A recent comment from me regarding the whole “Motrin Moms” ordeal. Snark FULLY intended..

It’s rather funny how things like this “Motrin moms” issue are viewed as some amazing show of power for social media when in fact it does little more than to show how a few herders can gather their flock, generate false rage, and create a “movement.”

The only thing to come out of this in my opinion is the fact that there are a lot of people out there so very willing to take something so clearly innocuous and blow completely out of proportion using such simple minded interpretations of what was actually said or meant by an ad.

So, when someone asks me, “what’s this social media thing anyway”, there is little to stop me from telling them that its a part of the internet where people who think they are a lot more important than they really are gather around faux celebrities who think they are even more important than the aforementioned group, waste obscene amounts of time and money, and in the end produce no real worthwhile results for society as a whole.

And as much as I enjoy tweeting, facebooking, and scrolling through endless blog entries and comments I’m sorry to say that it’s the damned truth and if “new media” doesn’t watch what they are doing they will quickly find them selves in the exact same position that “old media” is currently facing.

Now, excuse me while I go post this to my blog and tweet about it.

If you look at the comment section of this blog or any number of blogs on the internet you will notice an area that is available for a user image / icon / avatar. The empty space looks like this:

The little gray box with the white silloquette is where the Gravatar goes. What, you ask? [G]lobally [r]ecognized avatar or Gravatar. From Automattic:

A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an avatar image that follows you from weblog to weblog appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites. Avatars help identify your posts on web forums, so why not on weblogs?

Automattic is also behind the WordPress publishing platform. To sign up for a Gravatar you will need to go to http://en.gravatar.com/site/signup/ and enter your email address. Before you sign up find a nice photo of yourself because you will need it in order to set up your own Gravatar.

Gravatar works by recognizing your email address when you submit comments to blogs. When you set up your account you can register several email addresses. Once you have it all set up you will see comments like this:

Pretty slick, huh. Give it a shot @ http://en.gravatar.com/site/signup/

If you are using VMware Enterprise Converter to do Physical-to-Virtual (P2V) machine conversions you will probably run into this issue at some point. When you boot a recently converted machine and attempt to modify the TCP/IP settings on the new VMware NIC you may receive an error stating that there is an existing NIC with the same IP settings.

Basically this is the ghost of NIC’s past. You need to reveal the hidden NIC and remove it. While this is not absolutly required it is most certainly recommended. Here’s what you need to do:

Step 1: Open up a command prompt

Step 2: Type - “SET DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES=1″ and hit <Enter>

Step 3: Type - “START DEVMGMT.MSC” and hit <Enter>

Step 4: Once the Device Manger opens to the “View” menu and select “Show Hidden Devices”. Expand the Network Interface portion of the device tree and you should be able to remove the phantom NIC.

This should also give you a chance to remove any other non-existent hardware that is left over from the physical server.