It’s Virtually Done (IVD) Blog

Imagine that you want to check your weather forecast, and so you check your local television station’s website to see if it is going to snow. You poke around on a few pages; no harm no foul. But wait a minute. Unbeknownst to you, that local television station has downloaded spyware onto your computer. Is it harmful? Probably not. Rude and not welcome? Yes!

I use this example because it happened to me. Hey, I was just checking the weather! I found out that the television station had put spyware on my computer when I ran one of my antispyware programs. I use three programs, which are all free, and I run them about once a week. Here’s what I use:

Ad-Aware SE Personal
Spybot Search
Spyware Blaster

PC World ran a story about spyware stoppers in their magazine’s April 2005 issue. Rather than combining free anti-spyware programs as I do, they recommend Counter Spy  or Spy Sweeper and combining it with Hijack This.

Overall, you just need to select a strategy that you are comfortable with and keep up with it. If you pay for a program, make sure that it automatically updates for the latest protections and then renew it when it expires. If you elect to use a free version, then make sure that you run it on a regular basis.

Most of all, be careful about downloading free programs of any kind. In actuality, it isn’t free; you’re just paying a price of a different kind: your privacy.

It helps if you use the appropriate subject line. As emails go back and forth, the topic often changes. I recently received an email that had a subject line related to a business topic that didn’t pertain to me. Because I was expecting an answer on another topic, I opened the email from this person. To my surprise, it was an email intended for someone else and contained an important family announcement.

Quick tip: As the content of the email changes, change the subject line

Instead of: Feedback on Business Forum
Change the subject to: Mother and Baby Fine

Result: The subject line will attract the attention of the right people. The added benefit is that when later you are searching for that birth announcement to forward to someone else, you won’t have to plow through 10 emails with the subject “Feedback on Business Forum.”

If you are really kind, you’ll delete all the information below your topic that doesn’t relate to the new subject at hand.

Ever get email newsletters, also called ezines, that contain strange characters in appropriate places? For example, sometimes there are question marks where apostrophes or double quotes should be.

If you don’t want to be the person sending a newsletter that looks like that, here are some tips:

1. Use straight quotes instead of “smart” or “curly cue” quotes for both contractions and double quotes.
2. Use double hyphens — rather than em dash (a longer hyphen).
3. Don’t use superscript or subscript.
4. Don’t use ellipses (…).
5. Don’t add manual carriage returns; let your word processor wrap the text.

The difficulty here is that if you create your content in Word, which many of us do, Word will automatically create problems 1-3 above when you type certain characters. It looks better in print, but it wrecks havoc with certain browsers.

Solution: Tell Word that you don’t want these specialty autoformat features:

Open a blank document

Format>Autoformat>Options>Autoformat Tab

In the Replace section, uncheck the first four boxes

Okay

Cancel

For added insurance, after composing your text in Word, cut and paste it into Notepad. This will get rid of other Word formatting that may cause you grief.

Good luck and may all your apostrophes be straight.

 

Recall my previous post, Portland Snow Frenzy (see post December 3, 2005), when the weather forecasters promised snow and we didn’t get it. Imagine my surprise when awoke to a few inches of the white stuff on Thursday, March 9, when no snow was forecasted!