Just a busy time tonight.

3 Posts in less than 3 hours - inspiring? Insightful? ingenious? No, just a very busy boy tonight I guess. Below is a short video about the reemergence of craft brewing in the US. As some of you may know I've been brewing my own for about 4 years and have loved every bit of it. My wonderful wife started me on this journey and I have never looked back. I may get tired of being a computer nerd, grow out of WoW (seriously?), or jaded with politics but I will never grow tired of creating great craft ales out of "good stuff".
I Am A Craft Brewer from I Am A Craft Brewer on Vimeo.
So here's to my brewing brothers and sisters on this late Sunday evening.

Swine Flu Map

The feds have in fact declared a state of emergency with regards to the H1N1 Swine Flu. Declaring a state of emergency is standard operating procedure so thay can release money and/or resources to the state or states affected by the emergency. The geeks at Google have an interesting map that shows the world wide areas affected by the flu. Check it out below.

View H1N1 Swine Flu in a larger map
Here's the best source for information on the H1N1 Swine Flu.

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DFH 90 Minute at the Old Bag of Nails - Westerville

One of my all time favorite "Double IPA's" is on the guest tap at the Old Bag of Nails in Westerville. I actually like this better on tap then bottle. If you're a hop head you'll love this stuff.
That is all for now - sorry in school.

Fred's Fav Five

In the interest of free I felt it'd be fun and informing to write about my favorite freebies on the web. Some include security tools, another few are office suites, and some others are just cool useful tools that anyone can use. In this economy free is good. So in the next few days I'm going to go over my 5 favorites w/brief explanations on how to use them.
KeePass - Free easy to use password manager.
How many user names and passwords do you have to know? Work, eMail, banking, maybe even a few social networking sites? The majority of security experts will tell you to never use the same user name and password combination. It makes perfect sense too. If someone hacks that password then they have all the other accounts attached to it.
KeePass stores all your passwords and user names in one database. All you have to do is remember one password. Click here to visit the user tutorial. Google Desktop - Google's desktop/internet/computer search tool. There's more to this than the search tool but it's the search tool I want to spotlight here. Once installed and left alone for a couple days it indexes your entire system. Just about anything you need can be accessed by hitting the ctrl button twice. It will even search words inside of documents if needed. Can't find that email from Bob? Type his name in the search box and it'll pull up everything you have stored with his name on it. You even have the ability to launch programs from it. Hit ctrlx2, type "internet" and it pull up IE for you.

Sure Delete from Wizard Industries - A data erase utility. A new report on data breaches from Verizon Business says hackers aren't paying as much attention to where the data is but where it was. When you really want to delete something Sure Delete goes a step beyond the deletion and overwrites the data. When you delete something in Windows it goes to the Recycle Bin from there most people empty it. The data is still there believe it or not. Windows needs to overwrite it when it requires the space but until then it can sit in memory or other places on the hard drive. Sure Delete overwrites that data several times eliminating the chance for recovery.
The last three of my favorites comes from Comodo.

Comodo EasyVPN - Free encrypted chat/file transfer/and remote desktop application. Setup a private encrypted connection between you and someone else. Transfer files across an encrypted network so no snoopers can see what you're transferring. The remote control desktop feature is my favorite. I use it instead of PCAnywhere or Windows Remote Desktop for customers. The customer logs into my private network (after I issue a password) and once there I can access their desktop.
Comodo Internet Security - OK I'm going to cheat a little and give the last in a 2 for 1 kind of deal. The Comodo firewall is a very user friendly firewall for inbound and outbound protection. You'd be surprised at the amount of programs that were designed to access the internet w/o asking. Personally I don't want random programs accessing my connection w/o me knowing and it's not a very safe way to travel the internet. If a program tried to access the internet you'll be given a warning of what it is, where it is, and most of the time where it's going. Good information to know. I started playing around with the anti-virus about a year ago and it seems very robust, and very quiet. By quiet I mean it doesn't hog a lot of resources on your system. A lot of anti-virus programs are very intrusive and have no business doing what they do in your system. It just isn't necessarry and wastes computing power.

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Conficker - Are you good to go?

Joe Stewart from the Conficker Working Group has created an 'eye chart' that allows for online identification of Conficker B and C infections. The explanation of the chart is below. This is a very good idea. Read below and click the link at the end.

Conficker is known to block access to over 100 anti-virus and security websites.
If you are blocked from loading the remote images in the first row of the top table above (AV/security sites) but not blocked from loading the remote images in the second row (websites of alternative operating systems) then your Windows PC may be infected by Conficker (or some other malicious software).

If you can see all six images in both rows of the top table, you are either not infected by Conficker, or you may be using a proxy server, in which case you will not be able to use this test to make an accurate determination, since Conficker will be unable to block you from viewing the AV/security sites.

http://www.confickerworkinggroup.org/infection_test/cfeyechart.html