Moving house is always fun. Particularly when getting hold of packing boxes. Moving companies charge for them if they're not going to be returned. There's a place advertising itself as the Box Shop which has "Boxes from $1!" all over its website, by which they mean "There's a beat-up box sitting out the front of the store exposed to the weather ( Read more... )

Nothing quite like using the Christmas break - the only time I have when I'm not going to be working 11- and 12-hour days - to try and contact a whole bunch of people who might be able to transition me to better opportunities ( Read more... )

Nothing quite like spending a screwdriver-wielding day up to my elbows in printer guts and diagnostics to give a sense of accomplishment. There's something wonderfully clarifying about being able to simply junk a whole pile of oversized IT hardware in order to help clear the decks, mentally, metaphorically, and literally ( Read more... )

Having spent most of today wrestling with an internet gateway box which suddenly decided it was not going to pass packets, and having trawled through the net only to run across multiple incompatible causes and solutions, I can say:

If your ifconfig -a output has a __tmpnnnnnnnnnn entry where there should be an ethN entry (eth0, eth1 etc), the ( Read more... )

Website designer has decided that as I'm not paying for broken goods, they're sending my account to collections. Good luck with that. I wonder if their collection agent knows that their own website (by the same designer) is also standards-incompliant ( Read more... )

First day of the new year and I'm going to get into a huge (and possibly legal) fight with my website designer over the definition of functionality in an email webform ( Read more... )

You know, I don't actually mind people taking the afternoon before Christmas off. I don't even mind entire offices taking the afternoon off ( Read more... )

Oddly enough, internet how-to sites don't really convey the realism of changing a car battery. For instance, they assume that you will not have to worry at multiple rust-encrusted bolts with a small spanner. They assume that should you have to unbolt anything, there will actually be room in the engine bay around the battery sufficient to operate ( Read more... )

When an invention assessment-and-marketing firm says that they deem perhaps one in eighty submitted inventions suitable for taking to market, one would assume that this is because they are very strict about whether an idea is (a) engineerable, (b) mass-manufacturable, and (c) marketable for a profit ( Read more... )

Look, programmer-person ( Read more... )