Lucky me!

When I go to the Houston Chronicle site to update The HelpLine Blog and I see that banner pictured above it’s like seeing my name in lights.

I was just browsing through the archives of my column and was amazed to realize I have been writing for the paper for almost 6 years now.

What an amazing experience the whole technology explosion has been for me. From my humble beginnings as a sales dweeb in the computer department at Best Buy over 11 years ago to working in the IT department of a huge software company today.

Along the way I have gotten to do cool things and meet amazing people.

When I was the operations manager at Neosoft many moons ago was when I first encountered technology columnist Dwight Silverman. Dwight was the original HelpLine columnist for the Houston Chronicle.

Technology Bytes was still in it’s infancy and Dwight was an early adopter of residential ISDN. I had many opportunities to sit on the phone and go over the configuration of his Pipeline 25 whenever his Internet connection would drop. Over a short time we developed a rapport and he even wrote a very nice article about the radio show for the Chronicle which gave us a much needed push in listenership back in those formative years.

I moved on from Neosoft in 1999 but did not lose touch with Dwight. He guest hosted on the show every now and then and in 2000 he informed me that he was getting promoted at the newspaper and would be giving up the HelpLine column.

The story on how I came to take over the column varies depending on whether you talk to me or talk to Dwight.

My recollection is that Dwight didn’t even offer me the opportunity to apply for the position. When I suggested the idea to him I seem to recall him dismissing it rather out of hand, citing my lack of journalism credentials. In my mind I pushed the issue and was granted the opportunity to write a test column to be reviewed by his editor and they would consider my application. It was none-too-encouraging, but my desire to be a media-whore was strong.

I took the time to find the original e-mail exchange. This is the response I sent to Dwight when he announced his moving on to other things at the Chronicle:

To: Dwight Silverman
From: JLee
Subject: Re: The times, they are a’changin’ (was Re: Tech Bytes)
Cc:
Bcc:
X-Eudora-Signature:

Wow….big changes!

Maybe I should apply as your replacement…

At 09:26 PM 08/21/2000 -0500, you wrote:

Jay –

You may be interested in this note I’m sending out to my sources…

Effective Monday, Aug. 28, I will no longer be covering business technology for the Houston Chronicle. Instead, I am taking on the job of Web Development Editor for HoustonChronicle.com, the newspaper’s Web site….*snip*

And this was his reply:

To: “Dwight Silverman”
From: JLee
Subject: Re: The times, they are a’changin’ (was Re: Tech Bytes)
Cc:
Bcc:
X-Eudora-Signature:

Ha! Maybe you should! Got a journalism degree?

At any rate, I applied and Dwight ended up helping me quite a bit with my first efforts at writing the column. In the end the position was offered to me and I accepted.

Things have evolved over the years. The HelpLine column is now an almost daily blog and remains a weekly feature in the business section of the paper on Tuesdays. It used to be Wednesdays, same as the radio show which made Wednesday Jay Lee Day for awhile, or so I dubbed it when Andrea declared that nothing important or entertaining happened on Wednesdays.

Now Dwight is a regular on the program and we’re going stronger than ever as the show approaches it’s 11th anniversary in June.

I just love being a geek and getting to do what I do.

Someone to watch over me


Saint Isidore’s Feast Day is April 4th

St. Isidore of Seville is my patron saint. He patches my operating system and keeps my device drivers current and up to date. He watches over me and delivers me from the BSOD. He gives me strength to smite sooth my users and optimize my network bandwidth. He protects me from viruses and worms and allows no spyware to tempt me. He is my guardian and keeps my identity from being usurped by those who would phish it. St. Isidore insures my passwords and guards my accounts from hackers. He is the firewall that guards me from the Internet barbarians and the pop-up blocker that shields me from unwanted pr0n. He is the encryption algorithm that guards my data and maintains the integrity of my storage devices. He is my backup and my restore in darker times when I lose my way or my faith is waning. He is the sale at Fry’s and the shepherd of increasingly lower prices on computer hardware. St. Isidore ushers in faster processors, cheaper and better video technology and increasingly smaller portable and removable storage options.

St. Isidore watches over me.

Technology Tower of Babel

Esta noche en Technology Bytes, el programa computacional de ayuda, Aurora Losada traducira en vivo preguntas formuladas en español. Ella es la editora de La Voz, el periódico en español del Houston Chronicle. Tú podras explicarle en español tus dudas de cómputo, y ella las traducira al inglés para los miembros de Technology Bites. El programa se transmite hoy miércoles 8 de 7:00 a 9:00 p.m. por KPFT, 90.1 FM. También lo puedes escuchar en www.kpft.org.

Aurora Losada

Tonight on my show, Technology Bytes, we will once again be experimenting with bilingual tech support. Aurora Losada, editor of the Chronicle’s Spanish-language publications, will be joining us in the studio as we invite our Spanish Speaking audience to phone in their support calls.

The last time we did this it was a huge success…and QUITE amusing.

According to Evil Dwight (who works with Aurora) there are some surprises planned. I am all a-twitter with anticipation.

You can tune in via KPFT 90.1 FM tonight between 7 and 9 pm CST or listen to the stream via the web site at www.kpft.org.

Kudos! I love kudos!

I know it’s not everybody’s cup of tea, but the blogging I do as part of my contract work for The Houston Chonicle over at the Helpline Blog is pretty cool to me.

My great grandfather, Franklin W. Lee, owned the Rush City News of Rush City, Minnesota and my great grandmother took it over after his death. Marilla Upright was the first woman newspaper editor of the country, and made the speech opening the Minn. pavilion at the 1892-3 Worlds Fair in Chicago.

