Here's a completely random posting...

Twelve years or so ago, I used to wear a cologne from Abercrombie & Fitch called "Woods." I loved the cologne, and I used to joke it was the only thing the store sold that fit me. Much to my disappointment, it was discontinued about 5 or 6 years ago. I really liked that cologne, and it was pretty much all I wore!
Fast forward to this afternoon, where I'm searching on E-Bay for some tester sizes of new colognes. If you're not familiar with testers, they're just the bottles the stores use to show off the fragrance. Testers come without a box, are usually twice the size of the regular bottles, and about half the price. I'm thrifty (cheap).
On a lark, I searched for "Abercrombie Woods" and found about 20 listings. This formerly $70/bottle cologne is now going for upwards of $300 or more per bottle, with some places listing it at $399.

I spent way too much time doing some Google searching, but found a few places that do "custom reproductions" of discontinued colognes. I thought it was fascinating that companies could carve a niche out of something like this. The pricing was very reasonable, and they offer a 100% guarantee. So, I placed an order! We'll see what it really smells like - I have about 1/8 of a bottle of Woods left in my desk at work.

Like I said... Completely random. And yes, I have much better things to do with my time. :-)

This really isn't "tech" related, but it is definitely on my mind.

I was really excited to attend the grand opening of Nick and Nino's Coal Fired Pizza tonight. Monroe's newest restaurant represents a significant investment by two of my friends, Tony Sacco and Nino Perna, and if the grand opening crowd was any indication, I'm sure it's going to be an overwhelming success. 

The concept is great - a coal-fired pizza oven that gets up to 1000 degrees cooks the thin-crust pizzas super fast, and with a very unique flavor. The restaurant is beautiful, and the huge oven is very impressive in the center of the open kitchen.

Nino and Tony started working on this project five or six months ago - in the middle of the worst part of the credit crisis and "recession." I talked with them alot during the renovation of Dolce Vita, their upscale Italian restaurant which gave up some space for Nick and Nino's, and during the construction of the pizza restaurant. I don't know how much they spent, but I'm absolutely positive it wasn't a small investment. So I asked: "Why spend that much money, and open a new business, when the economy is tanking?"

Nino's answer was simple: "We have to do it to keep growing."

These two guys are very successful entrepreneurs who understand the best way to get through the tough economy - pay close attention to your bottom line, while planning for and investing in the inevitable top line growth that will come as things turn around. As the economy turns, which I think it's already starting to do, their brand new restaurants will be positioned way ahead of the competition's to take great care of customers who are again wanting to spend money.

This isn't to say they aren't already busy at Dolce Vita - most evenings I'm there (which yes, are too many) the restaurant is incredibly busy. I'm certain Nick and Nino's will be just as successful.

The investment and the confidence that Tony and Nino have in their businesses and their plan is really inspirational for small business owners who are sweating slower receivables, decreasing sales and margin pressure.

Seeing what they've done sure makes me feel good about our business and our community. I wish them tremendous success. And thanks for the great pizza!

So, our company Nextel bill came in the mail yesterday... It has slowly crept up to just over $400 a month. Heartburn city, let me tell you.

So, I figured I'd give Nextel a call to see what we could do to lower my costs. We have an extra phone on the account we're not using, so I knew I could put that phone in "seasonal standby" for a few months, which drops the cost, but I wasn't sure what other options might be available.

I was connected to a wonderful customer service representative named Elizabeth. She reviewed our services, compared options, and came back with fantastic news.

She was able to reduce our monthly bill by over $100 per month, and at the same time, give us unlimited data, unlimited texting, 500 more minutes per month, AND unlimited Blackberry data service. Oh, and unlimited direct connect (the reason we use Nextel).

The lesson here I suppose to to review these monthly bills and check in once in a while with the vendor. They have a way of slowly going up.

 

You're undoubtedly familiar with the phrase, "When the cat's away, the mice will play."

Now, I'm not at all in favor of Big Brother watching what I do in my private life, so I can completely understand other people objecting to their privacy being invaded. I rarely use my Kroger discount card because the idea of my purchasing habits being stored in some database somewhere, and used to figure out what makes me tick, bugs the crap out of me.

Politically, I'm a staunch Republican, and the idea of the government invading my personal life any more than absolutely necessary makes my blood boil.

It is important to note, though, that I'm talking about my personal life.

