Category: Geekdom

Anybody Want A Google Voice Invite?

I already have a Google Voice account, but have an invite code for somebody else to use. Comment below by tonight at midnight Pacific Time if you’d like it. Make sure to fill out the e-mail field so I can contact you (your e-mail address won’t be published/shared). If the posted time (which uses my server’s time) doesn’t show before midnight, you won’t be eligible. If there are more than one of you that want it, I’ll put all the comment IDs for the eligible comments into a column in Excel, have it sort randomly, and then will use Random.org to pull the row number. I’ll probably do the drawing later this weekend.

One entry/comment per person/IP address. Some restrictions apply. Batteries not included.

August 27, 2009

Is The Website Down?

Or is it just me?

August 24, 2009

The Secret Tech Support Flowchart

Anybody who has had to do tech support for a family member, friend, or a co-worker will appreciate this handy flowchart.

August 24, 2009

Once You Reach Max Level…

…you stop leveling — like Sean Connery, who maxed out his stats 20 years ago, and still looks ready to kick your butt:

August 19, 2009

Geekdom Link Dump

Been saving these around for bookmarking reasons, just haven’t gotten around to posting them. Don’t have time to post all of them, but here are a few…

More tomorrow.

August 18, 2009

X Could Learn A Lot From Vista, Windows 7

If you don’t know what “X” is, read up here. Simply, X is basically the pile of code that provides a graphical user interface for many Linux and some BSD-based desktop systems. And this guy is absolutely right: The X Windows system could learn some stuff from the big, bad, empire. I’m not a hardcore Linux desktop guy (I use it for servers quite a bit), but my experience with it matches his quite well — it doesn’t take much to break it and bring your system down with it.

August 18, 2009

They Really Wanted The Text At Certain Size

While this page looks all fine and dandy in your browser, if you look the page’s source code, there are hundreds of <FONT style=”FONT-SIZE: 8pt”> tags, mostly wrapped around single lines of text. They really wanted that size of type.

Link via b3ta

August 16, 2009

How Much Does My Data Weigh?

Contrary to popular belief, your hard drive doesn’t get heavier when you fill it up.

August 13, 2009

Outsourced Tech Support People Are Idiots

A co-worker was having trouble with our Toshiba laptop. She was having trouble getting her laptop on her WiFi at home, after it had worked before. Since Qwest said it wasn’t their problem, she would need to call Toshiba. It was a bit over a year old, so technically out of warranty, but she figured she’d call Toshiba anyway. She went back and forth, trying a bunch of things, following his broken-english instructions, with Toshiba even suggesting a full restore on the system which would’ve killed all here data and programs.

She brought it in to me, and sure enough, I couldn’t connect to any WiFi networks, either. It wasn’t detecting any networks, so the thing was getting disabled or something. And sure enough, the tiny little WiFi power switch next to the USB ports on this particular laptop was turned to “Off.” Flip the switch to “On”, and look at that, it magically works.

Now I didn’t expect my co-worker to see that switch (it is quite small), nor to know what it does (she does now), but why on earth didn’t the Toshiba tech suggest to look at that switch?

August 10, 2009

The Web Tries To Kill MSIE6, But Some Of Us Are Stuck With It

There’s a pretty good movement about of people that want to kill Internet Explorer 6, which I have absolutely no problem with for the most part. My problem? I run an old Citrix Metaframe 1.8 client/server network running Windows 2000 (I inherited it, I didn’t design it). Some of the Web apps my company uses or potentially might use only work in MSIE (I’m looking at you Escapia and Navis). While I can install Firefox, it doesn’t work well on our under-powered twinky terminal clients. And Microsoft has no intention of releasing IE7 or higher for Windows 2000. So my co-workers are stuck with a crappy browser.

And in this economy, as much as I’d like to, we’re not going to be able to upgrade our clients into full blown useful desktops anytime soon. So while this campaign to kill IE6 is fine and all, it sucks for me as I get folks at work who keep asking me why they’re seeing this message. And I get to tell them that there’s nothing I can do about it.

(Granted, most of the site’s that are posting that IE6 No More code are sites that my co-workers shouldn’t be visiting during office hours, but that’s another problem for another time.)

August 9, 2009