Cable, Satellite and now Joost?

With no major networks broadcasting locally, most North Central Washington residents rely on cable or satellite for their daily dose of TV. With the Internet becoming more of a necessity than a luxury, most of us pay a monthly phone, TV, and now Internet bill. VOIP phone services like Vonage are allowing some to forgo the monthly phone bill in favor of a lower monthly bill for a service that piggybacks off the Internet. So if a phone company can bypass traditional means of providing a service, then why not TV?

Napster made sharing music files fast, easy and very popular. Similar services popped up later that not only allowed people to share music, but video as well. The problem so far with file sharing, is a majority of it has been illegal, but now a new company called "Joost" (pronounced juiced) is trying to use file sharing to deliver television over the Internet. Will it work or be successful? Your guess is as good as mine. Regardless, after reading about Joost in Time magazine I requested to be a beta tester of their service. What do I think about Joost so far? The only thing it has going for it is potential. Limited channels and limited shows for the moment, but just like file sharing networks, the more people that use it, the better it will get.

Joost recently sent me some invites that will automatically allow others to join in on their free beta testing. If anyone is interested in trying out Joost, simply contact me here. Be sure to leave a name and email address.

Pro Wrestling Beyond - Slam Fest

Please visit PWB Ringside for the Slam Fest review.

The Source of the Contamination Found (I Hope)

I am currently working on building a new business and website directory for the website. One of the features of the new directory is thumbnail sized images of all the websites listed in the directory. The directory currently has over 1,100 website listings and doing this manually was out of the question. So I found a great program that automatically fetches thumbnail images for me. I feed it a list of web pages and it opens them up and takes a screen shot. The downside is the program requires the use of the Internet Explorer web browser to capture the images.

So whats wrong with Internet Explorer? Unlike other popular web browsers like Firefox and Opera, Internet Explorer comes with the ability to interact directly with the Windows operating system. A great idea, in theory. For example, it allows a person to update their operating system through the browser at the Windows Update website. The downside is that computer viruses also take advantage of this ability for the browser to manipulate the operating system and use it to infect your computer with a virus. Something I had the joy of experiencing first hand when I forgot to set my Internet Explorer security settings to high before starting the program to grab screen shots of the 1,100 plus websites.

Removing the virus was the easy part, reinstalling the operating system takes less than an hour, the real problem was to figure out which of the 1,100 plus websites was handing out the virus. If in fact, it was only one and not multiple websites carrying viruses.

Today I found what hopefully was the one and only website that carried a virus. It was the old website for the Chelan County Fire District 7. I won't print the URL and please don't go looking for it, trust me, it's a virus. Their new website is located at the Go Lake Chelan website and is virus free.

The question you might wonder is why does the old Chelan County Fire District 7 website have a virus that installs itself on your computer if you view the page in Internet Explorer? Well, what happened is that they discontinued their website and someone else picked up the domain name. Now instead of finding information about Chelan County Fire District 7, you get a web page that tries to install a virus on your computer. How are people allowed to buy discontinued websites and put virus installing scripts in their place? I'm not sure, but they do, so be careful where and how you surf the web.

Craigslist comes to Wenatchee

Wenatchee joins Craigslist and it seems to be taking off pretty fast. I have glanced through Craigslist before but since it has never had a local page, I never really explored the website very much. For those who have never heard of Craigslist, it's a very popular community based classifieds website, and it's completely free!

It features everything a regular classifieds would feature and a few you won't find, such as it's Rants & Raves section. The Rants & Raves section allows people to complain or simply voice their opinion about (almost) anything they want. I find it refreshing to see people openly expressing their opinions. Sometimes it's hard to know what people really think in a smaller community where most of the media outlets could risk losing valuable sponsors if they were to speak openly about certain local issues and problems, especially with local businesses and poor customer service. Nothing personal against local media, I need advertisements as well, and have no more desire to complain about customer service or the lack there of than they do.

It's nice to know though that if I receive poor customer service somewhere that I finally have a place to vent. Hopefully local business owners will take notice and keep customer service on a respectable level. I know there are probably a few businesses out there that invest heavily in local advertising that aren't going to be to happy when dissatisfied customer voices are finally heard and not quietly muffled by the local media. Well... more typed and read than voiced and heard, but you get the idea.