The fifty thousand dollar cell bill

We have all heard the horror stories. Somebody spends hours downloading videos on their cell and then collapses when the bill comes along! Even if you are not a dedicated downloader nevertheless watch out for those international roaming charges. They can really add up. Before you travel make sure you know exactly how much a minute you are going to pay when you call home. You might be better off getting a local SIM card.

Twitterers tire of tweets!

It seems most twitterers get tired or bored or both and move on after a month. I joined twitter and the novelty wore off after a week. And I got tired of following celeb tweets. Do I really want to know what a celeb had for breakfast and what they are doing by the hour?

Swine flu spam

Its not enough that we are all wondering if the swine flu will kill us. Now we are bombarded with spam about it. Most spam has message titles with the scare word swine flu and some alarmist information. The hapless user who clicks on these emails will be directed to a website with some general information on the subject and some nicely embedded malware to take your computer down.

If you do want to read about swine flu then stick to the FAQs offered by well known news sites.

Our modern plague - spam!

For a long time spam was something you ate out of a tin. Not particularly a first choice as far as snacks go but a reasonably good sandwich could be had of it. Now we all know what the "other" spam is, and there seems to be no way to avoid it. A full 96 percent of emails are spam and this plague seems to have come to stay. The good news is mail filters are getting better and smarter in streaming out spam. And of course we can all do our bit to discourage spam. Dont open it.

Wheres Conficker?

We expected tech mayhem on April 1st, the day the Conficker worm was going to wreak havoc on our computers. Some of us even tried to outsmart it by changing the date on our computers - often with unexpected consequences. My friend Beth set the date a few days ahead and sent off work related documents way past the deadline. Then she had to send explanations!

But - its not a false alarm and all is not over as yet. Conficker has just appeared at the University of Utah knocking out computers in the hundreds. So, user beware! The best protection is to have a good well known anti virus software and update and run it regularly. Meaning - once a day. Cheers!