Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

Beth may not be as Internet-geeky as some of us, but she certainly is a geek, she is actively involved in plenty of social networks, and she does blog. So she made the cut for our series!

Name: Beth Snow
Screen Names: drbethsnow - or - Beth77
Personal Blog: drbethsnow.wordpress.com
Social Networks: Jaiku, Pownce, Facebook, Flickr, Friend Feed, identi.ca, Last.fm, MyBlogLog, Technorati, Twitter. I'm also a member of the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists: http://improbable.com/2007/07/13/beth-snow-joins-lfhcfs/  and the Order of the Science Scouts of Exemplary Repute and Above Average Physique.
Current Employment:  I run a research training program in gender & addictions and I teach nutritional sciences courses at the University of British Columbia; I also teach science to elementary school kids as a "Scientist in Residence".
Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada

What is your reason/motivation for blogging?

I mainly write things that I find entertaining and, somewhat surprisingly to me, others seem to find what I write entertaining as well.  So now my motivation is writing to entertain & build community, as well as because I just like to write.  Oh yes, and to win friends and influence people.

I have finally got around to installing Firefox 3 on all our computers. That’s 6 PCs 2 laptops and 1 server that need to be upgraded. The other 2 servers don’t have browsers being used. However I found the process very simple. Naturally I sat at my desk and used remote desktop connections to all the PCs to do the installs. Unlike previous versions of Firefox this upgrade was very clean and simple. All the users settings were maintained, all extensions were upgraded automatically where possible, where new versions existed the opportunity to download and install was there and those that were not available were gracefully disabled. I had waited until Session Manager was available before doing the upgrade, and it upgraded fine. All the open tabs in the saved session were restored in Firefox 3.

I am noting some problems with rendering – my banking website does not quite display correctly with some layout issues. However most sites seem to be fine.

I’ll report back any issues later on if I come across them.

My recommendation: Upgrade unless you have burning need to stay with Firefox 2. If you are using Internet Explorer still, then consider the move to Firefox 3.

WHS

The Windows Home Server Power Pack 1 was released just the other day, and I took the opportunity in the weekend to install it and then reconnect all the PCs to it. They all worked flawlessly. The most exciting thing is now my 2 Vista 64 machines are now connected and being backed up. Previously one wasn’t being backed up at all though there was no data on the machine, and the other which is my workstation was being backed up to an internal 500gb drive.

If you have a Windows Home Server I recommend downloading the upgrade as it also fixes the data corruption error previously found in a few small number of installs with multiple hard drives.

Microsoft Office

Geek Girl Profile -

Name: Bronwen Zande
Screen Name: BronwenZ
Personal Blogs: http://www.soulsolutions.com.au/Blog.aspx | http://girlgeekdinnersbrisbane.blogspot.com/ | http://www.geekgirlblogs.com/.
Social Networks: Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, friendfeed.
Current Employment: Am a director of Brisbane based, Soul Solutions Pty Ltd, a Microsoft Certified Partner.  We work with innovative web technologies such as Silverlight, Virtual Earth and Live Services.
Location: Australia

What is your motivation for blogging?

Originally I started blogging to document problems I’d solved so when I came across it again I’d know how to fix it. As time went on we found our clients, friends, family etc, were reading our blog to see what we were up to. I also use it to document things I’ve done so I can look back and see what we’ve achieved.