This is a special entry today. Last year I got talking to a lovely new friend called Amanda and she told me about a project that she was working on called Amanda On Ellen. As she explained what the project was about I was intrigued, so I offered to help by hosting the site. Now I want to spread the word to as many people as I can, so please read on. Gadolunad

What is Amanda On Ellen?

At a recent event that Amanda Tapping attended, she was asked by a fan if she would like to be on The Ellen Show. Amanda replied with a resounding yes. She is a fan of Ellen and the show and suggested that we should start a campaign to get her on it. This is that campaign, started by a few fans from around the world who took on Amanda’s suggestion and have decided to run with it.

Amanda Tapping Is the queen of Sci Fi, having been a star on the long running TV series Stargate SG-1 for 10 years and then moving over to Stargate Atlantis. She is now an executive producer, occasional director and star of the new SyFy hit show Sanctuary. Amanda is a wonderful person, giving so much of herself to her fans and her work.

Amanda Tapping

Amanda is a truly inspiring woman; she  has inspired all of us at Amanda On Ellen daily. Amanda has helped start up a new charity called ‘Sanctuary for Kids,’ which is just outstanding. Amanda Tapping has a wicked sense of humor which we, as her fangirls and boys all agree would fit well when put up alongside Ellen.

Ellen DeGeneres Is the queen of talk show hosts. Dancing her way into our hearts, and inspiring us all to be the best dancers we can be! Ellen has interviewed some of the greatest celebrities and minds of our time. As well as danced with each and every one. Ellen has a classic sense of humor which we as her fans would find EPIC when paired with Amanda.

Ellen is also someone who works hard for charities. She and her show have helped so many people around the world in so many different ways. Another truly inspiring woman.

Your support is needed

As most of you know, I don’t usually get involved in many external projects or causes. But… As a Stargate, Sanctuary and Tapping fan, I really wanted to help. So do Amanda and I a huge massive favour and please support Amanda On Ellen.

How to Help

Please follow this link and sign the Amanda On Ellen Petition: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/amandaonellen/

Amanda (my friend) has created a video listing many supporters. A lot of time and effort has gone into the whole project. Fans of both Amanda Tapping and Ellen have come together to show their support. Actors from many TV Series and Film have also shown their support for this project. So sit back and enjoy the video.

Thanks to: Amanda K, Emma S and Isabel V.
You can follow Amanda on Ellen on Twitter @amandaonellen on Facebook and the Official Website.

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Some of the world’s most popular Windows programs are vulnerable to a major bug in how they load critical code libraries, according to sites tracking attack code. Gadolunad

Among the Windows applications that can be exploited using a systemic bug that many have dubbed “DLL load hijacking,” are the Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera browsers; Microsoft’s Word 2007; Adobe’s Photoshop; Skype; and the uTorrent BitTorrent client.

Microsoft have released a tool to block the exploit that can be downloaded here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2264107 – Always keep up-to-date.

“Fast and furious, incredibly fast,” said Andrew Storms, director of security operations for nCircle Security, referring to the pace of exploit postings for the vulnerability in Windows software called “DLL load hijacking” by some, “binary planting” by others.

On Monday, Microsoft confirmed reports of unpatched vulnerabilities in a large number of Windows programs, then published a tool it said would block known attacks. The flaws stem from the way many Windows applications call code libraries — dubbed “dynamic-link library,” or “DLL” — that give hackers wiggle room they can exploit by tricking an application into loading a malicious file with the same name as a required DLL.

If attackers can dupe users into visiting malicious websites or remote shares, or get them to plug in a USB drive — and in some cases con them into opening a file — they can hijack a PC and plant malware on it.

Even before Microsoft described the problem, published its protective tool, and said it could not address the wide-ranging issue by patching Windows without crippling countless program, researcher HD Moore posted tools to find vulnerable applications and generate proof-of-concept code.

The majority of the exploits published in the last 48 hours have been generated by Moore’s auditing tool and the generic exploit module added to the open-source Metasploit penetration testing toolkit.

Several sites have taken to tracking the applications that people have found vulnerable, including an informal list kept by Peter Van Eeckhoutte, a Belgium IT manager, and a longer one of published proof-of-concept exploits maintained by Offensive Security, an online security training company.

