Michael Valverde's Blog

Well, I've always wanted to create a video game. The first time I ever wrote the famous Hello World, I was in the fourth grade. My parents had Santa deliver a Coleco Adam computer. Originally for my sister Nikki, but in few short weeks she tired of me wanting to be in her room to play on it - it was moved to my room. I don't think my parents realized just how much I would naturally take to computers. Yeah, we had an Atari 2600 that I had about worn out playing, but to their surprise I was printing and writing programs that printed things almost immediatly. I discovered magazines like Family Computing and Compute that would publish programs in pring and I'd tirelessly type them in and run them! I taught myself how to store data sequentially and create a program to catalog my 8 or 9 records. I create a program to print me a checklist for my baseball cards. I even wrote a little drawing program that I took to school and showed off to one of my teachers. Computers bec...

Well, if you are like my wife's employer - then you are using Outlook as an email client to Google's gmail system. Google offers wonderful email hosting solutions - Google Mail Hosting Also, Microsoft's Outlook works great with it(isn't that ironic!). However, my wife noticed she wouldn't get new email notifications for a while in outlook - but instantly via her web browser at gmail.com. After a little pokeing around, I found the setting she needed to change so she could get new email notifications within 1 minute. While in Outlook - press CTRL+ALT+S and this windows pops up. Change your "Schedule an automatic send/receive every" option to 1 minute and now Outlook will poll Gmail every minute - not every 30 minutes by default!

Well, I signed up for a night/weekend course the other day. If enough people sign up, I be taking a A+ Test Prep course. It has been a while since I was in the classroom on that side of the podium - but you can never stop learning and I am looking forward to getting hands on with hardware again! Even though I build my personal computers from parts (and the best place to get them is NewEgg ), I really haven't done much with hardware in a few years. Besides the occasional GPU upgrade, there really hasn't been a reason to upgrade anymore. I remember back in my college days upgrading almost every summer! Guess when your priority isn't to play the latest/greatest video game at max settings, you don't really push hardware! Well, hopefully class will be fun!