ScaleOvenStove

Shut Up And Dance: Scammers using hacked passwords to extort money

Below is the email I received yesterday. Posting here so hopefully others will google and find and know this is a scam. Do not pass go, do not transfer 200 bitcoin.

For those that have watched Black Mirror – this reminds me of this episode.

Let’s cut to the chase. I do know is your password. Most importantly, I do know about your secret and I have proof of this. You do not know me and nobody paid…

Stumbled across a pretty cool site the other day, Walk Score (https://www.redfin.com/how-walk-score-works) – you put in your address and it gives you back a score between 0 and 100 about how good your location is to walk around to other places nearby. I got a 94/100 – pretty good! Here is my walkscore link: http://www.walkscore.com/get-score.shtml?street=2190+W.+Burnside+St&loc=97210&go=Go  …

Transparency in the Workplace: Sharing Your Calendar Details

This is just one more step to being more transparent in the workplace. A few months ago I tweeted this, figured it was time to detail it out Want to be transparent in corporate America? Make your calendar public in your workplace. — Steve Novoselac (@scaleovenstove) November 19, 2013 How many times have you went to schedule a meeting with your coworkers, and when you add them to the meeting you…

Internet Explorer YouTube Embeds Duplicate Closed Captions

Ran into a funky issue recently with Internet Explorer, YouTube embeds and duplicate closed captions (CC) Videos that you use closed captions (CC) on work fine in Chrome, Firefox, even Microsoft Edge, but some videos, some times, in some areas of the video would duplicate closed captions in Internet Explorer 11. The fix for this is to use an iframe embed for Internet Explorer and you will no…

Testing Hardware – QA and the Nest Thermostat 

I have had a Nest thermostat now for 3 years. For the first year it was great. Then, something shorted out in our furnace or something and it went haywire. 

Problem was, the furnace blower would try to start when the A/C was on. Not good.

A bug fix was to just disconnect the heat wire during the summer. But I am getting sick of that. 

   And how can I prove that it isn’t a botched wire job or a…

SSIS – Custom Control Flow Component – Execute SQL Job And Wait

Sometimes you have some pretty complex ETL’s going in SSIS, and you might have multiple projects/solutions that need to call other SSIS Packages or SQL Agent Jobs and you have a pretty big production going on. You might have an ETL solution that needs to kick off other packages, and you can either import those into your solution or call them where they lie on the file system/SQL server, etc. You…

Microsoft Business Intelligence Now and Into The Future

10 years ago, it was SSIS/SSAS/SSRS

Then in 2007 SharePoint, PerformancePoint/SSRS

Then in 2010 Power Pivot in Excel/SharePoint, then Power View in SharePoint

Then in 2013 Power BI … Power Pivot, Power View, Power Query, Power Map.. In Excel and Office 365.

Now in 2015 Power BI Version 2. Not in Office 365, separate. Power BI Designer, or use the Power BI web site to set up your dashboards,…

What is one of the biggest time sucks in corporate information workflow?

Email Attachments.

Let’s go through an exercise.

Person A sends out an Excel document, Word document, PowerPoint presentation – choose your poison. They send it to 6 people. They ask each person to update a section and send it back to get merged.

First off, this is very 1999ish. We have better ways to do this. But let’s…

Last night was the first Trek Bikes Software Development Hackathon.

A modest turnout, we had fun. Two teams, we worked on different parts of a revamp of an internal web service we all would like to see work better.

One team focused on the front end and API and one team on the data and service bus.

Hopefully this is just the start and we do these regularly. We had people from not just IT but…

If you use Google/Gmail ..

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/use-google-windows-8-rt

“To sync your calendar”

Though you can’t sync your Google calendar with the Calendar app, you can see your Google calendar events by moving them to Outlook.com. For more info on how to do that, see How to see your Google events in the Calendar app.

This is a horrible solution. It is a shame that…

Why I No Longer Self Host WordPress

Well I finally did it. Cancelled my hosting account. This post you are reading was written on WordPress.com and not in my Self Hosting WordPress instance. MediaTemple had a good run, but I just didn’t need it anymore.

Looking at things a little deeper.. When I started blogging back in 2004 (it’s been over 10 years already?!?) I started on blogger, there weren’t a ton of choices. Then, a couple of…

If Data Is Your Currency…

Then why do enterprises insist on trying to create their own banks (data centers)?

I have been thinking a while about on-premises data centers vs cloud data centers, and this analogy came to mind…

We trust our money with banks, financial institutions.. Instead of keeping our money at home in a safe or mattress. Yes some people have safes with valuables but I’m guessing they don’t direct deposit…

Using Power Query to Analyze Your Schedule

I am in a lot of meetings. A LOT of meetings. Double, triple, quad booked. I guess when you get to manager or director level somewhere, that is the definition of “busy”, or maybe everyone just wants you in their meeting, or your opinion, or whatever. In the end “Meetings are Toxic” (from 37signals), but really the are sometimes a necessary evil.

Anyways, do you really know where you spend all…