Among the 40 exploits listed by Offensive were ones for several Adobe products, including InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop; a number of Microsoft-made programs, including a pair that were revealed yesterday by Slovenian security firm Acros; and other popular applications, such as Foxit Reader, uTorrent and Wireshark.

As of 3 p.m. ET, more than 30 exploits had been posted on Wednesday alone.

The flood will likely continue: Yesterday, Moore updated his DLLHijackAuditKit to version 2, making it easier to use and quicker at identifying buggy programs.

“I don’t recall seeing a list like that so quickly,” said Marc Fossi, director of Symantec’s security response team. “But at the same time I’m not surprised.”

Fossi compared it to an earlier disclosure of a broad class of vulnerabilities that more than 10 years ago led to a large number of exploits in a short span of time. “It’s like when format string errors were first discovered and you had all these apps being found that were vulnerable,” Fossi said.

Format string vulnerabilities were long thought to be harmless, but in the late 1990s, researchers figured out how to exploit them to execute malware.

Moore had a different analogy in mind.

“The most recent example I can think of is the AxMan tool I released in 2006,” said Moore in an e-mail reply to questions. “It resulted in hundreds of new ActiveX bugs and used a similar model of leveraging the security community at large to identify vulnerable applications.”

AxMan was a Web-based fuzzing tool designed to find flaws in ActiveX controls, the widely-used and often-buggy add-on technology for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

Moore believes that the rush of exploits will be a good thing in the end. “Overall, [AxMan] worked [and] ActiveX exploits sharply declined a few months after the tool’s release and software vendors had an easy way to make sure they didn’t repeat common mistakes,” Moore said, referring to four years ago. “My hope is that having a quality assessment tool available for the DLL issue will lead to this being a non-issue in a few months.”

Some developers, such as Wireshark and BitTorrent — the latter maintains the uTorrent client — have said they have fixes in the wings, and will update their software within days.

Microsoft, on the other hand, has declined to name vulnerable applications, even though researchers filed bug reports five months ago.

“Microsoft is analyzing its own applications to identify any that are affected by this new remote vector for DLL preloading attacks,” Jerry Bryant, group manager with the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC), said in an e-mail Tuesday. “We will take appropriate actions to protect customers which may include releasing security advisories with mitigations and workarounds and security updates to address the issue.”

Until patches are available, Microsoft has urged users to download the free tool that blocks locks DLLs from loading from remote directories, USB drives, websites, and an organization’s network.

Source: http://www.infoworld.com

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1. FixWin

OK, it’s been a while since I wrote anything on here, so what better way to come back with a peeve / rant or annoyance… So, as many of you know (or are about to find out) I love Twitter. Its sucked the life out of me for hours when I either should have been working or I was bored. Anyway, over the last few months it seems to me that Twitter has started going down hill. It’s server performance just sucks, Its slow, API timeouts or unavailable, Aarrghhh Its annoying. Gadolunad

OK, So the boffin’s at Twitter probably didn’t expect the popularity or the load that the seemingly minuscule servers or bandwidth can cope with (I bet when Twitter first started as an internal communication platform for Odeo (twttr, as it was known), they had no problems like this). The first Twitter message was sent on the 21st of March 2006, that’s 4 years ago!!! So why is Twitter still having problems?

Fail Whale

When any website cannot cope with excessive bandwidth, the server returns an error, usually a white screen with big black letters boasting ‘Server Error 503′. Twitter uses a custom error message for the same error using a Whale being saved by some red birds.

Twitters 503 Fail Whale error notice

So, out of complete Irony, I wanted to make my own version of the Fail Whale, and with the thing being so annoying using a mobile or the web interface its frustrating, just like the BP Oil Spill, so I combined them to make a new Twitter error screen:

The Twitter / BP Error Warning... Save the Whale (Not)

This time I have the Whale being saved by BP Logo’s…

Bots – These are another peeve. They scan for keywords then either tweet you or RT (Re-Tweet) your message. They are so annoying that I now just block them and report them as Spam. I hate them with a passion. Its as bad as walking through the City and some asshole jumps out on you asking ‘Are you interested in buying this 54 piece Britannia Encyclopaedia collection?’ – I’m Like Nooooo, If I wanted something like that I’d have come to you. Ever hear of the Internet, fool!

