I have used several CMS’s over the years, from my time at Cisco with their internally developed system, and again starting in 2009 or so when I started working with WordPress and later Joomla! They are wonderful tools, but they do have some drawbacks. First the positives. Someone who is technically minded can setup a WordPress site, add a custom template, and have a pretty decent site in an...
A while back, while we were on a trip, my wife dropped her 13″ MacBook pro. It was not the first time she dropped it, but it was enough to kill it. (it was a short distance on to a carpeted floor in the hotel). She got home and I did some diagnosis. The hard drive wasn’t recognized. I used all my tools, and assumed that it was just a bad HD, and that we could replace it easily enough...
A while back I commented on the disappointment I experienced with my Bose QuietComfort 2’s broke (plastic fatigue) and the AWESOME support that got me a new set of better headphones for << 1/2 price. I work in a cubicle farm. My cube is about 10′ from my boss, who is also in a cube, and I am up against an engineer’s cube who like to hum. Fortunately the Bose headphones are...
I have seen lots of friends and respected news sources bashing Microsoft today with the announcement that the CEO, Steve Ballmer, will be retiring in the next 12 months. First and foremost: I am not a microsoft fanatic. I am a Mac user, and am far more productive on the Apple platform, so take this with a grain of salt. Many of the messages I have seen are lamenting that Ballmer should have...
On our trip last week, my wife (again) dropped her laptop. After that, it stopped working. Oops. First thoughts were that it was a failed hard drive. All my utilities failed to find it. So I replaced it with a known good drive. It had a clean install of OS X Lion on it, and was pretty lightly used before I replaced it. I know it was good. The system wouldn’t boot. So I thought maybe that...
I got an email in my inbox today that seemed to imply that I ‘missed’ a big announcement last week. Well, I certainly didn’t remember any big announcement, but if I had I probably would have ignored it. This startup has called themselves “Alpha Software”. Really? ‘Alpha’? Now I love playing with new and edgy things on my ‘puter, and have installed...
You know you are an old time computer geek when you notice special numbers. 2^8 is something we geeks all know, it is the number of different bytes there are. 2^8 is 256, and the maximum value of a single byte of computer memory is 255. 2^10 is 1024. I am guessing that most kids today see that number and scratch their head wondering why the old fogeys didn’t just call 1000 bytes a kilobyte...
I am back in the south bay for my high school reunion, and I visited two places that I have always loved. The good: Guitar Showcase Way back when I first started playing guitar, I was introduced to the legendary Guitar Showcase in Campbell. It is an iconic music store, and naturally has a wide selection of guitars (as well as other instruments). They have greatly expanded the store, and added a...
I have long been a religious user of ad blocking software. Since the first plugin for Firefox back in the day, and now I use adblock across the board (chrome, firefox, and safari). I particularly hate ads on sites that I pay for (NY Times, I am looking at you), or where my information is the principal value to the company behind that site (Google and Facebook fall into this category). But...
Last week, I had to get my laptop re-imaged. I had fouled up either my hive, or the install of Windows, so it had become incredibly unstable. Probably my fault. (ok, almost certainly my fault). It has taken a week to get back to functional. All the key software is installed. The settings are back to where I like them (for power options etc), and I got all the essential drivers sorted (you really...