Personal life occurs during personal time, in your own personal space. In public places like your office, or my office, or out on the streets, people need to understand the idea that they have no right to privacy. I would go so far as to say that we should have surveillance cameras on every lightpole, so we can prevent terrorist attacks and hunt down and find terrorists and criminals when they do attack. 

They have street surveillance cameras in London, for example, and remember how quickly they found the terrorist attackers in July, 2007?

Let's translate this to the workplace.

Employees need to understand that they are at your office to work. They have no right to expect privacy. WHATEVER they are doing is your business as long as they are doing it at your business, on your business's clock!

Salary.com (www.salary.com) commissioned a study, and reported that American companies spend more than $750 billion paying people for work they're not doing. Add to that your best, conservative guess as to the amount you're paying people for work they're doing that isn't in compliance with your standards, that's shoddy, that's only half-ass, or that doesn't follow your procedures, and you are very easily talking about a $1 trillion problem.

If you're a business owner, your share of that $1 trillion is coming out of your pocket.

Big brother has to watch at work. The cat must never be away, and the mice must never be allowed to play. It is simply too expensive!

There's a few ways to accomplish this. One, of course, is with technology.

We routinely install software that monitors employee computer usage. This software is relatively inexpensive (less than $100 per computer), and records every action that is done on the machine, including what programs are being used, what websites are being visited, if any chat programs are used, all e-mail activity, and every keystroke typed. We can keep a history of screenshots, as well, recording the activity on the computer screen every 30 seconds or so.

Where it gets particularly useful is when you know you have a problem. If you know that employees are spending time on Myspace, for example, you can block access to that website. Or, you can make Myspace a hot monitoring term, and start recording a screen shot every second while an employee is on that site.

We also have the ability to block any external sites at the firewall level, so there's no need to monitor employee's computers. Using a Fortinet router, we can deny and allow sites based on their category (research sites are allowed, for example, while lingerie sites are not).

You can also install video and audio surveillance equipment, and access it from anywhere you have an Internet connection. The systems will record everything to a server or computer with a large hard drive, and allow you to review it whenever you need to. Washington State University researchers found that workers who knew they were being watched got more done, but weren't as happy. Gosh, I wonder why?! Could it because they were actually having to - say it with me, folks - W O R K?

And here's a little secret I'll let you in on: The good employee's don't care. And secretly, they're going to be happy you're cracking down on the slackers.

Installing monitoring software isn't all that expensive, particularly when you contrast it with your share of the $1 trillion American businesses spend per year paying for work that isn't getting done.

 

We run into a lot of companies that are still using spreadsheets to keep track of their financial information. In almost all cases, a fantastic program called Quickbooks would make their lives so much easier!

QuickBooks has been around for nearly two decades, which means it’s a stable, time tested program. It's incredibly easy to use, and has all the normal accounting functions and reports available via a single mouseclick. Custom spreadsheets can break from time to time; changes can be tough and require close scrutiny. 

Once the data is in QuickBooks, the software tallies everything for you automatically.

What else can Quickboosk do for your business?

Need to send invoices or statements? You can email them.
Need to accept credit card payments? That’s integrated too.
Need to write checks or deposit slips? Print them out. It’s faster and more accurate.
Tired of retyping the bills that stay the same from month to month? Memorize the transaction and set it to repeat on the schedule of your choice.
Don’t want to deal with entering credit card statements each month? Download them instead.

We’re barely scratching the surface of what QuickBooks can do, but the point is that it can dramatically transform your accounting processes. Invest the time to set it up right, with your accountant’s help. Get training, so you are comfortable using the system and know its capabilities. Then enjoy the new-found productivity, accuracy, and up-to-the-minute financial reports that tell you exactly how your business is performing.

Something all business owners face from time to time is an employee who doesn’t work out. And every so often, one of these employees turns vindictive. As a computer consultant, I’ve heard stories that just weren't believable - things I never thought people would do.

We had a client who's internal IT guy was routinely reading the owner's e-mail. When the company caught on to him, he deleted the entire company's e-mail file. When he was let go, he tried to hack into the company's network. Fortunately, we had changed all of the access codes as he was being walked out of the building.

While we like to think we work with good, trustworthy people, what if we don’t? Financial motivations in this economy are leading to a steep increase in employee data theft. What if one of our employees is angry and wants to get back at the boss? A dissatisfied employee can very quickly cause serious damage by deleting data files, corrupting your financial records, or downloading viruses to your network. A good security policy is a necessity.

