Ok, so, apparently in certain circles of defense parlance, you do not blow up people. Well, you do, but the correct euphemism is "soft targets" (as opposed to "hard targets", such as tanks, buildings, etc.). Referring to soft targets as people is rather frowned upon. I managed to inadvertently silence a getting-out-of-hand meeting yesterday as ( Read more... )

Today, I logged into LJ (that drug I joined because All my Friends were Doing It), and found out that ( Read more... )

1) Dude. Seriously. The display we'll be designing into our gadget won't be ready for 6 more months? You said it was ready a week ago, and that was two months ago. Our customer is crawling up my ass for the prototype we promised them in December. So you gave me this other one and said "prototype with this, it's exactly the same." After three days' ( Read more... )

I mean it, guys, want money from me in exchange for services I've agreed to? All you have to do is ask ( Read more... )

Today was one of those little icky days where, after the fun and mildly arty process of designing a set of boards, the next step was to spend all day in Excel sourcing parts and getting all their prices filled in (and ripping up parts of the design where the part had gone non-stock, etc.). As a fitting punctuation to this experience, I had a ( Read more... )

I just had my first taste of Windows Vista, uninstalling the mountains of craplets pre-installed on a co-worker's new HP laptop. Renaming a shortcut on the desktop required clicking "ok" to two authorization dialogs.

'Nuff said.
cexxy version

True story. The following overheard on my way into the Shaw's on Locust St., where a cop (or rent-a-cop, they all look alike) was hassling what I could only guess was a suspected shoplifter (or generally suspicious mixed-ethnicity youth, etc.): "You walk into the store, you walk out of the store, you don't buy anything... what is wrong with you?"
( Read more... )

This week was the week of dealing with billing-related BS - namely, clearing up why the city is still sending tax bills to GJM (in Texas), a discrepancy between the written and printed oil bills we got, and suspicious charges on my last mortgage statement. The first two were quickly and easily resolved. As for the last ( Read more... )

No, that's not a typo, and not (much) of an exaggeration*. For a limited time, you can read the full article here in IEEE Spectrum of all places (IEEE is the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). But basically, it exists to draw none-too-subtle comparisons between Iraqi insurgence and the Open Source movement, drawing heavily from ( Read more... )

In about 30 days, Verizon will begin selling your calling records to marketing companies, unless you call their opt-out number. (Yeah, this does sound like some kind of bad chain letter, except not.) This information (CPNI, or customer proprietary network information) includes the numbers you call, how long, how often, and how much it cost you ( Read more... )