So the thing with Skype destroying my connection was (maybe) not Skype's fault after all. Turned out using my wireless network *also* destroyed my wired router connection in the same way, so something was just wonky. After nothing else worked, blanking the router completely back to factory defaults fixed everything. Okay. Still makes no sense, ( Read more... )

Come in to work, log into my PC, take care of some quick things, checking my mail.. oh hey, spontaneous system reboot. Swell. And then it fails partway through booting. Well, I "fixed" this once before by just doing a round through safe mode, let's see if that works...
( sometimes I hate computers )

Separate entry for griping. I just downloaded and installed the latest version of Skype (which I've never used before) on my Mac. Long debugging story short, it completely annihilates my network connection every time it logs in. I have to reboot my router; can't even ping it until I do. Happens totally consistently. Google turned up nothing, ( Read more... )

For the most part I'm loving my new Mac Mini, but one thing about the transition didn't go so well - somehow, when moving over my external HD (which had always been a little flaky) to the new machine, it's file system got corrupted). OSX's built-in Disk Utility managed to repair the partition with my actual important backups, thankfully, but the ( Read more... )

Man, I haven't gotten around to writing here in ages. So, news ( Read more... )

(This whole post will be nonsensical to anyone who doesn't work with 3D computer graphics, sorry ( Read more... )

So after getting home a little before 1am this morning with an existing sleep deficit, I sauntered in to work late after stopping by my local bank branch to report my ATM card missing (which I discovered while out of town, hence apparently missing the 3-day deadline to recover ATM-eaten cards before they get shredded.... new card should be in the ( Read more... )

Man, plug-and-play is so great and saves everyone so much time. Except when it doesn't. Like when you spend a whole friggin' day trying to get a friggin' Canon digicam to talk to a friggin' Windows XP laptop and it friggin' refuses to even after re-installing everything multiple times and spending hours on the phone with actual competent tech- ( Read more... )

So I got to watch through a window while akiko was getting her Lasik done. It was pretty fascinating.
( first part cut for the eye-sqeamish )

Sometime last week, Neil Gaiman linked in his blog to this Cory Doctorow column, in which he both muses on and attempts to compile some statistics for the idea that giving away your product for free can in fact increase your revenues. Specifically, he's mostly concerned with giving away e-books as a way to increase sales of paper-and-ink books, ( Read more... )