You might recall my bitching a few weeks ago about my work laptop. I foolishly dropped it and it landed on my iphone charger and broke the screen. That was in May. Mid August they figured pout what I needed to do to order a new panel to replace the broken one. The local, on site tech got the panel, but then the backlight didn’t work, so he called the HP support team in. Oh boy, what a fun...
Sigh. This is getting tiresome. I have not had such issues with computer crashes since I first went to Windows Vista in 2007. I come in this morning and pop my computer on the docking station. It was sleeping happily, then I pressed the power button to “wake it up”. I get the familiar password screen, then BAM – blue screen. Fuck. Wait for it to finish the memory dump. Hmmm...
A little over a year ago, we moved from our “edge of civilization” house in Tucson to Chandler, a much more standard suburban setting. For the most part it has been a pretty good experience. But there has been a soft underbelly. We live next door to a house with a just graduated high school baseball player (presumably he is playing ball in college as well) who seems to love having...
My main domain, tralfaz.org was a compromise. When I first registered it in 1999, the tralfaz.com domain wasn’t available, so I grabbed the .org variant. I have often kept an eye on the .com domain to see if it expires, but the scummy domain squatter hasn’t budged. I wouldn’t have minded, but over the last 14 years, the owner has done nothing with that domain. It has moved...
The joy that is Windows. Every so often you need to blow it all away and start from scratch. Today was that day. Outlook had been a piece of garbage for quite some time. Lots of bandaids, duct tape and baling wire was keeping me up and running. But today it finally gave up the ghost. So, back up all my files, and off to IT to reimage, and get me back to a stable state. Alas, a lot of software...
In general, I love living here in Chandler. Great neighborhood, great neighbors, lots of quality restaurants, and good shopping. But there is one bad thing. We have biting ants. Not the usual fire ants that you can see and avoid. These little black ants that swarm up your legs and sting like crazy. We had a nest in our yard, fortunately the pest control people eradicated it post haste last year...
Ah, the children are back in school this morning. Apart from the fact that it is only July 22nd, and that is a sucky/short summer vacation for the kidlets, it also means chaos on the drive in. School buses are learning their new routes (they practiced last week, but it always seems like it has kinks when there are actual pickups). Kids are doing lots of dumb things getting to and waiting for the...
Two days ago, I gave you props for being smart about the “Reply All” function in Gmail. Today, you wiped out that karma credit you earned with your new changes to gmail. I have long been a happy, satisfied customer of gmail. Hell, I purchase a small business account for my main domain, because your service is pretty kick ass. I have been on gmail since it was invitation only back in...
Thinking back to 2007, and the launch of the original iPhone, I remember the outcry over the fact that the iPhone didn’t render Adobe Flash content. Lots of predictions of doom and gloom for the device (although no cellphones at the time really supported it). As a Mac person, I have long loathed Flash. The implementation on the Mac was buggy and a huge resource hog. I would have to run a...
Microsoft, Apple, Thunderbird (indeed, all MUA’s): It is time to remove the “reply all” option. I know that there are valid use cases for it, but alas, the general population has failed to grasp the implications of this seemingly innocuous button on their email. Yes, there are times that people really really do want to spam their colleagues like it was a listserv, but this is an...