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The 2006 BNC Editorial Rules are on the web. Deadline for entries is February 6th, 2007.

In case you haven’t had a chance to look at the Mid-Winter Agenda yet, check it out: Lisa Tackett Griffin will be on hand offering classes in Quark XPress, InDesign & Mac Maintenance & Troubleshooting! Lisa is with Ray Davis & Co. in Selma, AL, and she’s a popular trainer in the newspaper industry. Her areas of expertise include system management, OS X, network setup, and much more. I’ve had an opportunity to take her classes before, both when they were offered by MPA and the Institute of Newspaper Technology.

Information Week reports that on average, spam accounted for 87% of e-mail traffic this year, a 30% increase over a year ago.

Broadband-connected computers commandeered by spammers drove a 30% increase in the amount of spam headed to consumer e-mail boxes and corporate networks, an e-mail security firm says.

Zombies [remote controlled banks of computers spewing out spam] accounted for 85% of spam circulating the Internet, Commtouch said. Half of all phishing attempts involved spam posing as e-mail from eBay or PayPal. [More]

The letters requesting BNC graphics have gone out; please get them to me as quickly as possible so they can be included in both the BNC publication and the Saturday presentation.

If you have a question about the winners, please contact Beth Boone at bboone@mspress.org or call 601.981.3060.
Send files to vbracknell@mspress.org. PDF’s, JPG’s or TIFF’s are all acceptable.

I am checking my mail every 5 minutes these days to keep it cleared out. I can accept e-mails up to 4MB, so if you are sending multiple files, please consider using separate e-mails a few minutes apart.

If you have a single file that is too large, you can use an alternate e-mail address vbracknell@gmail.com, which will accept up to 10MB per e-mail. Or consider using one of the free file tranfer sites I mention in this newsletter!

Ok, you have these files you need to send to someone easily, but it’s too big too e-mail. Here are some free file transfer services that can help.

One tip: if you are sending multiple files, create a Zip file first. You can do this on a any PC or on Macs running OS 10.x and above.  

YouSendIt www.yousendit.com
YouSendIt lets businesses, professionals and consumers move big files (up to 100MB free!) If you know how to use email, you can easily use the YouSendIt service.

DropLoad www.dropload.com
A service enabling one to transfer files to a server for someone to pick up at a later date, without disclosing email address.

Recipients you specify are sent an email with instructions on how to download the file. Files are removed from the system after 7 days, regardless if they have been picked up or not. You can upload any type of file, mp3, movies, pdfs, etc up to 100MB each! Recipients can be anyone with an email address.

We’ve all seen them; the petitions to help a Make-A-Wish child, the petition to help a wounded police office have a new house created on Extreme Makeover, and so forth. So before you send out that next e-mail to 10 friends, consider this message from Snopes.com:

Claim: Signing and circulating online petitions is an effective way of remedying important issues.
Status: False.
Origins: These past few years have seen the birth of an Internet phenomenon: the e-petition. It offers instant comfort to those outraged by the latest ills of the world through its implicit assurance that affixing their names to a statement decrying a situation and demanding change will make a difference. That assurance is a severely flawed one for a multitude of reasons.

Okay, so the average e-petition isn’t ultimately worth the pixels it took to create it — why are they so popular?

In a world beset by complex problems, the solutions of which will take enormous amounts of time, money, and commitment, such simplification as the e-petition provides a welcome relief. Imagine having the power to solve those problems! Moreover, imagine having it merely at the click of a mouse!

Such is the appeal. A sense of powerlessness and lack of control over events played out on the grand scale becomes replaced by the certainty that real change can be brought about at the cost of no more effort than it takes to type a few characters on a keyboard, just enough to display one’s name on a growing list of equally committed cyber activists. Through the magic of the e-petition, those left feeling like bystanders to important events are transformed into powerful agents for social change. It’s heady stuff.

It’s also illusion.

http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/petition/internet.htm

For those of you looking for 2007 calendars, especially small ones that can be printed for wallet or purse, check out davidseah.com

There are Excel versions as well as PDF versions for those of you who don’t have Excel installed. Also including a generic no-holiday version, for those of you without a localized version available.

And then there’s timeanddate.com, where you can generate a printable calendar in almost any way you like.

Apparently, yesterday’s Office updates updates were a mistake. They’re gone now. Aren’t you glad you didn’t update yet? There’s no way to “un-update” once it’s done.

Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac 11.3.1 Update has been posted.

This update contains several updates to enhance security and stability, including fixes for vulnerabilities that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer’s memory with malicious code.

Applies to: Office 2004 Standard Edition, Office 2004 Student and Teacher Edition, Office 2004 Professional Edition, Word 2004, Excel 2004, PowerPoint 2004, Entourage 2004.

Released: December 12, 2006