Kevin on June 21st, 2009

Although my Dad passed away eighteen years ago, a day doesn’t go by without my thinking of him.
Dad was ill for virtually the last decade of his life, but memory has been much kinder than the disease which took him:  my most vivid remembrances are all from happier times.  …playing catch in the road outside [...]

Continue reading about Lessons from Dad

Kevin on June 11th, 2009

Traveling back to Albany for a few days to see family and friends… back on Tuesday. Everyone have a great weekend!
In the meantime, here’s one of my favorite TED talks; Sir Ken Robinson on schools and creativity:

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Continue reading about Out of pocket for a few days…

Kevin on June 4th, 2009

Thanks to everyone who’s downloaded one or more of the files on the FREE Downloads page – I hope you’ve found this information helpful.  We’ll surpass 5,000 downloads sometime today, which is especially gratifying.  This is something I started last year as a service to my readers, and I will continue to add files each [...]

Continue reading about FREE Downloads to hit 5K today

As I imagine the case is with many beginning bloggers, I frankly didn’t have a clear path and vision for Practical Hacks when I began blogging.  My initial thought was to focus on lifehacks-oriented topics and perhaps marketing issues.  For the first 8-10 months the blog in fact was geared to posts focused on shortcuts, [...]

Continue reading about The next step: A major project & potential second blog

Kevin on April 29th, 2009

Without a doubt, the most gratifying thing about blogging is getting feedback from readers and reading your comments.   I often find that a post is merely a starting point.  Reader comments expand, amplify and sometimes challenge my thoughts, and help develop the story; I can’t imagine this blog without your contributions.  After all, if I [...]

Continue reading about Reader Mailbag #1

Nine days ago one of my subscribers emailed me and said he was getting malware warnings when attempting to visit this site.  I responded with something insightful like, “aarrggghhhh.  Hope it’s a fluke.”   I wasn’t seeing any such warnings with either IE or Firefox and hoped (forgive me, Michael) it was just a problem with [...]

Continue reading about Ah, irony: a site with “hacks” in its name gets hacked; what I did when my WordPress blog was compromised

Practical Hacks has been cleared by Google!  Gone are the notices warning that the site is harboring malignant, life-as-we-know-it-is-about-to-end software.  The last 7 days have been interesting to say the least…  this site was somehow hacked or otherwise compromised and it took me a couple of days to figure out how to get rid of [...]

Continue reading about Site has been cleared!! …we’re back in business!

Kevin on April 7th, 2009

…I think. (Crossing fingers.)  I’m fairly certain the site is back to normal.  It loads without any warning icons when using IE; with Firefox, you’ll continue to see an Attack Site warning until Google reconsiders how it indexes the site. I hope that will happen within a couple of days, although Google has warned [...]

Continue reading about Blog is fixed…

Kevin on April 5th, 2009

My apologies, but somehow Practical Hacks has been compromised.  I see little point in posting until I can get this fixed.  Thanks for your understanding and patience; I hope to resume posting soon!!
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Continue reading about Shutting down until site is fixed

Kevin on April 5th, 2009

If you’re a Firefox user you may have received a malware warning when attempting to view this site. I have no idea what is causing this and am attempting to resolve it with (gulp) DreamHost’s help. I’ve added no ads to the site in the last several weeks, and haven’t approved any spam [...]

Continue reading about Sorting out apparent malware issue

Kevin on March 11th, 2009

My apologies if you’ve had trouble connecting to Practical Hacks during the last week. The DreamHost server for this site has featured more crashes during the last few days than a typical Indy 500. Practical Hacks is allegedly going to move to a better server sometime in the near future, but until then [...]

Continue reading about DreamHost reign of terror continues…

Kevin on March 1st, 2009

My apologies for not following up earlier on the fate of my old Dell desktop that pulled a full Christian Bale-like meltdown a couple months ago – other projects and commitments have interrupted work on this post and I’d permanently pushed Part II to the back burner.  A week or so ago one of my readers [...]

Continue reading about Ctrl-Alt-Del\PANIC Part II