If you’ve had your computer for a while, take a look at your mouse. Pay particular attention to the left mouse button – the one you’re used to clicking all the time. Is the plastic a little bit worn from where you’ve clicked it a few bajillion times? Maybe there’s a little bit of “finger-dirt buildup” lingering right around the sweet spot where you’re used to resting your finger. Now, look at your right mouse button. If you noticed much “wear and tear” on the left button, see how the right button compares. If it looks like you’ve never even clicked the poor neglected thing, this week’s article is for you.

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This week, a reader writes:

My grandson evidently connected his window messenger to my computer when he was here last time. How do I get him off? I’ve now signed up for Windows Messenger but his name kept coming up instead of mine. I had to “knock” him offline and sign in. Can I get him off for good?

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I’ve just been made aware of an annoying new trend that I thought my readers should be aware of. Was Santa good to you this Christmas? Perhaps he dropped a new Dell laptop or PC down your chimney this year in exchange for a few cookies and a glass of milk. Unfortunately, if he stopped by Wal-Mart on the way to your house to buy that shiny new computer, he might not have known that Dell will refuse to provide service to you if you need it (and if it was pre-loaded with Microsoft Vista, chances are good that you will) because, according to Dell, Wal-Mart still “owns” your PC, not you.

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[This is the last "Ask the Geek" for 2007, since the Stratford Star (the newspaper that publishes it) is going to sleep for the holidays. I thought it would be fitting to end the year with a technology-related holiday poem. I hope you enjoy it.]

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‘Tis the Season for your email inbox to overflow with spam! Ever since “Black Friday,” the day after Thanksgiving where many folks begin their holiday shopping frenzies, legitimate vendors and their illegitimate spammy counterparts have jockeyed for position among your regular serving of email solicitations. This happens every year around this time, but a recent article in Business Wire said that, “This year marks an all time high for spam, accounting for 10.8 trillion messages… [H]oliday spam has spiked, representing an initial 6 percent increase over pre-Thanksgiving levels – with more to come”

Yikes! With that in mind, I offer the following (abridged) tips from SPAMfighter, a leading spam filter developer in Europe:

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Let’s take a little time today to discuss wireless networking. If you don’t have it now, you might have it in a few weeks after you open packages from under the tree. Who knows, right? Wireless networking is not all that mysterious, really, but it’s commonly misunderstood. I’ll describe the most common components that a home-based wireless network will have, assuming the following scenario:

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I know that they’re not really related, but I opened my just-finished novel and “copied” the last two words into this post’s “Title” space so that you can at least share the joy of those two words with me – even though the ones you see are only the electronic cousins of the ones I typed earlier this evening.

Typing “The End” has never felt as sweet as when I completed the 52,455 words I wrote for my NaNoWriMo novel this year. It ended the first novel I’ve ever written, and the longest body of work I’ve ever tackled – easily longer than every story or poem I’ve written in my life combined, and then some.  The entire novel is 55,408 words after I integrated a short story I wrote a couple of years ago.  I even had time to edit it and make it fit appropriately.

I can call myself a novelist now, and I will be. I printed the final copy of the first draft of “The Secret to Escape” and fanned the pages, looking at all the words. It’s a great feeling. THANK YOU to everyone who wrote with encouragement. I hope to post a sample chapter or scene at some point in the future. For now, I’m going to back away from it slowly and try to ignore it while my wife reads it, then tackle it again for the rewrite sometime in December.

Just when I thought everything was rocking along and I was assured (from the book about NaNo and many testimonials) that Week 3 would be a mad rush of creative juice that I would be wise to utilize to up my word count, instead, I fell behind, caught up, then fell behind again. All has not been lost, however.

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Update, November 23, 2007: I have taken “The Delivery” offline for the second and final time. It has absolutely, irrevocably become intertwined with the novel I’m almost finished writing for NaNoWriMo this year, “The Secret to Escape.” Jack and Pete will never be the same. I couldn’t help but include them and their story (which dropped you right in the middle of their job and left you right after) in the new piece.* I may post excerpts from the story in the future, I’m really not sure. My hope is that one day you’ll read “The Delivery” again in it’s final form after pulling it off the shelf at your favorite bookstore. (And paying for it, of course. They don’t like it when you just wander off with the books.)

*Don’t worry, I’m not including any of the word count from “The Delivery” in my word count for NaNo, and it wasn’t my intention from the beginning to utilize it until I realized that it ran a perfect tangent with what I was writing, and I had always wanted to see it become something bigger.

By the time you read this article you may already be deep in the throes of holiday shopping. I hope I’m not too late. I hope you’ve not already run out and bought that new computer to put under the Christmas tree (whenever it gets hauled out of the attic or garage, that is), because there’s something we need to discuss.

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