Peanuts to Profits With Thor Schrock
Peanuts to Profits With Thor Schrock

Service is what Schrock Innovations relies on to keep our customer loyal and ensure the ongoing success of our business. We always strive to make certain that our customers leave our doors happy, and if they don’t we try to figure out what happened and how we can prevent it from happening again.

I literally LIVE this motto day in and day out, so it came as a pretty big shock to me to experience the bipolar opposite of good service myself. My refrigerator stopped cooling properly, and as knowledgeable as I am with computers, I don’t know squat about refrigeration.

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The latest Computer This show has been posted on our Compute This page.

You might notice that we are now archiving three weeks of shows on the website instead of the usual two weeks. I received a request from a listener to keep more audio on the website for a longer period of time, so we are!

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Now that the most over-hyped digital event since Y2K has passed, I am interested to see how my readers handles the early time change.

All of my Windows Vista and Windows XP computers switched perfectly, advancing by one hour overnight. All of my Outlook appointments are fine, and from what I can tell, most public and government websites are working fine.

I am interested to hear if any of you had problems with the early switch to Daylight Savings Time. Click on the comments link to tell me what (if anything) happened to your technology.

Microsoft released its Office 2007 product in February, and it seems to be taking pretty well with our customers (better than Vista is anyway). A couple weeks ago we received our first shipment of OEM Office 2007 software for installation on new Modular computers.

We were shocked to find that Microsoft is shipping Office 2007 OEM in an empty amaray case! When you crack it open to install the software, all that is present is a small cardboard card with an activation code – a license. OEM installers are now required to download the trial software from the Microsoft website, install the trial, and then activate it using the provided code.

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Last Saturday on Compute This I announced that we will be launching our Ultimate Upgrade sale one month early this year.

We had planned on running a sale this month on upgrading to Windows Vista, but the problems I experienced upgrading my own PC have given me pause about subjecting our customers to that headache. So instead, we moved the Ultimate Upgrade sale up by a month to give Microsoft another months to work out some additional Vista kinks.

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I was interviewed today by KFOR 1240, a local AM radio station in Lincoln Nebraska about the new daylight savings time change and its expected impact.

The bottom line is that the sun will come up tomorrow and life will move on. If you are running Windows XP or Vista, chances are everything has already been taken care of by your automatic updates. (If you disabled auto-updating, you might want to visit www.windowsupdate.com now to get critical updates.)

If you are running Windows 95, 98, or ME, life will go on, all be it an hour off schedule for a few weeks. These operating systems no longer receive Microsoft patches, and therefore remain unprotected against the daylight savings time changes imposed by Congress. Thanks to Dave Lucas, there is now a patch that Windows 9x users can install that will bring their systems into compliance.

Click “Read More” for a link to the patch and installation instructions for Windows 95, 98 and ME users only.

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I received an alert yesterday morning that the website http://www.crlincoln.com/ had expired and was no longer serving information.

I contacted the local Lincoln Computer Renaissance store and confirmed that they are still open and conducting business. I asked if they had a website anymore, and their employee answered that they “just have the national one” now.

A quick check of the national website found that there were a number of links to obtain information about the Lincoln franchise, but all of them were dead and redirected me to the www.compren.com homepage.

Computer Renaissance is a nation-wide franchise with locations in multiple states. In the past, the Lincoln franchise has maintained its own website.

**UPDATE 3:59 PM CST**

The FBI has been contacted by NOAA according to their Public Affairs Office. The statement I received is that NOAA is aware of the breech and is following its internal procedures. Thor Schrock and Schrock Innovations, Inc. have offered the NOAA and the FBI assistance by providing technical information that was intentionally not publicised on this blog.

**END UPDATE**

Now that news of the infiltration of the NOAA server has reached ZDNet, it appears that the NOAA is now responding to an unauthorized user accessing their website. The pages about Soma have been removed and the entire sub domain for the Global Monitoring Division is now down.

At the time of this post, http://www.cmdl.noaa.gov/ is offline. No content whatsoever is being served on the sub domain, which carried legitimate data from the NOAA as recently as this morning. The NOAA.gov main website is still operational.

The webmaster for the domain happens to be out sick today, and I have had difficulties reaching other NOAA or Public Affairs officials for comment.

Tonight I received a spam post on our customer support forum that I normally would have deleted and forgotten about, but this one was different. It was the usual pill-pushing post with a couple dozen links. But these links went back to a .gov website – a highly unusual occurrence for this kind of scheme.

The U.S. government might have a serious security breech on the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) website.

It appears that either an authorized agent of the NOAA or a hacker has infiltrated the website and used that access to plant more than 70 pages about the prescription drug Soma – a muscle relaxer.

The pages can be found at http://www.cmdl.noaa.gov/hotitems/soma/.

All of the pages are interlinked to cross promote each other and reap the benefits that a .gov backlink offers to those trying to come out on top of search results in search engines like Google.

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The March 3rd edition of Compute This is posted on the Schrock Innovations website.

This week I talked about the release delays with the Maintenance Checkup Home Edition and asked for additional beta testers. I also announced the launch of the 2007 Ultimate Upgrade sale. Aside from our Holiday Sale, this is our most popular computer event of the year.

During the Ultimate Upgrade sale you can trade in your old, tired PC for a brand new Schrock Innovations Modular PC at a significant discount over our normal prices. You can learn more about the Ultimate Sale by visiting the Computer Sale website.