (to talk to meriko and Russell)

  • AOL Instant Messenger (to talk to my sister and a church friend)

  • MSN/Exchange Messenger (mostly for work)

  • Snail-mail to me at work

  • Snail-mail to me at home
That's three instant-messenging applications (and leaves out icq, another popular program), numerous email addresses, three phone numbers...
At work, I usually have two email programs running (getting work and personal email), all three IM programs, my work phone, and my cell phone. Trying to pay some attention to all of them -- and write code, which is what Microsoft actually pays me to do -- is occasionally a little nervewracking.

It would be nice if the instant messenger applications at least could be combined, but as long as AOL remains total buttheads about interoperability with any other application, that probably won't happen.

I guess the real answer is to just turn it all off from time to time.

While I'm on the subject of AOL Instant Messenger, I've noticed two rather unusual things that its installer does on Windows. One is amusing, the other less so. Windows XP has an error reporting feature so that if a program crashes, Windows will ask you if you want to send a log of the crash to Microsoft. It helps Microsoft look for problems so as to improve future versions. You can turn it off, and you can add certain programs to an exception list -- i.e., if one of those programs crashes, don't ever report the error. AIM adds itself to the exception list. That's just kind of amusing.

The second thing the installer does has to do with Internet security zones. Internet Explorer defines four different safety zones -- Internet, Intranet, Trusted Sites, and Restricted Sites. Each zone can have different security settings applied to it. Trusted Sites run with most permissive security settings. AIM's installer adds the 'free.aol.com' domain into the Trusted Sites list. Evil, evil, evil.

 

Posted by Mike at April 3, 2002 11:59 PM