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Fast and Reliable Home Internet: Your Livelihood Depends on It

You're on yet another Zoom call and...wait what did she say? Dang it...Internet glitching again! You quickly mute your audio and video. "Kids! Get off YouTube...I'm on a call!" With everyone working and schooling from home, your Internet can't keep up. The cable company keeps claiming you're on their "super-fast Internet" but everything keeps lagging. It's all so frustrating and you just want to get your work done.  It may not be the cable company's fault. Use this approach to ensure your household enjoys a super-fast, reliable Internet! Start with the Source Run a speed test. Google "speed test" . Run that test a few times on a given day. If you're not getting at least 50Mbps download and 10Mbps upload speeds, keep reading.  Check with your Provider and do your Homework Reach out to your Internet provider. This may be your cable company or telephone provider. Understand your current plan: What package are you currently on? Wha
Recent posts

Collegiate Stadiums Projecting Pro Brands

My son and I throughly enjoyed watching The Ohio State University Buckeyes shred the Miami of Ohio Redhawks on a recent Saturday afternoon. Following an early afternoon downpour, the humidity and recently-cleared skies brought a healthy glimmer to everyone's skin. It was hot. Which makes folks thirsty. A few years back, Ohio State, like many other universities, began selling beer during football games. As a college student and later as an alumni, I experienced some of the greatest tailgating in the country--frequently enjoying a beverage or two. Why not bring it inside and further line the pockets of the university? The argument at the time centered less around the fiscal and more around alleviating the need for ticketholders to drink intensely immediately before the game knowing they would need to last through a 4 hour contest. The university claimed people would enter the stadium less intoxicated knowing they could get their fill inside. I would love it if the Sociology dep

Windows 10 Creator's Update and Office Conflicts

Recently, Microsoft pushed the " Creators Update " out to Windows 10. It was available in April but it seems to have been force-pushed in the past 2 days. On my mother-in-law's computer, Creator's caused Excel to render a "Bad Image" message when attempting to start declaring "MSVCP140.dll is either not designed to run on Windows or it contains an error". I attempted the SFC and DISM repairs as advised on Tom's site to no avail. When I attempted an Office repair, Office disappeared completely. At this point, I definitely started to panic. Fortunately, I noticed a pending reboot due to an install/update. Allowing Windows to install that update and rebooting twice brought Excel and Office back to life. I did have to re-register the software but all is well now. If you encounter this issue, stop what you're doing and install/restart Windows. Anecdotally, I've since hear of many folks encountering similar issues.

Managing Expectations

The touchpad on my oven at my house died about a month ago. It’s a Kenmore so I called Sears. Tough to get that first appointment so they first came out last Saturday. I was pretty sure I knew what was wrong and priced out the part alone at $200. When they offered a $275 “we’ll fix it or replace it with a warranty”, I jumped on it. (It’s worth $75 to avoid me screwing up my oven and have my wife be mad at me. Come to think of it, that’s probably worth a lot more than $75.) Upon arrival, the technician gave me a hard time about the lack of a serial number on the microwave. Huh? (It’s an oven/microwave stack combo and apparently, the serial number is a prerequisite to my service deal.) Is it my fault the serial number is a dinky sticker inside the microwave? No. We found it on the manual but nonetheless, don’t bother me with this. Just fix it. The technician diagnosed the bad touchpad (“control panel”) and said he would need to order the part. Fine. I then scheduled the next appointment

Need Help: COALMG Leader

(Cross-posted at http://www.coalmg.org/ ) Both Alexei and I enjoy working on the COALMG group. However, within the last few months, both of us took on new roles in our careers and struggle to find the time to line up speakers and keep things running smoothly. To that end, we would like to open up COALMG to new leadership. Alexei and I would still remain involved (as well as Brian Prince) from a "board"/guidance perspective but we want someone to really drive: schedule strong presenters, question the current setup, drive membership, sponsors, etc. We have a great following and there's tons of potential. COALMG is a fantastic opportunity for someone with energy, a passion for great software and a desire to get involved in the community. We look forward to hearing from you! If you're interested, shoot me an email at jeff dot hunsaker at gmail.

TFS Error | The type initializer for 'Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Server.BuildInformationNodeBinder' threw an exception.

Posting this one for the search engines. If you ever receive the exception "The type initializer for 'Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Server.BuildInformationNodeBinder' threw an exception.", more than likely, your drive space is at 0 on your TFS application tier box. I encountered this at a client recently. The root cause was that IIS logs had filled up the OS drive (C:\). I switched IIS logging to the applications drive (D:\) which cleaned up the OS drive and resolved the issue. Detailed message: TF53010: The following error has occurred in a Team Foundation component or extension: Date (UTC): 6/7/2011 4:18:53 PM Machine: TFSATBOX Application Domain: /LM/W3SVC/8080/ROOT/tfs-1-129519118182628600 Assembly: Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Framework.Server, Version=10.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a; v2.0.50727 Service Host: 7ecfbd77-b386-4d75-b038-b05474782696 (DefaultCollection) Process Details: Process Name: w3wp Process Id: 367