Secure confidential data files by setting up password-protected directories. Take advantage of built-in software capabilities to designate specific users for any software with sensitive data (financials, social security numbers, credit cards, etc.), and limit access so they have just what’s needed to do their job. Change your firewall settings to limit Internet downloads. And most important – promptly remove security access for any employees who leave your company.

You’ll have to balance safety versus productivity.  Too much security can cause administrative headaches, creating employee frustration that eventually may lead you to remove important security settings. However, it’s far better to spend a little time being proactive than to find out the hard way you should have been more careful.

With the economy the way it is, it is more important than ever to make sure your valuable data is protected. One hard drive failure could cost your company tens of thousands of dollars - more if you aren't able to retrieve your accounting and customer files.

What's frightening to me as an IT consultant is the number of companies that don't backup - or that take their backups for granted. At a minimum, you should have daily verification that your backup completed successfully. Ideally, your data is being backed up off site, or your tapes are being rotated out of the building.

But have you ever tested the recovery process? Murphy’s Law is alive and well in the technology arena. I hesitate to assume anything when it comes to computers, especially when it comes to something so critical as a backup system.

One company we spoke with had “a bad feeling” about his backup. When we reviewed his systems we found his backup hadn’t run for well over four months.

Another company…the backup was working, somewhat. About half the backup jobs finished successfully. But occasionally there was a full week of failures. Imagine if they’d had a server outage during one of those periods.

And then this one horrific situation we ran into…someone had sold this poor business owner on outdated tape technology, and the recovery portion of the software was never installed. When their server crashed, between software issues and slow tape reads, recovery took nearly two weeks.

As bad as that was, the best proof of Murphy’s Law was a story another tech shared with me. This company had a very well-organized backup regimen. Tapes were stored in the basement on a dedicated shelf. Everything was well-labelled and happened exactly on schedule. The jobs ran smoothly. There was no reason to doubt that they had a solid process in place…or was there? Unfortunately, there was. Turns out that shelf backed up to the elevator. You may or may not know this: elevators generate a magnetic field, and magnetic fields erase tapes. Sadly they didn’t discover this problem until they tried to recover old data from a demagnetized tape.

May I suggest you test your backup today?

Domain name renewal scams aren't new - our clients have been dealing with them for years - but I figured it would be helpful to warn you about them again. A Google search brings up thousands of examples of these renewal scammes and schemes.

The usual way this works, known as domain slamming, is fairly basic, and works just about the same way telephone slammers do. Companies with very questionable ethics download millions of WHOIS records for domain registration information and domain expiry dates. Then, a few months before the domain expires, they snail mail or e-mail a very official looking and sounding document or message that tells them to protect their valuable name by renewing early. Here are a couple of scanned examples.

Of course, when the domain owner sends the check or pays by credit card, thinking they are doing the right thing, what actually happens is that a registrar transfer is initiated. The registrant will then go through the steps to complete the transfer, because they think they're doing the correct thing in response to the (fake) renewal notice they received.

You can protect yourself fairly simply. Here's a few recommendations:

Also, always make sure you know your registration administration information, such as your domain login and password.

I had an issue here recently where after moving mailboxes from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007 and then to a new Exchange 2007 server, a user’s Inbox folders disappeared from their mailboxes. All other folders were still there (Calendar, Tasks, Sent Items, other ‘mail’ folders), just the Inbox was missing.

The view through Outlook Web Access (OWA) was much the same. Re-creating the offline sync file (*.ost) had no affect. Starting Outlook with “outlook.exe /resetfolders” also had no impact.

The KB924226 - Contacts or other default folder hidden, but shortcut works with Open in New Window seems to be a similar problem.

Workarounds

• Can still access inbox from the Outlook today page.
• Can still access from mobile device
• Right-click ‘Mailbox’ | Open Other Folder | Open Other User’s folder | type the user name.

Solution

1. Download mfcmapi from this link: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=55fdffd7-1878-4637-9808-1e21abb3ae37&displaylang=en
2. Extract this on the end-user’s computer having the issue
3. Open up MFCMapi on the computer and choose the “Session” then “Logon and Display Store Table”.
4. Select the profile that the user uses to access email then double-click the “Mailbox MDB” 
5. On the new folder that opens, expand “Root – Mailbox” and then expand the Information Store folder which will show all the folders in the mailbox (IPM_SUBTREE)
6. Highlight Inbox
7. On the right pane, look for the Property Name – “PR_ATTR_HIDDEN”. This should have a tag of 0×10F4000B. Under the Value column, this should be set to False by default. 
8. If it is set to True, right-click this Property Name, then, select “Edit Property”
9. Uncheck the checkbox, which sets the attribute to F (False) and click on OK.
10. Refresh the screen by selecting F5 and make sure that the change did not revert back to T (True).
11. Close MFCMapi.
12. Open Outlook and see if Inbox folder is now showing in the Mailbox Hierarchy.