I actually have my great grandfather’s journal that he wrote. It documents the birth of my grandfather and even has his first drawing in it. Kinda like his “blog” so-to-speak.

Anyway, I like what I do at the Chronicle and I like getting to be a part of the online aspects of what is happening there.

Today I got the news that the Chronicle has been recognized for it’s efforts in blogging.

New York University Associate Professor Jay Rosen from Pressthink and his students conducted a study to determine which major U.S. newspapers were best at blogging.

Fifteen undergraduates in journalism, two grad students, and one professor set out to determine–by our lights– the top blogging newspapers in the U.S. among major dailies. We found six standouts, two honorable mentions and some wacky blogs. Number One in our eyes: the Houston Chronicle. By a mile.

Coming in second is the Washington Post.

You can read about the study here.

I don’t fancy myself a newspaper man but I suppose there is some of it in my blood. Franklin Lee is one of my favorite relatives. He was a journalist, poet, playwright, essayist and editor.

I’d like to think that he might be proud of my efforts, or at least see them as something worthwhile. At any rate, it’s good to be acknowledged by one’s peers. And that’s what happened today.

Congrats to Evil Dwight over at chron.com and to all the Houston Chronicle Bloggers!
We’re #1!!!

It’s official, AOL sucks! @!*#

The company I work for has between 600 and 800 people working globally. We generate a LOT of e-mail, as you might imagine. Here recently I have been getting a rash of calls about e-mail from here to AOL being delayed.

I remember reading this article about AOL’s plan to implement a fee for bulk e-mail messages.

Basically, if you want to send a certain amount of e-mail to AOL users and you don’t pay your e-mail priority is lowered.

I had one user here who indicated that they sent an e-mail to their spouse’s AOL address and it took two days to get delivered.

While I was discussing this one of our engineers forwarded me the following:

Some interesting news that I thought that I would share with you, and this may be old news to you but it was new news to me.

Late last week one of our employees started receiving Marshal “˜your email has been delayed’ messages on some (but not all) email that he was sending to his wife @aol.com. Since I had implemented the new HOU MTA servers, we were thinking that there was some correlation of his issue and it being related to the implementation of the new servers.

I was able to recreate his delayed email situation by sending 4 test emails to the employees wife @aol.com. It appears that one of the four emails made it through to her, the others were queued on our side. After searching the MM logs, there was a link within the logs pointing to http://postmaster.info.aol.com/errors/421rlynw.html. This url basically says that ourcompany.com is a spamming website and we have been throttled as a domain to only be allowed a small percentage of bandwidth of email thru at a time. This is a per domain restriction, not a per user restriction. However, our company could if it chooses, pay AOL a fee to become a “˜certified’ email sender with AOL, which would allow us more bandwidth for sending emails. If choose not to pay the fee, then we will be throttled to only allow certain amounts of email data thru their pipe at a time, which is our current situation. As a result, mail to aol.com is being queued on our side until eventually there is enough bandwidth to allow the email to go thru. The side effect is that the sender will be receiving delayed messages from MM.

The MM folks tell me that yahoo.com is going to be implementing the same thing soon too. There are several other domains that also have adopted this philosophy, but I do not have their email domains.

—-

Interestingly enough, we are not listed on any of the RBLs (Real-Time Blacklists) so I don’t know what criteria AOL used to determine we were a “spamming” company.

And to think, I defended AOL not too long ago.

Testing new plugin for WordPress

If you’re viewing this on your Lj friends list it won’t be very impressive.
Click the link to bring you to www.baldheretic.com to see this as it’s intended to be seen.

I’m playing with the Lightbox java script plugin. When you click the below image a larger version should pop-up in a “Light Box”…it’s a VERY cool effect.

For the record, after Cynthia had her eyes examined and got her new contacts she still thinks I am attractive…so PPPPHHHHHTTTTTTTT!

So very tired…

Last night was the final fund-raising episode of Technology Bytes for this pledge drive. We did very well. Three shows during the run and we exceeded our overall goal for the drive. Last night was not looking like it was going to be a success until the very end. Our goal was $2280 and I just rounded it up to $2300 and pushed for that. About 1 hour and 15 minutes into our two hour slot we were hovering around $400/$500. Needless to say, I was sweating it. We kept pushing and pushing and in the final minutes of the show we went up over $2400. Whew!

After nearly 11 years on the air with this program I am still amazed at the support we get, even if our listeners like to make us stress till the last minute.

Speaking of support for the show, one of the best comments from a listener/subscriber was “Appreciates Jay’s subtle gay humor” which came after we were razzing Smiley who was our off air coordinator for the fundraiser. He’s an unabashedly flaming individual. The subscriber who made the comment was quick to point out that he is also gay.

For some reason members of the gay and lesbian community seem to like Technology Bytes. We get on air mentions from the Gay and Lesbian Voices program on occasion and even Ray Hill, Houston’s most famous gay man, never hesitates to drop a kind word about what we do. Perhaps there is a solidarity between our two social groups due to our shared ostrisization. I like to think that, in our own way, we are activists for a good cause and that is the reason for the good will from such a diverse group.

In other Technology Bytes news, Groovehouse has joined the crew to answer phones and screen calls to be on the air. So far, so good. He’s been in the control booth with Phliktid for the last two shows. We’ll see how he holds up after we banish him to the phone room of isolation…

Next week we get back to our normal routine. It’s always good to get the support but I like just doing a normal two hour show withouth the added pressure of fundraising.