Live blog – Kansas Auctioneer championship

Posted on 10 September 2008 | by Aaron Traffas | 13 comments

8:30am
Just passed Junction City, KS, on I-70 headed to the KAA bid-calling championship at the fair. I’ll be updating this post in real time today so long as I have a charge on my phone, so check back regularly.

Waiting in the green room to be called in for the interview

Waiting in the green room to be called in for the interview

10:30am
I made it here to find Alan VanNahmen, Jeff Ruckert, Megan McCurdy and an auctioneer from northwest Kansas named Lance all loitering around waiting to draw for order. I’ll post an updated roster and the order after we draw.

11:00am
We 19 contestants have drawn our order and are waiting to interview. I drew number 6. I think it was really a 9 but peer pressure said otherwise.

11:50am
I’ve completed the interview portion. I’ll post the questions after everyone’s done. I feel solid about my performance. While we wait, here is the list of contestants in alphabetical order.

Milling around the merchandise at 1:30pm

Milling around the merchandise at 1:30pm

Byron Bina – Herington
Eric Bloomquist – Assaria
Eric Boone – Yates Center
Charly Cummings – Yates Center
Kevin Ediger – Windom
Greg Foote – Bucyrus
Lance Kinderkneckt
John Kisner – Hays
Tom Lindsay – Shawnee
Megan McCurdy – Wichita
Aaron McKee – Manhattan
Ty Mitchell – Oxford
Dennis Oller – Turon
Jeff Ruckert – Manhattan
Glen Suppes – Lindsborg
Jayton Tautfest – Park City
Jeff Temme – Petersburg, NE
Aaron Traffas – Sharon
Alan VanNahmen – Manhattan

…more in a few minutes.

1:30pm
We’re milling around, perusing the merchandise, waiting for the contest to start at 2 p.m.

Byron Bina, Aaron McKee, Megan McCurdy

Byron Bina, Aaron McKee, Megan McCurdy

2:40pm
I just finished competing. now I wait to see if I make finals. There are some great auctioneers here, so it’s anyone’s guess.

3:46pm
I made finals…already sold again, better than first round…happening fast…results soon…

4:07pm
Here are your results.

  1. Byron Bina
  2. Aaron McKee
  3. Megan McCurdy
  4. Charlie Cummings
  5. John Kisner

9:33pm
Fixed formatting

10:45pm
Added pictures

Posted in announcements, bid calling | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |

Secunia checks your PC for vulnerabilities

Posted on 9 September 2008 | by Aaron Traffas | 3 comments

Secunia

Image via Wikipedia

The tubes are full of baddies. It’s not enough anyomore to simply install an antivirus package and pay your yearly virus tax. Antivirus is becoming outdated. Granted, it’s still a requirement for all but the most elite computer users, but in the time of the always-on Internet connection we need to protect ourselves against all kinds of attack vectors. An attack vector is a means by which someone or some automated program can compromise and, in the worst cases, gain access to an innocent user’s computer or network.

As today’s software becomes larger and as release cycles become shorter, there are security holes in everyday packages like browsers (IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome), add-ons (Flash, PDF readers, Java machines), utilities (OpenOffice, Microsoft Office, Picasa) and even the operating system itself (Linux, OSX, Windows).

Maintaining a constant watch over all of the programs that you may or may not even know you have installed can be a daunting task. Luckily, for the majority of you who are Windows users, a product called Secunia can help put your mind to rest.

Secunia offers three levels of protection. The first level, which is a no-brainer for everone, is a free web scan. Simply launch your Java-enabled browser and it will scan 70 common programs to be sure they’re up to date. If it finds a program that’s not the most current version, it lists it and provides links to explanations of the vulnerabilities in that older version. I wasn’t able to get the program to run under Chrome. Since Chrome requires the latest Java 6 update 10 release candidate, it’s not all that surprising that it doesn’t support everything we throw at it. Just run Secunia’s online scan in IE for now to check your system.

The second level of protection is their PSI – Personal Software Inspector. The PSI is a free-for-personal-use application you download and install. It scans for over 6,900 possible programs to be sure all the software on your computer is up-to-date.

The third level of protection is for business and is called the NSI – Network Software Inspector. It makes it easy to maintain the same level of updates as the PSI but on a multiple-system scale. It costs $30 per system per year.

I pride myself on keeping my software, nearly all of which is open-source, up to date. I have yet to run a scan on a machine where Secunia didn’t tell me at least one package was vulnerable. I’ll admit the business solution is a little steep for the average business, but the web scan is something that you should do right now and once every month. It’s free and crazy-easy and is one more asset in the reponsible computing tool belt.

Posted in Security, services, software | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |

Apple releases new iPods, iTunes 8

Posted on 9 September 2008 | by Aaron Traffas | Comments Off on Apple releases new iPods, iTunes 8

Image representing Apple as depicted in CrunchBase

Image via CrunchBase

Apple today released new versions of their iTunes software as well as updated versions of iPods. This release was hardly surprising and, as predicted, there wasn’t anything unexpected or widely diverging from the rumors that had been floating around the Internet.

