Tomorrow is Thanksgiving and I, like Toni, will not think of Christmas one minute sooner than I have to. No presents have been purchased, no decorations are up and no lists have been written (at least not on paper.. mental ones, maybe). Tomorrow I’m looking forward to family gathering, visiting my Pop in his new Nursing Home, praying my mom and sister get along, making mashed potatoes, and keeping special memories of my Gram close to my heart. 

While the Thanksgiving to-do list is getting longer, I must first take care of my DDA to-do list. Specifically working on a few website design concepts for our medical division, DDA Medical. We are currently developing many levels of website designs for doctors in the neurological field offering them varied, high-end websites that include interactive flash animation tools and/or a video spokesperson and patient tools not seen on many other template designs. We are not and never have been a website template-based advertising agency. Each corporate and medical website we develop is custom, one-of-a-kind and through extensive research, custom menus and discussions with our client, they are delivered an optimized website that works. You won’t find this level of detail, process and customer service anywhere else. Just like you won’t find me singing Christmas Carols before Thanksgiving or shopping the day after at 4am. 

Last night I began using the new Netflix app for the Xbox 360. Basically, it is a new application that lets you use the system as a set-top box for streaming Netflix’s online video library directly to your TV. The whole thing took mere minutes to set up, and I was totally blown away by the fact that I could stream HD video at 720p directly through my ethernet connection so quickly and easily. Before I had even finished making dinner, I was watching the full first season of Jericho with virtually no wait between episodes. The program dynamically chooses your video quality based on your Internet connection speed, so within the first 30 seconds of choosing a video, there it is playing on my TV as if I had just popped in a high-quality DVD. In fact, at 720p, this looked even better!

With this kind of super-fast streaming technology making its way into the mainstream market, it’s no wonder that DDA produces high-definition corporate and medical videos both for broadcast and on the web. Fiber optic connections are becoming the norm worldwide, and in fact the US is somewhat behind in terms of broadband penetration into homes. As we catch up, it is important to take advantage of the full range of opportunities that super fast Internet connections provide. Websites can be more complex, not in terms of navigation but in terms of raw content and graphical power. Video content can be higher quality, allowing users to see more than ever before. And data transfers go a mile a minute, so you can upload large videos and high definition photos directly to a website or loved one.

At DDA, we take full advantage of the opportunities that broadband and fiber optic internet technology provides. We are capable of producing dynamically scaling content that can be adjusted based on the user’s Internet speed, as well as their CPU performance, memory, or operating system. It is important to be able to get our clients’ content to as many people as possible, and as technology progresses, that only gets easier and easier. So embrace the future of information technology with DDA Video!

Today is the day before Thanksgiving.  I am thankful for a lot of things (a job for one) but today I am thankful for spam, or rather the lack thereof.  A few weeks ago a concerted effort was made to shut down the biggest spam ring in the world, where it is suspected some 50-75% of the spam was being generated from.  It appears that a group of vigilante network specialists found a way to shut down two ISPs where most of the spam comes from.  The coolest part (in my opinion) is that this was not done by law enforcement (but of course they’re more than willing to go get Grandma for a file-sharing app, not spammers, something’s wrong here) but by those “security researchers” that pinpointed the spam origination and summarily got their stream cut from the folks above them.  Every small server farm/ISP relies on the bigger Internet to get connected.  This is where the shutoff happened.

As a result of the shutdowns, I went from having over a thousand spam mails a day to a measly 100.  How great is that?  Thanks crazy network hacker guys.

I originally was going to post about ‘bounceback scatter’ but it seems temporarily that spam isn’t an issue.  But I still want to talk about the bouncebacks, because it always scares me into thinking our email server has been hacked, which hasn’t been the case.  We did have a small open IP relay issue with a client that was a bot, but that’s another issue entirely.  Bounceback spam or ‘backscatter’ is a way of forming spam so that it appears to be a bounceback message.  Bouncebacks are usually a rather official email that appears to come from a server where your message could not be delivered, due to whatever factors.  In this case, these spammers make the email appear to be bouncebacks so that they don’t get caught by spam filters.  It also makes it look like your email is sending out a number of bad emails.  This is where it looks scary, because it looks like you’ve been infected with an email sending virus.  In the end, after examining the messages, you are in the clear, but it’s still annoying.  Now there is still a chance that you are indeed infected, and should promptly run a virus scan, both on your computer’s current virus protection (you do have one right…?) and an online scan (not the same company as your virus protection), just for good measure.

Happy Turkey day everyone!