The new laptop hath arrived. It has all sorts of weird Lenovo ware on it. So I created myself a restore disk, then clicked the Update Drivers thing, which promptly reflashed my BIOS. Then I ran Windows update and got 124 updates to download and installed. It just finished. Now I get to go through and set up all my power settings, etc. Not to ( Read more... )

Turns out I did break the mouse touchpad on the laptop. Also possibly screwed the heat sink back in a little too tight. Lost the 6,Y,H, and N keys when I put the keyboard cable on wrong. Tried to reseat it last night and then lost half the keyboard. Had to give the SO's screwdriver back to him, though, because he carries it around with him ( Read more... )

I've know for a while that my travel laptop is dying. A few years ago, I had a heat problem. The bottom of the laptop kept heating up to sorching temperatures for no reason I could discern. So I installed some software, including a CPU temp monitor, and found out that my CPU was heating up beyond safe temps. The solution was to re-goo the heatsink ( Read more... )

This is is why women can't have nice things. Apparently it is dirty pool to keep men out of the room when it comes time for women to form their own groups. According to attorney Al Rava, who claims to have filed 150 sex discrimination lawsuits against California businesses, women-only technology groups and networking events are inherently "anti- ( Read more... )

Last year, the SO and I started talking about a business convention in Las Vegas. The convention seemed relevant to my writing business, so we made plans, registered, etc. Then somewhere around January, we realized "Hey, we're going to Vegas. We should do that thing that everyone does in Vegas so our parents stop nagging." So we padded our schedule ( Read more... )

When I come into work, I double-check all my SQL databases and jobs, fix any failures, then catch up on emails and respond to my customers. After all this, I take a few minutes to catch up on my SQLServerCentral notifications and newsletters, and any other interesting professional newsletters I have coming to my inbox. I always learn something new ( Read more... )

So a woman I know, we'll call her Jane, works an IT job in an environment similar to mine. Her two coworkers are male and her boss is male. While the workplace has plenty of women in it, there are maybe three women who do actual technology work. And two weeks ago she put in her notice, to find a job elsewhere ( Read more... )

Well, here's an interesting piece of news from the tech world:

"The best city for women in tech, according to the research, is Washington, D.C. In the nation's capital, about 37 percent of tech jobs are filled by women-compared with a national average of about 25 percent-and women in tech, on average, earn 93.3 percent of what men do. Perhaps that ( Read more... )

Originally published at Ramblings from the Flip Side (Site under construction). You can comment here or there.

I haven’t posted a SQL Saturday post in a while because I’ve had a lot going on, not the least of which is working extra weekend hours. Also, Steve Jones over at SQLServerCentral.com wants me to write more articles for him, ( Read more... )

Originally published at Ramblings from the Flip Side (Site under construction). You can comment here or there.

After fellow writer (and my VP mentor) Steven Gould retweeted my “Why the SFWA Debate Matters to Women in Technology” post, a male twit (aka twitter user) responded with the tweet asking what he gets out of it.

There are two ( Read more... )