I've been getting scam messages that purport to be from Delta informing me of a ticket purchase that I didn't make, with a nice attachment to open to print my ticket. Obviously I'm supposed to open the attachment, either to get the free ticket or to find out where to report that I didn't actually buy it. This is a well-known scam, apparently, and ( Read more... )

Dear young fan fiction author ( Read more... )

If you work in an IT department and need to warn people of a virus spread through email attachments, please, please, for the love of logic, do not put the information in an attachment! The first time it happened I spent over an hour verifying that 1) the sender really was who he said he was, 2) the virus mentioned in plain-text really existed, and ( Read more... )

My latest programming project is turning into something from Journalism 101. I'm working on code written by someone else, in a language I'm not 100% comfortable with, using technology I'm not 100% familiar with. My thought processes when looking at their code go something like this: "How do I do fix this? What is this even supposed to do? Why are ( Read more... )

Last weekend I got talking to a guy I met casually and asked him what he did for a living. Turns out he's in my field, more or less (I'm a software developer, he's a systems engineer), so we talked about that for a while and then about the Microsoft certification test I'd just taken and the one he was taking the following Friday (today, actually, ( Read more... )

I had to create a Google account for a work thing, my first ever Google account--I've never used GMail, Google+, or Google Docs. So I've just deleted my bookmark to Google and changed to another search engine and basically finished the process of divorcing myself from all Google products.

Anyone have a good alternative to Google Maps?

You're a restaurant. You have a beautiful website. Your website says the holiday gift certificates are now available. Could you PLEASE include a way to buy a gift certificate online? Just because the recipient has to visit your restaurant in person doesn't mean that the gift giver is local! (If you could include the average cost of a meal for ( Read more... )

Much has been said--quite eloquently and very true!--about Google+'s "real name" policy and why it's an incredibly bad idea for gays and lesbians, minorities, transgendered, liberals in conservative states, conservatives in liberal states, and anyone else with a potentially unpopular opinion. But can I also point out another post you don't want to ( Read more... )

You know, from a programming standpoint there is subtle difference between MustInherit and NotInheritable when defining a class. Like, you know, the subtle difference between Yes and No.

Computers. Nothing more annoying than a machine that does what you tell it to, rather than what you want it to.

I've been spending some time diagnosing a software bug in something I programmed. The thing is supposed to automagically perform an action when the user does something in the application, except that about a month ago it decided to stop doing it. For no explicable reason. Since then our tech support people have been doing a "Pay no attention to ( Read more... )