It's been twelve days since my shoulder surgery so I thought I'd post a summary of what I've been up to.
In the first 24 hours there was an issue that cropped up at work. The problem was caused by an update to some software released by another group in …
My first programming language was some variant of BASIC on a VTech Precomputer 2000. Then one day I discovered that a copy of QBasic was included with DOS and began using it to program. I wrote software to add and subtract arbitrarily long strings of integers (I don't think I …
I've been considering asking my company to drop my work cell phone plan and pay for my personal cell phone plan. Some people might cringe to be more accessible to their company but work already calls my personal phone all the time. Therefore, the biggest concern I have about doing …
I am absolutely lost on this computer of mine.
When my old PC finally died and I built my new one, I tried several different Linux distributions and was dissatisfied with each for some reason or another. I ended up defaulting to Ubuntu because it had the fewest hardware problems …
Work has been very demanding throughout the month of September. The sheer number of hours I worked, especially for the final week, is staggering. On Monday, for instance, I worked from 9:30am to 5:00am the next day (19.5 hours). I continued working 16 hour days throughout the …
At the end of June I experienced a catastrophic hard drive failure: I turned on my computer and heard a metallic ping, followed by the gut-wrenching grinding noise of something dragged across the spinning platters. I turned the computer off immediately, but when I booted it back up a few …
Yesterday while driving home just before midnight I passed by a woman who was walking along the side of the highway. I saw that she wasn't carrying anything that would warrant walking (such as a gas can or a bag of groceries) so I circled back around, stopped, and asked …
My software never forgets what I tell it. I've accumulated over a dozen dozen passwords, door codes, and PINs over the years, but while I don't use most of those 150-some services these days they're still clogging my password manager. My address book has hundreds of entries spanning almost a …
Recently I received an e-reader as gift, and I've been trying to decide what to read on it. Then I remembered I already own several books that I haven't read. Ooh, and then I can get rid of the physical copies and cut down on space! As a show of …
A number of my friends have their birthdays clustered at the beginning of February, and when the first birthday hit I fired off a quick message. However, my friend never responded, and as I pondered his silence it suddenly occurred to me: how old am I? I honestly couldn't remember …
I've accumulated quite a backlog of things I'm wanting to fix. I've got an LCD monitor that probably has a bad capacitor, an LCD projector to diagnose (it looked like a bad capacitor when I opened it, but I couldn't get into it enough at the time to confirm that …
After spending some time researching what I needed and where I could buy things from, I settled on a replacement iPod screen and a classy electronics toolkit from iFixit. They emailed a few hours later to let me know that the products had been shipped, and two days later everything …
While one of my brothers was in town he gave me a fourth generation iPod with a severely cracked screen. He found it while going through some old stuff of his but couldn't remember where he got it from. After plugging it in and discovering that it could charge, I …
I've become more and more dissatisfied with my job at the Health Service, for three immediate reasons: ideological differences, political pressure, and future career options. I'm concerned about my future.
My attempts to turn a Greasemonkey script into a full-fledged Firefox extension have proven difficult.
I've been enjoying contributing what little I can to the software projects I use.