… otherwise I have to go un-install Windows Defender on 400 machines when the beta version expired on December 31st and the application fails very ungracefully.
Next time Microsoft releases beta software for public testing, it would be nice if it would gracefully let you know when it expires and maybe even give an option to install the latest and greatest. The whole “Application failed to initialize…” evil error message on January 1st doesn’t make my job as an IT Desktop Support guy very fun when it happens to 400 clients at once. I stand by my previous hatred for Microsoft on this one.
January 7th, 2007 in
Tech |
4 Comments
Okay. Seriously. What is the pronunciation rule here? “Boot” rhymes with “Loot” and “Soot” rhymes with “Foot”. So is there some rule that says that double vowels that follow certain consonants get pronounced different than others? Or is this just completely random? Please explain.
January 1st, 2007 in
Language |
5 Comments
Well, Christmas is over. I, for one, had a good Christmas. I spent Christmas Eve Day at my Mom’s house, mostly baking in the kitchen, eating, and consuming Christmasy drinks, such as Glühwein, Winter Ales, and of course Absinth. We had a good time, with barbequed steaks for lunch, and Fondue for dinner. We exchanged presents in the evening and all was jolly. Christmas morning I got up and went home to recover from the family for a while before I went over to Karen’s family’s house for Christmas Day Dinner. I also had a wonderful time there with excellent food and losing three games of the 1981 edition of Trivial Pursuit in a row. After dinner we drove around town to look at the different Christmas light displays. All in all a very successful weekend. I even got that KitchenAid knife set I’ve been wanting. Now I can cut things in style!
It’s back to the mines for a few days of work while looking forward to New Year’s. I hope you all had a merry Christmas and were able to spend it with loved ones as I did.
Well, the Friday before Christmas is a day that gives all Classified Staff at the university off, leaving only Faculty and Students. Most Students are gone because it is right in the middle of Winter break, and most Faculty are gone for the same reason. This leaves me as the sole tech support worker in my office on Friday afternoon, while all my Classified Staff co-workers have the day off, and my Faculty manager has gone home already, and my student co-worker is home sick. I’m sitting here waiting for someone to break something so I can fix it. Ironically, since my customers live by the same rules as we do, they are all off today as well…
Luckily I discovered DOSBox for Linux. I am now going through memory lane and playing all my old favorite “Abandonware” DOS games from the days of the old 386. I discovered that my all time favorite, “Tony and Friends in Kellogg’s Land” is still floating around the internet and still just as fun as ever. Who would have thought that with all of Windows’ backwards-compatibility and whatnot, I actually finally got this game to work using a DOS emulator under Linux? Good luck trying to get it to run properly under Windows XP.
Well I’m off to do some more DOSing and waiting for phone calls that will never come!
December 22nd, 2006 in
Academia,
Tech |
4 Comments
As I stated before, I am pretty lazy about adding pictures to my blog posts. Partially due to my lack of a camera and partially due to me being too lazy to actually add a picture…
But I recently installed some cool picture management software on my webspace, so I started putting up some photo albums of miscellaneous pictures that I have. Check it out here.
December 14th, 2006 in
Tech |
No Comments
There is a specific chain of events, which happened to me recently, that couldn’t have been more unfortunate. I was the owner of one of those Samsung smartphones that was running Windows Mobile 2003. The phone was pretty cool, but it had its share of bugs. I could live with most of them, but overall the thing was great as a PDA and terrible as a phone. At best I could get a day out of the battery if I didn’t make any phone calls or use the Wi-Fi or anything like that. This made it a very expensive tool to see what time it was. On top of that, it wasn’t really intuitive to use the phone function. It just seemed like the phone part and the PDA part didn’t really know each other existed. Well I got used to it anyway and just carried around a huge bulky phone that I ended hating after several months. So I went down to the store and found a pretty good deal on one of those new Motorola KRZR phones. This ended up being worse than the Samsung, since all the neat features of the phone had been disabled by my service carrier, and the remaining ones were extremely broken beyond any kind of usability. Failing to find any kind of decent software hack to get the back to its original Motorola functionality, I decided to return the phone to the retailer before my trial period expired. The retailer was happy to exchange the phone for a similarly priced way more functional LG enV. However, they didn’t have a way to copy my contacts from the KRZR to the LG. Not a problem, since all my contacts were still backed up on that stupid Samsung running Windows. Somehow, in the time it took for me to return the KRZR, leave the store with my new LG, and get home to the Samsung (which was working fine before I left that day), the Samsung completely crashed all by itself and did a handy little factory reset on itself, completely annihilating all my personal data including 8 years worth of collected phone numbers!!!
This is strange, since that phone never gave me any trouble like that in the 8 months that I had it. It’s almost like it knew that as soon as I actually really needed it to not destroy my data it did everything in its power to anger me. There was nothing I could do. Now I have a nice new LG phone with the 7 phone numbers in it that I could remember off the top of my head. I am livid!
The only thing that makes me feel better about the situation, is that deep down I am telling myself that Microsoft uses their own software to run their entire network infrastructure, including their backups. That is punishment enough, if you ask me. I severely hope that they lose 8 years worth of code or something.
Well enough ranting for now. If you are reading this and wondering why I haven’t called you in a while, it is because I no longer have your number. Please send me an e-mail with it, so I can stay in touch.
I stumbled upon a quote the other day that I thought was very interesting:
“Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiß nichts von seiner eigenen.”
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
via Jacob Huber
November 28th, 2006 in
Language |
2 Comments
While down in Mountain View, CA this last weekend, I couldn’t help but notice the following group of signs:
Let me translate this: “You are not allowed to smoke. You are not allowed to ride your bike. You are not allowed to use your skateboard. And yes, we are indeed watching you right now!”
But that’s okay, because we live in a “Free Country”.
For lunch on Friday, I went down to the Mozilla Foundation. They were doing a presentation for some Stanford students and had a bunch of pizza. I got a tour of the office and met some of the people there. Everyone seemed really friendly and the work environment looks awesome. If I could program any more than a good old “Hello World”, I would definitely want to work there. I was so impressed with the company and their mission, that I decided to help out in a small way. You’ll notice I have a slick looking “Firefox 2″ button over on my sidebar now. If you’re not using Firefox now, I strongly recommend you give it a try!
November 12th, 2006 in
Tech,
Travel |
No Comments
Today, I am writing from the beautiful city of Mountain View, California, home of Google and Mozilla. I drove down last night to visit my very good Foreign American friend, Fred. It was a long trip, but totally worth it. Today will be spent catching up on things with Fred, whom I haven’t seen since September. Tonight will be spent catching up on some liquid bread. Tomorrow we’ll probably see if we can’t find something to do in San Francisco. Right now, while Fred is diligently coding away at work, I’m shamelessly raiding his kitchen and watching HBO on digital cable. It sure is great to get away for a while! 