Auto DMs (Direct Messages) – If god gave out one thing that made people annoying, its Automated Replies on Twitter. OK, before you all moan at me and call me a hypocrite, I use something called True Twit. This actually stops spammers from following me, but it does send out an automated reply so anyone following me can authorise themselves, So it protects me. I then Auto Follow you back via True Twit. What you won’t get from me is a DM stating ‘Hey new friend, thanks for the follow, why not come on over and check my blog http://imboring.com‘ Or try to sell you something.

Last one… I use my own domain for email, and Twitter hates that. It never delivers my emails and I always get an error stating that my email address is incorrect. Twitter do know about this and are looking into it. So I’m glad I’m not alone with that.

On a good note, I don’t really get that much Twitter Spam any more, so that’s a good thing.

Anyone else have any Twitter Peeves? Let me know.

Till Next time. Happy Tweeting.

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Is it just me? For Christ’s sake tell me that this doesn’t just happen to me. You’ve decided, for whatever reason, to go to Tesco/ASDA/Sainsbury/Lidl (apparently pronounced Leedel now), Morrisons or wherever else you buy your food and you’ve decided to go at a time when you think it’ll be less crowded like eight in the morning or at midnight or something like that. You get in there and every single place where you want to look there is a member of staff doing a stock check/filling the shelves/mopping up or chatting to another member of staff about her bunions… Either that or the one other bloody customer in there decides to look at exactly the portion of shelf that you’re at… Is it just me or does this happen to other people too? Then, when you get to the checkout, you get the bag with the dodgy handle, the talkative or miserable checkout person (talkative is bad if you’re in a shit mood because I personally don’t want to use boxes instead of bags and I certainly don’t want a lecture about being  “green” while I’m trying to shovel cans of drink into a bag on top of crisps). Some woman one morning said: Gadolunad

“why don’t you take boxes instead of bags, it’s better.”
“Better for who?” I japed, cheerily (well, grunted actually)
“For the planet,” she trilled.
“Who cares, we’ll all be dead in a hundred years,” I informed her.

End of conversation.

Oh and another thing. I’ve tweeted about this before… Self Service points. There’s never enough room to fill more than one bag and more likely than not, you’re going to get the message, which is usually on full volume (with 30 people queuing behind you huffing) say ‘Please return the item into the bagging area‘. You scream It IS in the bagging area… If I was going to steel the item, do you think I would have scanned it through in the first place?

Having said that, back at the normal checkouts, the talkative ones at least generally help you with putting the shopping away while the miserable ones just let it pile up then look at you as if you’re a fucking idiot because you can’t pack fifty items in three seconds as they come down the conveyor belt like the unwanted leftovers of some cheap version of The Generation Game (older readers will remember that ) What happened to the days when they had people to pack the bags of useless bastards like me?

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not moaning about supermarket staff (except the ones in my local Tesco Express) and anyone who does should try working with the public for 12 hours a day, I’m just saying that it seems that everywhere I go someone seems to be “in my space”. It happens everywhere.

If I’m at the pictures (which I am quite a lot as you know) then nine times out of ten some idiot will come and sit directly in front of me or behind me (I usually move ) WHY? Are these people lonely? Do I look like the sort of person who is going to strike up a conversation while the houselights are up and we’re waiting for half an hour of adverts before the film starts? No, I don’t look like that kind of person…

I’ve learned over the years to avoid eye contact and certainly never to smile at anyone as they enter for fear of being lumbered with them for ten or fifteen minutes or, as happened so horrifically on one occasion, for the whole film! Smiling at women has the completely opposite effect by the way, especially young ones. Smile at them and they think you’re going to ask them out or, in the case of the younger ones, stalk them, groom them on Facebook and then cook and eat them after posing as a sixteen year old boy online for six months… (that bloke who just killed that seventeen year old girl he met on Facebook should be put in a small room with the parents and a couple of baseball bats by the way, in my humble opinion).

Shopping rant over.

