Hotmail Stinks (yes, I’m just getting around to this)

I’ve been dealing with Vista issues for the last 2 years of my life, but sometimes something happens that just astounds you. It’s not only that hotmail is incapable of knowing that my email address ends in “@hotmail.com” when I go to log in at www.hotmail.com, or that it seems incapable of preventing me from [...]

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Bicycle repair classes, swimming and more

I have been monumentally busy lately. Busy at work. I think I can truly express authentically what a piece of crap Vista is. For those people who just don’t like how everything is organized, you don’t know the half of it.
Inexplicably I can’t connect to Oracle databases in Access. The whole dang program shuts down. [...]

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Founder Visas

Here’s another interesting article on Slate talking about a proposal to create an immigration classification for entrepreneurs.
He wants the government to create a new immigration class for founders of new firms. Every year, Graham’s “Founder Visa” program would let in 10,000 immigrants who’ve shown a plan for starting a new company. These people would be [...]

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The Mad Men Finishing School

Here’s an interesting column about Mad Men where the writer talks about how she romanticizes the job of secretary in the 60’s after watching the show.
It’s twisted, but watching the heckled, thwarted women of Mad Men made me want to be a better assistant, and not (only) because I wanted to dress like them. I [...]

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Quote for the day

Amazon is being sued for deleting e-books from their customer’s Kindles when Amazon found out the e-books were pirated copies.
The lawsuit said Amazon never disclosed to customers that it “possessed the technological ability or right to remotely delete digital content purchased through the Kindle Store.”
No shit. I didn’t know that about the Kindle either. The [...]

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FALKIRK WHEEL Video by matthew – MySpace Video

more about "FALKIRK WHEEL Video by matthew – MySp…", posted with vodpod

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Living in a post-Facebook world ctd.

In my last post about Facebook I said that face-to-face human interaction was too precious to avoid using Facebook, but Marcella Proust wisely noted that she uses Facebook exactly because she doesn’t want to talk to people. She uses it to avoid people. Maybe I’m thinking about Facebook in the wrong way. No I haven’t [...]

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Living in a post-Facebook world

I asked a friend at work how her two-week vacation to the Midwest went. She smiled and said that I would know how it went if I was on Facebook.
And then she kindly told me how her vacation was.
After this story, I am even more determined never to be on Facebook. If you ever catch [...]

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“Screw that” cooking advice: the ceramic glass stove top

Why “screw that?” Because sometimes you read something so ridiculous in recipe that you have to curse.
We will be signing a lease on a new house that has a ceramic glass stove top. I have heard anecdotaly that you cannot cook using a cast iron pan on one of these stove tops. So of course [...]

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Where pilots sleep

I like reading the “Ask the Pilot” column on Salon. I think my fear of flying makes me completely fascinated by anything to do with a plane. Today’s column is about the problem of pilot sleep deprivation. While the picture below is not typical of all aircraft, that is the problem says the author, it [...]

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Glad I didn’t program that

As a computer programmer, I occasionally make mistakes that get noticed. Those mistakes are bad as opposed to the ones I figure out before anyone knows about it. I hate to be this guy at Amazon who caused a Twitter fiasco by un-rating all Amazon products that had gay/lesbian themes.
In the comments to my earlier [...]

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Of jobs, layoffs and H1B visas

Layoffs
This week several people were laid off at my work. I was spared. While I would like to think that it is because I am a good skilled worker and that my company would be unable to do without me, I know that that is not entirely true. There was to be certain an element [...]

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Time calls Slashdot overrated

I was interested to find Slashdot made Time’s list of the top 5 over-rated blogs:
Reading Slashdot these days is like visiting the IT guy at work. He’s infuriatingly smug and cares passionately about stuff you don’t care about, and views your lack of interest as further confirmation of his intellectual superiority. Enjoy.
Tell me about it. [...]

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Clone a passport in 20 minutes

Via Americablog.

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The next generation of voters

One of Norm Coleman’s (the loser of the Minnesota Senate Race) star witnesses in his lawsuit to unseat winner Al Franken explains just why his ballot was rejected.
DeMuth’s ballot was rejected because the signature on his application didn’t match the one on his ballot, and he said nobody ever called him to inform him of [...]

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I think I’ve got a name for him

Roomb Van Nistelrooy, anyone?

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Day one with the Roomba

We ended up purchasing a Roomba 410. This is an older model which was cheaper. The amazon reviews suggest that the latest models in the 500 series are problematic. As the 500 series were nearly double the price, we both thought the Roobma 410 was a good place to start. Many reviews on any Roomba [...]

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Please help me choose a roomba

I have Christmas money to spend and I’ve decided to use it to buy a roomba. Only a quick search on Amazon shows quite a variety. Any reader reviews of roombas? Can anyone recommend a consumer web site for reviews on roombas?

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NY Times article on the illegality of “cleaning” voter rolls

This is an incredibly disturbing article at a pivotal moment in our country’s history. I recommend reading it in full. The article describes how many states are nullifying voter registrations illegally.
States have been trying to follow the Help America Vote Act of 2002 and remove the names of voters who should no longer be listed; [...]

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Another gadget comparison

As with the trains, this is via DailyKos.

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Melamine baby plates

I was shopping for a baby shower gift when I saw these melamine baby plates. Melamine is the additive that has sickened and killed pets across the U.S. and now babies in China. The fact that the same product used in plates is found in baby formula and pet food says a lot about what [...]

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Beware Coreflood

I’ve largely been offline today due to complications arising from the Coreflood virus. For info on that nasty thing, click here. It’s not pretty.
The system infects PCs with a program known as Coreflood that records keystrokes and steals other information. The network of infected computers collected as much as 500 gigabytes of data in a [...]

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S.F. Network Admin Takes City Hostage

A friend of mine told me about this story of the San Francisco network administrator who took the city’s computer network ransom by refusing to give the administrator password it to his bosses. He was put in jail on $5 million dollars bail. Here we learn a little bit more about how this happened.
If Childs’ [...]

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Dual Monitors Are the New Flat Screen Monitor

The cool kids are not content anymore with the flat screen monitor as it has been usurped by the dual flat screen monitor. What’s next and how outrageous can it get?

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Brew Espresso in the Woods

This is why I have a coffee category.
If you prefer your coffee fresh-brewed when hiking, Spokane-based GSI offers a number of coffee solutions. If you want a steaming mug of Starbucks Yukon blend during your hike, toss your favorite lightweight stove into your pack, then add a GSI Lexan Javapress — a French-press style coffee [...]

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