More of the damn cold, Dell, Wireless, and turning people onto Open Office.

Last night, it got into the teens around here (in F, not C). This morning, our heater decided to go on the fritz and not put out very much hot air. Now it’s “stuck” on high heat. Turns out it’s probably because our natural gas supplier isn’t supplying enough pressure. Probably the result of the increased demand due to how cold it is! Oh well, it’s better than no heat in these kinds of temperatures and means we can put off the service call until tomorrow when it’s less expensive :).

My father-in-law just bought a new Dell laptop, which supposedly included Microsoft Office. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve helped to answer some basic questions about the system, like how to find out of the battery is charged or how to deal with a self-compressed zip file containing documentation. Other than the basic setup instructions (which proved to be less than adequate), the rest of the documentation doesn’t even come with the computer anymore. They make it that much harder: go to their website, download said documentation, figure out where the extractor extracted it, then find the index.html file so you can read them, or the Windows help file. No instructions that explain how to open their help documents. And they expect novices to figure this out? Which idiots at Dell do we need to pummel with a clue-by-four? Printed documentation… not everyone has broadband.

Meanwhile, my father-in-law contacted Dell about the missing office CDs. In the meantime, I installed a copy of OpenOffice.org 1.1.0 that he can use. Dunno if that will eventually turn into a “conversion” or not since he theoretically is also going to have Microsoft Office, but I can only hope they will find Microsoft Office too much of a pain in the rear to use (or activate — this is Office 2003 we’re talking about) and switch to Open Office. At least if it’s there, they may give it a shot.

From the hey, you’re a geek department, I got asked today about using wireless LAN technology by the parents of one of my son’s friends. Even my wife knows that Wireless LANs are only a good idea if you don’t mind being hacked (or maybe she’s heard me say it enough times, I don’t know). Anyway, the advice I gave them was pretty simple, and I’ll repeat it here:

• If you’ve got 2.4 Ghz cordless phones, avoid using 802.11b or 802.11g since they absolutely don’t get along. Make sure you get a card that supports 802.11a (preferably an a/b/g card)
• Enable whatever security comes with your wireless LAN card. That usually means WEP (yeah, I know, easy to crack) and possibly other security measures (e.g. restricting MAC addresses, changing the default ESSID)
• Install client firewalls on every PC. By putting an wireless LAN card on your PC, anyone in your neighborhood could potentially break into your PC. Install a client-side firewall. Configure it as securely as reasonable for your intended usage patterns.

Of course, the best thing to do is what I did: get your house built with CAT5E in the walls to begin with (CAT6 wasn’t a standard when my house was built). No wireless security issues to worry about, except on my GSM phones.