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From time to time nature shows us that we are not as almighty as we might think. Consider, for example, the recent volcanic ash clouds that plague air flights across Europe. Gadolunad

These two things usually don’t mix well together. Although one could argue that some disasters happen because of technology, I think usually disasters are outside of our control. But only when a big one is happening do we come to realize how dependent we are on all the shiny things that mankind has been inventing mostly in the past 100 years.

What if there were no flights across Europe for three months? What if the complex network that provides communications were to break down for a month? Could we function in such a disruptive event? And how well would we cope with it?

While the economic losses would probably be huge, I think some good could come from such an event. Without all these networks we would probably talk more with the ones around us. Like really talk.

I mean, could you imagine Socrates doing his work today? Forging wisdom into 140 characters to accommodate Twitter or having a Facebook account to keep in touch with Crito and the others.

On the same note I was talking to a friend about the prospects that we as programmers, have in the event of a really big disaster. No computers, no networks. And we still need to make a living? So here you go to find something to work:

– So what do you know to do?
– I’m a programmer!
– Right! Can you “program” this cow to give more milk? Or perhaps you could “program” this hammer?
– ?!

Indeed we would be in some deep shit.

I guess it is uber cool to be head down in the IT field. But on the other hand we don’t have to lose sight of why we are doing this.

What do you think?

Oh, and just out of interest, this is an actual aerial photo, taken above Eyjafjallajokull…

The 'face' of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano captured in an aerial picture by the Icelandic Coastguard. Isn't this a little bit creepy?..

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I love it when there is a simple way to fix certain problems. Working in support can be a real pain sometimes when you have to explain a process to a user that is pretty scared or has confidence issues using a computer. So when this utility came along, its a godsend. Gadolunad

Microsoft’s FixIt solutions generally work well, but sometimes they just take way too long to run, especially on Vista and Windows 7.  Some of them also require a little more interaction than I’d prefer: I know where the registry key is to fix that stupid bug where DVD drives disappear from My Computer, I just want a point-and-click way to do it!

Fortunately, The Windows Club has a nice portable application which provides much of the same functionality as FixIt. FixWin is a tiny download which packs loads of helpful registry fixes for Vista and Windows 7. Everything from a disabled Task Manager or RegEdit to replacing missing shortcuts and fixing that CD problem I mentioned above. FixWin can also tackle a handful of Windows Media Player glitches such as messed up file associations, sync problems, and messed-up libraries. In total, the 173KB program contains 50 fixes.

As with any one-click fix program, it’s a good idea to create a system restore point prior to making any changes. FixWin’s developer has thoughtfully included a button on the applications’s main tab to make things easy on us.

FixWin is available for download from The Windows Club — scroll down about halfway and look for the glowy arrow pointing at a hard drive.

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A sneaky new Trojan attempts to extort money from BitTorrent users under the guise of a fictitious copyright infringement lawsuit. Gadolunad

Malicious pop-up messages (shown below) generated by the malware, which is being spread via fake files offered up for download through BitTorrent, seeks to bully victims into agreeing to pay out for a “pre-trial settlement” of $400 in order to avoid possible prosecution over supposed copyright piracy violations.

Infected users receive warnings every time they reboot their system, warns net security firm F-Secure. The scammers have sought to lend credibility to the ruse by setting up an official-looking but bogus website at icpp-online.com, which was taken offline on Monday afternoon.

The domain was registered to “Shoen Overns”, using an email address previously associated in the registration of domains associated with the Zeus information-stealing Trojan and Koobface scams.

Fake copyright message from the scammers

Fake ICCP Evidence List

Real payment screen from the scammers

A full-write up of the scam can be found in a blog posting by F-Secure here. One unfortunate example of a user who fell for the ICPP extortion Trojan ruse can be found here.

Note: Please make sure that you have your AntiVirus definitions up to date. If you don’t have any AntiVirus software, firstly, Shame on you and secondly you can download a free one here.

