You never really know what employers are looking at when it comes to the things we do online. Our lives have become partial blips on maps. As open as we are, we try to keep things private. One would think that the Internet offers a level of obscurity and anonymity that we can utilize and be free because of it. Unfortunately thats not the case at all… We have to watch our every move, Facebook, Myspace, Linkedin, dating profiles, blogs… They can all come back to haunt you. As open and honest as you want to be, the Internet has a way of turning people into liars, even if it’s simply by omission.

Recently I took it upon myself to look up some old friends from when I was younger. I’ve tried a few times to find old childhood friends, but I never really gave it the effort it was needed. I can now say with certainty, if some aspect of your life is out on the Internet, there is somebody out there who can find you. I was able to find my old friend utilizing a multitude of websites. It helps to remember as much about them as possible. Siblings, parents names, old addresses if you can remember them, hobbies and interests. All of those will play a factor into if you’ll be able to find them. Begin with Googling the names and seeing if you get a hit, you can try the obvious Facebook and Myspace, but I’m going to assume you’ve already tried these avenues and were unsuccessful, don’t disregard Facebook completely, in the end it will be the most useful tool…

If you can remember a street name or a full address as well as a parents name, you will have the best luck with this one. You can utilize pipl.com or you can use spokeo.com to look into it. For me, I was able to  remember this persons brothers names and their step mothers name. Once I began searching for the step mother, I was able to find her profile she made on a forum for the area they had moved to. I was hesitant to believe this was her, I was so close to finding my friend, but I needed to know for sure, I went to view the profile, but it required me to be a member. Thankfully Google cached the profile so I was able to view the cached page. Utilizing this, I was able to see the city they had moved to and verify the names of the siblings I remembered. I double checked this with spokeo.com. Sometimes if you are lucky, spokeo.com will be able to provide you with a family tree.

Once I was able to verify all this information, I went back to Facebook, punched in their name, specified city and state and found them in an instant. I sent them a message with the hopes of a response, but as it appears, I’ve probably been forgotten in the ether or time.

I’m not sure how I would have managed high school without AIM. To me, it was the social network before the social network. AIM allowed you to do so much. You almost always knew where your friends were. All you had to do was check their away message to know where they were. Had a friend in a bad mood, away message said it all.

AIM profiles were the about me before the about me. Some people tried to be funny, others tried to explain their whole life stories, while others attempted to be mysteries, but one thing was always in common; When ever an AIM user found an AOL user who they were interested in, we’d rely on our other AOL using friends to check out their profile for us.

When AIM allowed you to forward messages to cellphones via SMS, it was as if we were at the gateway to the future, such revolutionary technology in the palm of our hands? Should such power be weld by such mere mortals? Only time would tell…

Anybody who was somebody had an AIM account, those that were losers had a yahoo account. It wasnt anything against yahoo, it was simply, AOL was more popular. We all had yahoo accounts, but we only kept them for the friend who didnt want to use AIM.

As the years progressed, AIM slowly became a staple that then became a burden. AOL would pack it with so much bloatware and so many ads, that people started using Trillian, Pidgin, other things… as their aim clients.

With the rise of Google Chat and then Facebook Chat, AIM slowly began fading. What was once a popular staple with my generation, slowly began fading. Kid’s in high school today barely have an understanding of what an away message is, or how to create an extended profile.

The ability to import your AIM contacts into gTalk all but put the final cut into AOLs once mighty chat client. I myself have found myself in recent months migrating away from AIM, I’ve merged my contacts into google and find myself talking to people that way.

Farewell AOL Instant Messenger, it was a good run. You lasted at-least 15 years to my knowledge… Who knows, maybe you’ll last another 15 in our memories.

Source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/13/aol-slashes-more-than-40-jobs-with-more-expected/

Unfortunately that was not the case, they were able to direct me in the right direction though. They told me that VBScript was broken. The application I was attempting to install was unable to install due to the installer trying to kick off a VB script…

This morning I came in, and figured I’d take another crack at it. I threw together a quick “Hello World” script and tried to execute it. It failed with the error:

Can’t find script engine “VBScript” for script

This bothered me a little bit… So I started doing some Googling to see how I could resolve this issue.

I came across a forum, and in there, a person stated that they had run into a similar issue, the issued stemmed from antivirus software replacing the VBScript.dll file with their own file called scriptsn.dll.

