The video above is Apocalyptica performing the Metallica song "Fight Fire with Fire". You have to check it out, even if your not a Metallica fan, just to see the crazy Cello action.

Last night, I was lucky enough to catch Apocalyptica at "The Black Sheep" here in Colorado Springs. Although I used to listen to Apocalptica quite a bit, about 10 years ago, for some reason I haven’t listened to them in awhile.

Luckily, their last album has two songs which received some playtime on the radio, making them much more popular with the mainstream.

Although I don’t have that CD yet, I believe the two popular songs are the only two songs with vocals on the entire disc.

I haven’t seen Apocalyptica before, but what a terrific show! The amount of bass that they produce is mind boggling, and to be honest, there were parts of the show where I fully expected the cellos to burst into flame. The band loved the crowd, and it was obvious that they enjoy playing for us.

I love heavy music, but I think that even if you didn’t, you still have to appreciate their ability and talent.

Thanks Apocalyptica! I hope you find your way back to Colorado again.

You can find tour dates on their website. They have a few more stops in August before going back overseas, but they’ll be back in the US in September through October.

Posted in Music, Recommendations No Comments »

I was looking through my Del.Icio.us bookmarks to find some common topic for today’s link post. There’s a whole slew of links there on far too many topics, but sometimes it’s hard to tie them all in together. This is one place I should implement “Phil’s 3 or more for categories” rule. I do tend to go a little crazy with categories.

Feeling a little inspired by a guest post on Pearl’s blog, “3 Crucial Things That School Never Taught You”, I decided to use Parenting as my theme for today. So, here goes:

- How to raise a Fun and Funny Child – Although the site name, BabyCenter, would make you think that it’s only about babies, they cover topics for children of all ages. This article gives you some insight into why a sense of humor is so important, but also how to help your child develop their own.

- How Not to Talk to Your Kids – This is a New York News and Features Article that’s really interesting. It discusses the difference, and long term implications, of praising your child for being “smart”, vs praising them for “working hard”. Really interesting, and I saw the difference in my own kids.

- OffSprung – This is a terrific blog that covers all sorts of parenting and parent orientated topics, and makes them funny to boot. I’m a big fan of being entertained while I learn, so this is a favorite.

- The DaddyCast – This is a great podcast from a working father. He discussed parenting topics, as well as relating his experiences. I’ve really been able to relate to a lot of his stories, as well as found his recommendations helpful.

- Fatherville – Terrific site for fathers. Advice and discussions about nearly every family situation, this site has some terrific articles, as well as a great forums and a blog.

Posted in Parenting, Recommendations, WebSites, LinkLove No Comments »

The eDoxs service is an excellent way for companies to deal with SPAM. Once you sign up, you replace your domain mail server (MX) records with eDoxs servers, and they accept or deny the e-mail on your server’s behalf. Any valid mail gets forwarded on to your mail server.

eDoxs is the service that my company uses. This is not a pay for post, I was just reminded recently how much I love their service, and I wanted to post about it.

I’ll explain what reminded me a little later in this post. First, let me explain a little bit more about this service.

The SPAM and Nothing but the SPAM

There are a whole lot of anti-spam services and software out there, but eDoxs’ big selling point, for me at least, was that eDoxs has a 0% false positive for their SPAM scanning. In other words, not a single legitimate email is going to be labeled as spam.

I’ve had to deal with other companies blocking email from my company for really dumb reasons, and I didn’t want others to have to deal with that when they were sending email to my domain.

It isn’t a perfect system, but I prefer to know that I have some spam that gets through, rather than have valid email that get blocked.

Saving you Bandwidth and Server Space

Mail that is accepted is scanned for viruses and malware, compared to known black lists, and scanned to see if it matches any known SPAM. The virus definitions that are used get updated every 4 minutes, from Symantec, before the updates are available to the general public.

I signed my company up with eDoxs years ago, and have been a very happy customer ever since. As soon as I signed up, I saw a dramatic drop in my bandwidth utilization, and I think I would’ve  needed at least twice the bandwidth that I have now, if it wasn’t for eDoxs.

What brought this up

The reason this came up is that eDoxs called me a couple of days ago to let me know that for some reason, I have had a dramatic increase in the number of email coming into my company’s domain.

It looks like some bot net has singled my company’s domain out for a dictionary attack.

You see, lately we have been receiving about 3 Million emails a day.

Yes, that is a whole lot of email. About 2,083 emails a minute!

Thankfully only a fraction of them are sent down my Internet connection, and on to my mail server.

If you’re looking for a corporate email solution, I highly suggest eDoxs. The money saved in circuit costs, not to mention employee time, makes the service a bargain.

Thank you eDoxs!

Posted in malware, SPAM, Reviews, Email, Internet, Recommendations 4 Comments »

I can’t honestly tell you that I’ve been regularly checking out the web site of the long time Tech giant CNET. Although I have ran across it from time to time, I just don’t visit it that often.

Until now.

I’ve mentioned it before, but I just can’t seem to sit down in front of the computer and watch videos for more than a few minutes at a time. I’ve talked about some of my favorites, like Webb Alert and Textra, which are both short duration, but I hadn’t looked at CNET TV before now.

CNET TV is also short little clips, but there are a whole bunch of them, and you can even see what’s coming up next. Not to mention the ability to skip ahead if you want.

Pictured to the right is a closer picture of their player, and you can see the upcoming clips listed in the red highlighted section below the video.

This works well, because instead of one short video, I can watch several short videos, which do a better job of keeping my attention than a longer duration video would.

Since it is only tech news, and most of the time I just need the audio, I’m pretty happy just jumping to another application to keep working, while the clips continue to play in the background.

Now, I do this with the video podcasts as well, but let’s face it, like Steve Jobs at the mock turtleneck store, iTunes and/or QuickTime decides to throw a fit once in awhile if they aren’t the center of attention.

On the other hand, my web browser isn’t as picky. As a matter of fact, I’ve never seen it in a mock turtleneck.

Back to CNET TV, I did notice one strange thing though, there are music videos thrown in to break up the tech clips. I’m not sure what that’s all about, but the nice thing about the player is that you can skip right over them if you want to. Of course, if you aren’t a tech news junkie just hurting for a fix, you can watch them too.

So if you want to see some tech related content and news, check out CNET TV.

Posted in Recommendations, Tech-News, Podcasts 3 Comments »

I posted recently about TeXtra, but there is a second video podcast that I have been watching lately to get my tech news fix, Webb Alert.

Like Textra, Webb Alert is generally under 8 minutes long, and has a surprising number of stories about what is happening in the world of Technology.

The host of Webb Alert is Morgan Webb, who I first saw on The Screen Savers on Tech TV, and on Extended Play. I had heard that after G4 bought Tech TV, that she remained on that network. I don’t know this for myself, because I haven’t watched G4 since they killed all of the Tech TV shows.

One aspect of Web Alert that I liked is that she shows commercials for blogs that she likes, without payment from those blogs. What a great deal.

Check Webb Alert out, I bet that you’ll like it.

Posted in Recommendations, Tech-News, Podcasts 1 Comment »