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For those of you who know me, you know I love music. As my musical taste encompasses a broad spectrum of styles, you won’t be surprised that Johnny Cash is amongst one of my favorites. Although country music makes many people cringe, Cash has won the respect and reputation of a serious recording artist, and in his own right, his music is set way above the bar than most artists today. Gadolunad

Whilst maintaining the same tradition that resulted in his two earlier albums for Rick Rubin’s American Recordings, American III: Solitary Man saw Johnny Cash release another mix of original material and covers that had resulted in both critical and commercial success for American Recordings and American II: Unchained. This time around, Cash’s songs, such as Before My Time and I’m Leaving Now were recorded alongside Tom Petty’s I Won’t Back Down, U2′s One and Nick cave’s The Mercy Seat to create an album that lost a little of the humour of the earlier recordings and replaced it by a greater consideration of life and love following bouts of ill health but, as Cash writes in the liner notes, “I wouldn’t trade my future for anyone’s I know.”

Indeed, the cover photograph is an accurate summation of the music within, showing Johnny Cash no longer standing alone and fit to stare down a hurricane but is now pictured backstage and slightly defeated, as though winded by events around him. Despite the title of the opening song, being I Won’t Back Down, one suspects that over time, Cash was to have an ever-decreasing say in this.

Following that first track comes my first favorite track on the album. Cash’s take on Neil Diamond’s Solitary Man, which was used in an episode of Stargate Atlantis (Vegas, see below) and the aching and exhausted sound of That Lucky Old Sun, included at Cash’s request given his success in a talent contest when he was a child with this song. Nevertheless, where I Won’t Back Down saw Cash supported with backing vocals from Tom Petty, this brace of songs finds Johnny Cash singing solo and his voice sounds more beaten and husky that ever before. Track four is another cover, this time of U2′s One, which trades the bluster of the original version for a homespun honesty and is, in my opinion, better than the U2 version. Despite Bono and Cash singing exactly the same words, the former sang of little whilst attempting to make a grand gesture while Cash sounds as though he has lived the life to justify his taking over of the song.

After the wickedly funny tale of the awkward hero of Nobody comes the album’s two stand-out tracks, which are amongst the very vest that Cash ever recorded. I See A Darkness is a chilling tale of one man’s swing into depression and violence, which has been recorded at a funereal tempo with a beautiful, yet barely there, backing from pump organ and piano. Meanwhile, the cover of Nick Cave’s The Mercy Seat (my second favorite track on the album) has Cash tell of a a prisoner on death row climbing into an electric chair prior to his execution and recalling in his last moments alive what he knows of stories from the Bible. As the subject of the song admits the truth of his conviction, a piano rumbles the song to a conclusion and at the song’s end, completely overwhelms Cash’s guitar playing.

Unsurprisingly, the next three songs lift the mood of the album, particularly the lovely Fields Of Diamonds, on which Cash is backed by Sheryl Crow, and the wistful Before My Time, both of which give the feeling that the second half of the album is a lot closer to straight country and folk than the rock music that had influenced tracks one through seven. Moving on from the rock covers of One and The Mercy Seat, American III moves to close with Cash’s own Country Trash and the violin and guitars of the final three songs, being the wind-blown Mary Of The Wild Moors, I’m Leaving Now, which features Cash singing alongside Merle Haggard, and the wheezing Wayfaring Stranger.

One assumes that, with this being Cash’s third album for American Recordings, he and Rubin were comfortable enough with the audiences they were attracting to bring a greater country influence onto the recording. Whilst a small number of buyers may have been disappointed at this move, it’s refreshing to go from the harrowing and suffocating I See A Darkness and The Mercy Seat to the wide open sounds of the album’s final seven songs, particularly I’m Leaving Now, where Merle Haggard’s higher and more melodic style plays off against Cash’s gruff singing to great effect.

For those of you who have never heard the song ‘Solitary Man’ before, you can hear it in this video of the’ Vegas‘ episode of Stargate: Atlantis. This episode shows John Sheppard as a detective in an alternate universe.  Hope you enjoy it, and go and buy the album.