Cause

If it was experienced some time after the mailbox move (which it was), then it has nothing to do with the move. Something must be changing the property bit. This could be a 3rd party product such as Anti-Virus software or an Outlook Add-in

I read this on the message board for one of the personal coaching programs I'm involved in, and thought it was particularly useful:

On voicemail greetings, people tend to record a message along the lines of "Hi, this is Tom, I'm sorry I missed your call, please leave me a message and I'll return your call...."

Generally, that's functional, and lets you know someone wants to talk to you.

If you changed your greeting to the following, you can be sure you only return calls to people who follow the instructions in the voicemail, and avoid playing silly phone tag with people for what may be an unimportant call.... People will leave the right message if they really need to speak to you and if it is urgent:

"Hi, this is Tom. I'm sorry I missed your call. Please let me know why you called, so I can get to work on it before I call you back. Thank you!"

I was talking with a client today, and just randomly we started discussing employee Internet usage and the amount of time wasted. It gets to be staggering pretty quickly, if you do the math.

Suppose an employee spends 6 minutes per work day on the Internet doing things that are clearly not work related. That's 30 minutes a week. Or, 1,560 minutes per year - equal to 26 hours.

If that employee's burdened cost is $15/hour, your company just spent $390 for absolutely nothing.

If you have 10 employees, figure almost $4,000 per year in wasted time.

And that is if they waste only 6 minutes per work day.

My conversation with the client ended up there. But I thought about it some more when I got back to the office, and ran it out a little further....

Let's say you have an employee who consistently comes in right at the bell, so to speak. So, they run to the time clock, punch in, and then go through the process of taking off their boots and coat (remember, we're in Michigan... it gets cold here!), putting their things away, booting up their computer, socializing for a few minutes before they get started, perhaps even get their coffee ready.

Then this employee punches in from lunch, and spends a few extra minutes after they're punched in finishing up whatever they were doing on their lunch hour.

If you add all of that up, you can easily envision a scenario where you've lost 30 minutes a day to nonsense.

Which equals 130 hours of time you have paid this employee in a year, for which you've received nothing.

At our illustrative $15/hour burdened cost, that's $1,950 per year in completely wasted labor expense.

If you have a few of these people on staff, or their cost to you is even higher, the pointless expense to your company becomes staggering pretty quickly.

We have software we sell that monitors and reports on employee's Internet usage.... So that base is potentially covered.

But how do you deal with the "leaked time" in the scenario above?

Short of being a drill sergeant in your business, I'm not sure of the answer. I'd imagine, as with most things, it involves a delicate act of line-walking between too strict and not strict enough.

As you know, my company Tech Experts sponsors a program we call No Virus Wednesdays to help computer users eradicate spam, spyware, trojans and viruses from their computers. It's been hugely successful, and we've helped a lot of clients speed up their computers and protect their sensitive personal information. Because we do so much of this work, I'm always on the look out for interesting angles on how the viruses are designed.

I owe my friend Nathan a big thank you for this interesting post. MessageLabs (www.messagelabs.com) commissioned Russian artist Alex Dragulescu to create graphical representations of Internet viruses and trojans, based on the actual code of the malware. He's developed a number of images, and each corresponds to the structure of the virus.

I was really amazed to see how much these computer viruses actually look like living viruses, like the one that gives you things like the common cold. They're beautiful images, but scary to think about.

For the English majors out there.... I did research the plural of virus - and it is viruses, not viri or virii. Check it out here on wikipedia.

Back in the old days, my company was a dealer for Commodore computers (do you remember what Commodore computers were? The Commodore 64!!). We were also an authorized repair center for them. This was back in the days when we did component level repairs on computers - we would actually unsolder chips and troubleshoot board-level problems.

TechRepublic recently did one of their "Cracking open" series on the old Commodore 64.

Talk about bringing back memories! I loved these computers, for their simplicity. They weren't oversold and basically just did what they were supposed to do, without a lot (any?!) fluff.

