Trees hate computers - and it has been getting worse for years. Paper use has been rising almost in lock-step with the rise in numbers of computers. The concept of the "paperless office" seems to be fading.

Well, almost. There are excellent examples of paperless applications - litigation software that allows prosecution and defense to easily share huge volumes of evidence for example; but does this really extend to the complete concept of the paperless office?

I don't think so in most cases. Again, there are some companies operating in fairly tightly controlled circumstances that come close - but what is keeping them (and us) from going completely paperless?

Over the past several weeks David Ingram and I have been putting a new online video program together. David is a veteran radio and TV host as well as being "The Taxman" - hero to those who live and work across borders such as the Canada/US one but including many of the free world's borders in any combination.

I've been on David's shows in the past. In this one we touch on all manner of topics from the Internet to grouse hunting with David Hancock; with whom I've been associated almost as long as with David Ingram.

Read on and enjoy the interview

I monitor the activities of a number of servers. They send me a log report daily and various special activities such as backups also send me e-mail after they've finished, showing what was done.

Today a strangeness caught my eye.

/root/bin/single-roller1.sh georgia
mv: cannot stat `5/georgia': No such file or directory
mv: cannot stat `4/georgia': No such file or directory
mv: cannot stat `3/georgia': No such file or directory
mv: cannot stat `2/georgia': No such file or directory
mv: cannot stat `1/georgia': No such file or directory
mv: cannot stat `0/georgia': No such file or directory
job 578 at 2009-03-14 01:28

Adobe's Version 8 and 9 PDF readers - Acrobat and Reader - will be patched March 11 according to my information sources. In th mean time you should watch out!

And hey - when was the last time you got a parking ticket that installed malware on your computer? Just wait!

Over the past few months I've been moving many of the Linux systems I look after over to CentOS 5.2 - the latest free version of Red Hat's system.

One of the ongoing problems has been intermittant timeouts by some of the users of ftp. All of them use Proftpd.

After doing some tcpdump analysis, one customer and I noted that no matter what the settings in the proftpd.conf file, the system was doing a IDENT callout which was taking up to 30 seconds to time out.

The browser/phishing wars keep getting harder to beat. Now we have bogus "session expired" screens popping up when you're legitimately logged into your bank's web site. We also have nasty trojans that stop your system from getting help by blocking access to Microsoft Update and your favourite anti-virus sites.

An update of my take on a posting to CEN-TAPEDE my friend David Ingram's tax news letter - with my comments added:

It is almost the end of 2008

The Year is 1906 -- one hundred years ago.
Here are some of the CANADIAN statistics for the Year 1906:

The average life expectancy in Canada was 47 years.
Today we live longer but time goes by faster
2008: where have the past 2 (58) years gone?

Only 14 percent of the homes in Canada had a bathtub.
Today, only 14% of homes have at least one clean bathtub - the rest have 2 showers and a tub that has the kids' soccer uniforms soaking in it
2008: The kids have left home - so the tub downstairs hasn't been used in a couple of years - I'm afraid to visit it.

I've recently joined Linkedin - a social network of business people.

One of the aspects of the Linkedin site is "Questions" where members get to ask and answer questions on a variety of topics.

The question "What do you envision as the future of social media?" caught my interest as I'm in the midst of helping one of my major customers put up a social site to enhance their huge static-page site.

Read on for my answer.

I was just sitting there, reading some news and listening to/watching the Canucks' hockey game on TV, when the announcers started talking about the Sedin twins and their ability to eat up penalty time; and they coined the term "chronivors" to describe them.

Chronivors - a wonderful word I thought - but only applying it to hockey players is far to limiting. This term has legs!