They included a reg fix:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{B54F3741-5B07-11cf-A4B0-00AA004A55E8}\InprocServer32]
@="C:\\Windows\\system32\\vbscript.dll"
"ThreadingModel"="Both"

As a skeptical person, I was a little wary about what this would do, that and I’m mostly a Unix guy, so the windows registry to me is the Advanced Configuration Utility and should be handled with the same care the root account should be handled with…

I followed the path and saw that the location was legit, I simply wasnt sure what the

@="C:\\Windows\\system32\\vbscript.dll"

would do, but I decided to take a gamble and give it a shot. I kick it off and I receive the error:

Cannot edit: Error writing the value’s new contents

and so I attempted to simply replace the default key manually. When I attempted to do that, I was yelled at with the same error again.

I decided to reboot and go into safemode. I then attempted to modify the default value again, this too did not end well, it resulted in the same error again.

Once again I started with the Googling and found a post on groovypost.com. I read their instructions and decided to go as far as step 2.

Under step 3, instead of selecting owners, stay on permissions. Select the user you want, and click edit. Then give the user full permissions. Now you can change the default value to

C:\Windows\System32\vbscript.dll

or you can simply run the reg file you created if you followed the forum post. After modifying the default value, I left safemode by rebooting and attempted to run my hello world script again. This time it worked. I then decided to brave the install one last time and was able to get the install to work.

To start with, I was tired of paying T-Mobile over 100 dollars a month for cellular service. Im not saying they provided bad service or even customer support. Both were excellent. A far cry better than AT&T’s cellular service. I havent had the luxury of dealing with AT&T customer support just yet, and hopefully I’ll never have to.

Unfortunately when I canceled my T-Mobile contract, I lost my ability to receive 3G service on the Samsung Vibrant. Which basically turned it a useless commodity. Though I’ve held onto it and it turns out, my father will be able to use it instead of his blackberry. Which provides me with the perfect transition as to the other reason I got rid of my Vibrant.

The company I work for was providing me with a Blackberry Torch to use and I figured since I mostly talk to my wife and my family, this will work well, especially since I’m allowed to call 10 numbers at an unlimited rate. So I gave 7 numbers because that’s all I could think of, and one of those numbers was mine… It was my Google Voice number. Supposedly if you use google voice to call people, then it dials out to your GV number to patch through to who ever you want to call. So then all calls would be free… I dont think it actually works that way, but I also never bothered to really check.

So at this point in the story, I’m down one Android device, which means no more angry birds to kill time when I’m just standing around or in the bathroom. But I have this awesome Blackberry Torch. Now the thing about the BB Torch is, it’s something like that amazing girl you meet in the bar. The one all your friends warn you about. The, “nobody that hot stays single, there is something wrong with her”. And of-course, it is every mans God given right to ignore this sagely sound advice and proceed into what can only be described as a “shit storm of crazy” that will leave everybody involved scared and damaged for life.

That’s where I found myself. I thought it was so cool that I had a functioning GPS on my phone for once. The Vibrant’s GPS only worked once for me, it saved me when i was lost in one of New Jersey’s many ghettos. I feel like I used my one phone a friend life line while playing “Who Wants to be a Millionaire”. It rather sucked.

Back to the crazy at hand. So now I have this amazing corporate device that allows me to get all my email, keep my rsa token, defeat evil warlords with the touch of a button, all the while GPS tagging my photos. It all sounds wonderful, all that’s missing is the house with the white picket fence and the two little rug rats running around the yard chasing butterflies and a pitcher of ice cold lemonade…

Right when I was thinking life is good, the Torch started freezing, and disconnecting calls. Apps would lock up, emails would take forever to reach the phone. I realize the first logical thought would be to blame AT&T’s over saturated network for the disconnected calls and horrid email syncing. Unfortunately that was not the case. It’s the phone it’s self… Once you’ve been dating it for a while, you discover all the underlying issues and baggage this phone carries with it.

And so, Thursday I hit my breaking point. After calling my wife for the 4th disconnect to continue our 5 minute conversation, I said eff it, I cant wait for AT&T to device whether or not they are going to release an iPhone 5, which if they do, i hope it sucks and has the touch of brick instead of just the touch of death when it comes to phone calls, which I hope they resolve once I’m eligible for an upgrade.

I stopped off at the mall and signed up for an iPhone 4. I had dedicated atleast an hour to an hour and a half for this process… Fortunately, once all the workers were done staring at the well endowed lady simply asking for directions to the food court and stalling for 10 minutes so they could continue to smell her, I was helped. It took me longer to find a case I liked than it did to sign up for a contract and purchase the phone. I dont like my case for the phone btw, I’ll be looking online for a better one.

So here I sit with an iPhone 4. hopefully i havent made some horrible mistake. We’ll see, but I can sleep better knowing come tuesday, I’ll be rid of my BB Torch. The only thing I will miss is the Blackberry Messanger. It was a cost effective way to keep in touch with people all over the world.