That would have been, oh geez, about 21 years ago now.

Google announced today that it was building its own fiber optic cable to the trans-Pacific region, linking the United States and Japan. Neat!

The $300 million "Unity" project is a 10,000km linear cable system with 7.68 Tbps transmission capability.

Google's press release talks about the specific details. But the two things I find really interesting are:

A) Trans-Pacific bandwidth demand has grown over 60% over the last few years. That's a huge increase.

B) Google is moving to owning (and ultimately, I'm sure selling) infrastructure network capacity.

GoogleFi, Google's wireless network in Mountain View, was a testbed for something much larger, I'd guess.

It will be interesting to see how things progress with Google owning infrastructure and search.

If you're not a network geek, this post will probably put you to sleep. But it is something I think is interesting, and potentially problematic, as the Internet continues to grow and expand.

IP addresses, the series of numbers that computers use to talk to one another both on internal company networks, and on the Internet, are a finite resource - there are only so many available. Well, that is until IPV6 becomes widely adopted, years from now I'm sure.

Anyway, CIDR (classless inter-domain routing, pronounced like cider in apple cider) was introduced back in the early 90's as a way to avoid wasteful IP address assignments. CIDR allows one to use VLSM (variable length subnet masks) to chop up their IP address blocks into convenient sizes, as opposed to rigid class-based chunks.

For example, if your network doesn't employ VLSM, you can only break your networks into subnetworks of equal size.

So, if you have a single class C address range, and you want to break it into two sub-networks for some purpose, your option would be two blocks of equal size: two networks of 128 addresses each (actually, 126 because the network address and the broadcast address don't count as usable.... Like I said, if you're not a network geek, this is getting really boring). You could also break up the block into four networks of 64 (really 62 usable) each, eight networks of 32 (30 usable), etc. all the way down to 64 networks of 2 usable addresses each. The point is, it's rigid - without variable length subnet masks, once you chop a network into smaller blocks for some purpose, the entire network is chopped into identical sizes.

This can get wasteful pretty quick. And remember, we said IP addresses were in limited supply. So, you don't want to waste addresses if it can be avoided.

VLSM lets you pick different size networks for the same large network block. So, perhaps you want your engineering department, which consists of 4 people, on a distinct network so you can throttle their bandwidth differently than you would for your sales guys, who number a dozen. With VLSM, you could break the network up to give engineering perhaps 14 usable addresses (a subnet of /28) while giving your sales department a subnet of /27, or 30 usable addresses.

The key is, you're not tied to equal sized blocks. Which means you waste less address space. However, if you're sloppy about programming your routers, you can really bloat the size of your routing tables, because each of those separate subnetworks could potentially be advertised in the routing tables.

Internally, that isn't a major problem - unless your network is huge, you're probably not going to have enough entries to task the memory of your average router. Externally, however, it is problematic.

If you have a few networks subnetted for various purposes, you're supposed to aggregate that network announcement to the outside world into the smallest possible number of routes.

To use our example above, even though engineering and sales are different networks internally, to the outside world, there is no need to advertise them as such. In real world applications there may be a need to do that, but for example purposes, lets assume there isn't.

Instead of announcing a /27 and a /28, along with whatever other networks you're using, you can announce a single /24. (For the network geeks reading this, I know that we don't generally announce /24s - remember, this is a simple example!)

Now, to the point I'm attempting to make. I receive a report every week, courtesy of the kind folks at CIDR Report (www.cidr-report.org) that analyzes the number of routes advertised on the Internet, and how many can be aggregated without affecting routability.

In the latest report (parts of it copied below), there are 250,499 routes advertised across the global Internet. The algorithm that CIDR report uses to compute the potential aggregation is explained by them as:

Aggregation Summary

The algorithm used in this report proposes aggregation only

when there is a precise match using the AS path, so as

to preserve traffic transit policies. Aggregation is also

proposed across non-advertised address space ('holes').

Based on that policy, they are calculating the routing table could be reduced to 160,924 routes, which represents a savings of more than 35%.

There may be some valid reasons some network operators don't aggregate certain traffic, but a bloat of 35% across the entire Internet really tells me that there's a great amount of sloppy network design going on out there. Some systems have more than 90% aggregation possible. That's a lot.

To the point: I think it is really interesting that if managed and aggregated properly, the global BGP routing tables would shrink by more than 35% overnight. I wonder what that would do to the speed of some of the older core and border routers out there. To sum it up another way.... Cisco and Juniper must love BGP table bloat!