The take-aways are really fewer than I had expected.

iTunes 8 is out and it’s cool. It seems to combine features found in web radio stations like Pandora and Last.fm where it will predict what you would like and automatically associate similar styles of music into playlists. They call this the ‘genius’ feature.

The Nano and Touch have both received a redesign, both in shape and price. The iPod Touch and iPhone have a software update that will be made available on Friday. It’s also free for users of the 2.0 Touch software.

The Nano has an accelerometer, like the iPhone and iPod touch, and also has a microphone on the back. I don’t know if there is a time or size limit on the recordings, but at $199 for 16GB version, it would make a high quality voice recorder for auctioneers to use to catalog merchandise or to record auctions.

The iPod Touch has a speaker. Thank god. That’s probably the biggest feature that was lacking from it. We’ve been using my girlfriend’s Touch as a timer when cooking, and it doesn’t work very well when you can’t hear it ding.

The one feature for which I was hoping in the Touch that didn’t apparently seem to be added is GPS. I had hoped that they would find a way to push this feature into the new models. I’m on the fence right now as to whether I’ll get an iPhone or an iPod Touch. I’m going to do one or the other in the next month or two, and had they put a GPS in the Touch I’d have an easy decision. I may yet have to brave leaving Alltel for the AT&T void that is Kansas.

CrunchBase Information on Apple
Apple
Information provided by CrunchBase

Posted in gadgets, hardware, software, design | Tagged , , , , , , , |

Google recommends Chrome download from main page

Posted on 8 September 2008 | by Aaron Traffas | Comments Off on Google recommends Chrome download from main page

Google screenshot showing Chrome download link position

Google screenshot showing Chrome download link position

Google today, seemingly confident enough about their new browser, posted a link on their homepage for the download.

While a significant percentage of the news I read over the course of the last week involved Chrome and the browser wars, I’m guessing that the news escaped the average Fox News viewer.

Now everyone knows. Everyone who uses Windows, that is. The link doesn’t appear on Linux. I’m curious why they’re displaying the link on users who are actually using Chrome, as the screenshot to the right was taken inside the Chrome browser. If they’re so worried about their homepage as to sniff for user agent to see that the user isn’t running Linux (and I presume OSX) before displaying the link, you’d think they’d go the extra line of code to only display the link to users running browsers other than Chrome. I’ve already looked at the browser’s agent string – the header line that identifies the browser to the server – and it does list itself as Chrome.

I digress. The beauty of the sparsity of the Google homepage is that the nine words that make up the additional Chrome link represent such a significant percentage of the words on the page that it has the same effect of a big, flashing, yellow banner on any other site.

Google’s page teaches us an important concept. If you want to make a bigger impact on your users, reduce page weight. It’s tough, but we can all agree how effective it can be. Users want content. We should give it to them.

CrunchBase Information on Google
Google
Information provided by CrunchBase

Posted in design, software | Tagged , , |

Netbooks

Posted on 8 September 2008 | by Aaron Traffas | 1 comment

I’m typing away on my Apple slim aluminum keyboard. It’s the one I poured nearly a full cup of coffee into a couple weeks ago. I dried it, wet it, dried it again and when it wouldn’t work I’d left it for dead. A week passed and I tried it one more time and it’s been working well ever since. I guess I bought a pair to have a spare. With all the damn computers around here, I guess it will get plenty of use.

Everex Cloudbook CE1200V, photo by Aaron Traffas

Everex Cloudbook CE1200V, photo by Aaron Traffas

I sold my Cloudbook at last Thursday’s auction. I couldn’t ever get the wireless to work as well as I wanted, though it seems I’m not the only one. The graphics always seemed weak, though VIA just released an open source driver for it.

I’m currently rocking the ASUS EeePC 900 netbook. It’s quite possibly the finest piece of equipment on which I’ve ever laid my hands. I turned it on long enough to hit restart on the Knoppix distribution of Linux so that I could install Ubuntu. I had good luck with Ubuntu-eee as opposed to Eee-Ubuntu. Everything worked pretty much right away. I had to load a different kernel to get the microphone working so I could play with Skype with my girlfriend. I got her an Acer Aspire One netbook as an early birthday present. It’s slightly bigger than my Eee, but the difference in the keyboard size is pretty huge. It also runs Windows XP, which is pretty much a must for her iPod Touch. It was also crazy-cheap, weighing in at $349 at Best Buy.

Both the Acer Aspire One and the Asus EeePC come with either Windows or Linux. A Windows netbook makes a great and very affordable terminal for running stand-alone clerking software at auctions that aren’t at your facility. A Linux netbook is an even more affordable way to make a statement about how cool you are and how much fun you want to have with your computing experience.

Dell has hinted at releasing a netbook, similar to their Inspiron Mini 9, with Windows and built-in 3G, which would be a great solution for web-based clerking software. Imagine being able to clerk an auction wirelessly without having to setup a wireless network.

CrunchBase Information on Asus
Asus
Information provided by CrunchBase

Posted in clerking software, gadgets, hardware | Tagged , , , , , |