Today over at the NY Times, things aren’t sounding so good for the BlackBerry storm, where it’s being called “a dud.”

C|Net seemed to like it though.

Have you picked one up yet? What do you think?

According to a recent study, your keyboard may be five times dirtier than a toilet seat or lavatory handle! Of course with working from home, I’m sure many of you are like me and eat your lunch at your desk. Apparently this is one of the major contributors to causing upset tummies and other nasty things. Oh…that and not washing your hands after going to the bathroom — tsk tsk!

The scientist swabbed 33 keyboards for food poisoning bugs e.coli, coliforms, staphylococcus aureus and enterobacteria and compared the results to those found on a lavatory seat and lavatory door handle.

Four of the keyboards were considered a potential health hazard and one was "condemned".

Two had "warning levels" of staphylococcus aureus and two others had "worryingly elevated" levels of coliforms and enterobacteria, "putting users at high risk of becoming ill from contact".

Eeek! I’m off to shake out my keyboard and wipe it and my mouse down with some disinfecting wipes! How dirty is your keyboard?

Photo courtesy ericskiff via Flickr creative commons. (Note: Please don’t try this at home! :P)
Source: Daily Mail via Tech2Check

(Apologies to Kubrick and Dr. Strangelove)

I sometimes feel that I’m being tested by some outside force, or the old saying “things happen for a reason” often applies. Something really bad happened today, and as they say, when life hands you lemons, make lemonade.

Ok, I promise no more cliches. Last night I was having some hard drive problems, so I ended up having to run CHKDSK on my external hard drive. You know, the one where I keep all my documents and the 250GB of RAW and retouched photos that I’ve worked on over the last 2 years. Yes, you guessed it — I woke up this morning to find that I couldn’t access my drive and it asked me if I wanted to format it.

#&%@! I said a few more than just that. Then I held my head in my hands and wept. Felt sick to my stomach. Why? Because I had been procrastinating about backing up my important data for months, but never did it.

Hit the jump for the rest of the story and find out what you probably already know, but need to be told again.

continue reading "Backup or: How I learned to stop procrastinating and love the data"