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As release of Adobe CS5 is approaching its developers let slip more details about its features and advantages. They don’t miss a chance to hot up our interest in the forthcoming product. Michael Coleman, After Effects product manager, has recently announced some more exciting news about the product. Gadolunad

First of all for those who missed Adobe October announcement it should be reminded that After Effects CS5 is developed as native 64-bit. And if you have a good computer with enough RAM then you will have a possibility to appreciate every-day advantages of Adobe CS5 over earlier versions of Adobe products. According to Michael Coleman these advantages include the following:

• Complex comps and high-resolution images are rendered smoothly.
• Larger RAM previews allow you to view long comps in one pass. You’ll see much longer green bars.
• Memory-intensive features like HDR and floating-point color are easier to use.
• Your image caches can be much larger, which means less re-rendering.
• Low-memory errors are virtually eliminated.

But now this list is expanded by one more detail – After Effects CS5 is faster! This is a result of the product modernization which included not only its conversation for 64-bit systems but also modification of considerable part of After Effects’ core.

After Effects CS5 was compared with different versions of After Effects. For this purpose these applications were used for rendering of many different projects on the same computers. CS5 overcame its competitors in almost every case and showed better performance.

Michael Coleman notices that these results are preliminary and based on prerelease software. It is natural that results may vary when the software is exploited by different users on different hardware. But he believes that still every user will be able to enjoy improvements provided by After Effects CS5.

So let’s make a revision of improvements described by Michael Coleman.

First of all, After Effects launches more quickly – more than twice as fast.

“Dealing with files is faster. Reading and writing certain compressed file formats is twice as fast. We have also parallelized QuickTime export. This improves the performance of common tasks like transcoding files into other formats.

Rendering is faster. In the simple cases, when rendering on a single core, we are seeing 20-40% shorter render times. This is a result of general efficiencies gained during the 64-bit conversion. As a result, each core on your system is being used more efficiently and you can expect to see greater utilization for each CPU core.”

For multi-core CPUs the After Effects CS5 has an option “Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously”. This feature has also been considerably improved. The CS5 developers have completely rewritten the After Effects multi-core processing engine. As a result render time showed by CS5 during benchmark tests is by 30-50% shorter. That’s a really impressive result, but not the only one with regard to multi-core processing.

Another improvement is that starting up multi-core processing in CS5 takes 1-2 seconds compared to about 30 seconds in CS4. So using multi-core processing became more convenient even for short renders.

Thus CS5 ensures more effective use of CPU cores and makes multi-core processing more comfortable and efficient.

Now, good news for those who have in their disposition Core i7 hyper-threaded processors with virtual cores. Unlike After Effects CS4 which could not use virtual cores, CS5 can see and use them so you will be able to enjoy all the advantages of the latest multi-core systems.

Also Michael Coleman announced several more individual improvements. He assures that some effects are faster: Bilateral blur, Turbulent Noise, and the ever-handy Cartoon effect. Pixel Bender plug-ins will also render faster.

“Even though we recommend adding some more RAM to your machine to take advantage of After Effects CS5, it will still work better in computers with less than 4GB of RAM. Even in this situation, After Effects CS5 can still use more RAM than CS4, and this means fewer out-of-memory errors and better performance.”

There is one more problem resolved by Adobe. When many applications are used simultaneously there is usually a kind of a struggle between them for the amount of RAM which they can use. Michael Coleman said that the developers added a new performance optimization that allows Adobe After Effects, Premiere Pro, Encore, and Adobe Media Encoder intelligently coordinate their memory usage. This new feature should ensure the possibility to enjoy smooth and comfortable work.

So, to summarize it should be said that Adobe CS5 looks very attractive and no wander that so many look forward to trying it.

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Microsoft has announced its “get on the bus” tour of North America. Gadolunad

During the tour Microsoft will demonstrate the new features of Windows 7 and Office 2010 on a bus. In January 2007 Microsoft set off on a Windows Vista coach tour that featured comfy leather recliners, wireless internet, Xbox 360s and free copies of Windows Vista.

The Get On the Bus Tour is back home and they are taking the 10-city road tour to the East Coast toward New Orleans and Tech-Ed 2010. Register for a tour stop near you, where we’ll dive deep into both Windows 7 and Office 2010, and present specific learning paths for the latest Microsoft Certifications.

Registration for the get on the bus tour will begin on Monday and the bus will stop at the following locations:

• Atlanta
• Charlotte
• Montreal
• Boston
• New York
• Philadelphia
• Washington DC
• Richmond
• Raleigh

The old Microsoft Vista tour bus

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