AS Summary

         27461  Number of ASes in routing system

         11562  Number of ASes announcing only one prefix

          1577  Largest number of prefixes announced by an AS

                AS4755 : VSNL-AS Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd. Autonomous System

      88894720  Largest address span announced by an AS (/32s)

                AS721  : DISA-ASNBLK - DoD Network Information Center

  

Aggregation Summary

The algorithm used in this report proposes aggregation only

when there is a precise match using the AS path, so as

to preserve traffic transit policies. Aggregation is also

proposed across non-advertised address space ('holes').

 

 --- 15Feb08 ---

ASnum    NetsNow NetsAggr  NetGain   % Gain   Description

 

Table     250499   160924    89575    35.8%   All ASes

 

AS4755      1577      388     1189    75.4%   VSNL-AS Videsh Sanchar Nigam

                                               Ltd. Autonomous System

AS9498      1156      106     1050    90.8%   BBIL-AP BHARTI BT INTERNET

                                               LTD.

AS4323      1386      507      879    63.4%   TWTC - Time Warner Telecom,

                                               Inc.

AS18566     1042      253      789    75.7%   COVAD - Covad Communications

                                               Co.

AS22773      859       87      772    89.9%   CCINET-2 - Cox Communications

                                               Inc.

AS11492     1215      447      768    63.2%   CABLEONE - CABLE ONE

AS19262      879      148      731    83.2%   VZGNI-TRANSIT - Verizon

                                               Internet Services Inc.

AS8151      1153      495      658    57.1%   Uninet S.A. de C.V.

AS17488      983      402      581    59.1%   HATHWAY-NET-AP Hathway IP Over

                                               Cable Internet

AS6478       927      380      547    59.0%   ATT-INTERNET3 - AT&T WorldNet

                                               Services

AS2386      1362      847      515    37.8%   INS-AS - AT&T Data

                                               Communications Services

AS15270      647      137      510    78.8%   AS-PAETEC-NET - PaeTec

                                               Communications, Inc.

AS6197      1032      538      494    47.9%   BATI-ATL - BellSouth Network

                                               Solutions, Inc

AS18101      715      241      474    66.3%   RIL-IDC Reliance Infocom Ltd

                                               Internet Data Centre,

AS4766       853      391      462    54.2%   KIXS-AS-KR Korea Telecom

AS4812       552       94      458    83.0%   CHINANET-SH-AP China Telecom

                                               (Group)

AS4668       524       71      453    86.5%   LGNET-AS-KR LG CNS

AS7018      1454     1007      447    30.7%   ATT-INTERNET4 - AT&T WorldNet

                                               Services

AS7011      1054      609      445    42.2%   FRONTIER-AND-CITIZENS -

                                               Frontier Communications of

                                               America, Inc.

AS855        554      112      442    79.8%   CANET-ASN-4 - Bell Aliant

AS4808       527      129      398    75.5%   CHINA169-BJ CNCGROUP IP

                                               network China169 Beijing

                                               Province Network

AS7545       490      112      378    77.1%   TPG-INTERNET-AP TPG Internet

                                               Pty Ltd

AS9443       451       76      375    83.1%   INTERNETPRIMUS-AS-AP Primus

                                               Telecommunications

AS17676      506      134      372    73.5%   GIGAINFRA BB TECHNOLOGY Corp.

AS6198       647      278      369    57.0%   BATI-MIA - BellSouth Network

                                               Solutions, Inc

AS6140       603      238      365    60.5%   IMPSAT-USA - ImpSat USA, Inc.

AS19916      556      202      354    63.7%   ASTRUM-0001 - OLM LLC

AS16814      427       75      352    82.4%   NSS S.A.

AS3356       844      500      344    40.8%   LEVEL3 Level 3 Communications

AS4134       863      521      342    39.6%   CHINANET-BACKBONE

                                               No.31,Jin-rong Street

 

Total      25838     9525    16313    63.1%   Top 30 total

Raelyn Campbell is suing Best Buy and the Geek Squad for losing her laptop computer and lying about it. To the tune of $54 million.

At first it sounds kind of absurd. Until you read a few articles, and Ms. Campbell's blog. She's not after the money - she's simply trying to get them to clean up their act.

I think we all know it will get settled in some manner. But the publicity should help Geek Squad clean things up a bit.

How embarassing for the Geeks, especially after this incident in January.