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Front Page News
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If you're already having the kind of day where you feel a bit dizzy, and you're walking through the parking lot at your place of employment after coming back from lunch, do not under any circumstances close your eyes for any reason . No, I didn't fall, but I should have....
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One of my friends on LiveJournal posted a meme. Now, I'm normally not the kind to participate in various memes, but I like this one: go here and pick out five random quotes that somehow resonate with you (keep going until you find the right five), then post them. Here are mine: If you want to catch something, running after it isn't always the best way. Lois McMaster Bujold , "Borders of Infinity", 1989 Avoid the crowd. Do your own thinking independently. Be the chess player, not the chess piece....
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Steph alerted me to the existence of a very cool product -- a dock for Macbook Pro laptops that stands them vertically. This has two advantages: saves desktop space and promotes better cooling. Macbook Pro machines are industrious heat generators and you have to be really careful about what kind of surface you leave them on. I've found that mine will shut down or have BSODs (when running Windows) if I have it flat on a plastic or formica surface; wood seems to be okay. The best bet, though, is to...
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Man. Just shoot me now, because not only am I about to blog about Miley Cyrus, I'm about to defend her. Yup, that's right. I, as a parent of a girl about to be a teenager, am willing to go on record and defend the already infamous photo shoot which has been characterized as the result of villainous Vanity Fair exploiting a minor to sell magazines. What in the world can I be thinking? Well, for starters, her parents and other advisors were on the set with her. There's another picture from the same...
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Stupid website, but it gives me a chance to taunt my co-worker Kevin. This morning I got a puzzled e-mail from him, asking me why this picture of me in Sydney from February (yes, that's Sydney, Australia; we were there for training for work) was the most-viewed picture in his online galleries (warning, probably not a worksafe gallery). I have no clue, but I think it's damned funny. Kevin's a hard-core picture nerd; he's got a wireless card for his digital cameras that will automatically use any nearby...
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On a break this afternoon with co-workers Jon, Kevin, and Ryan, the idea for a new reality show was born. I hate "reality" TV -- but I might watch this one. It all started with Jon suggesting that it would probably be very entertaining to follow Wesley Snipes around prison , as he'd be likely to be jumping over tables and kicking drug dealers in the face. ( "You're Wesley Snipes! What are you doing here?" "I killed vampires." "Cool!") Kevin chimed in with the idea of just putting cameras in and making...
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Email clients need to be more intelligent. For example, I can appreciate the Request Read Receipt feature that Outlook/Exchange and other email systems offer; it makes sense in a corporate environment, or when sending correspondence with business partners. However, all bets are off once you starting emailing the Internet in general. Why, oh why, do Outlook and Exchange continue to be so clueless about these wonderful things we call mailing lists ? It wouldn't be very hard at all for Outlook to notice...
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Dear iPod, Over the years that I've had you (as your second owner), we've had our rocky times. You've worked well with both my Windows and Mac workstations -- that's a plus. Your battery life is damn near useless (and I understand that's not really your fault), but with the appropriate adapter therapy we've been able to work around that. I hardly ever use you with headphones, but that iTrip is a righteous score that allows you to rock the car, the house, and any other FM radio within distance. True,...
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All Hell is breaking loose in the Seattle area today because it's snowing. Hello, people. We get a lot of rain here. This is the Pacific Northwest. There are real, honest-to-goodness volcanic mountains here (remember that lovely "view" thing you keep talking about to jack up your real estate?). Part of this means that during what is nominally known as "springtime" we get highly variable weather, including flurries of snow. This winter has been an unusually cold and wet winter, so the chances of us...
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This has not been one of the best weeks I've had. That's not to say it's been all fire and brimstone -- it hasn't been an Old Testament kind of week -- but the victories and good things have been few and far between. One of them happened last night; I passed a needed certification test on my first try. I just got word that my grandmother died. This is a call I've been expecting and would suck, except for the fact that she's been on the decline for a long time, including pretty severe memory loss....
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For the record, Aly & AJ's Potential Breakup Song is one hell of an earworm , but it sounds really good on my work desktop's speaker/subwoofer. I've got it cranked up loud before anyone else gets here. I have finally found out what is more annoying than getting your ass kicked online by a nine year-old kid -- getting your ass kicked by an eighteen year-old girl who keeps giggling over voice chat every time she gets a kill . I mean, damn, girl's got skills , but does she really have to be quite...
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Dear Big-Ass Bank, Many years ago, we switched our accounts to you from one of your competitors because they had crappy customer service and you did not. In fact, your customer service rocked our socks off. Sadly, it has become clear that you're more interested in trying to grab customers from other banks than you are in retaining your existing customers. In fact, you are consistently engaging in extremely short-sighted "cost-cutting" practices while other banks are rejecting those same practices...
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We found out today that Alaric has a second set of armpits. No, it's true. You and I would call them "elbow joints" but in Alaric's world, they're "second armpits." Bet you didn't know that ....
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E. Gary Gygax died yesterday at the age of 69. They say that anything you do more than once is tradition. I guess that mine is to offer the words written by Annie Lennox, Howard Shore and Fran Walsh, as sung by Annie Lennox, at the end of The Return of the King : Lay down your sweet and weary head Night is falling; you’ve come to journey's end Sleep now and dream of the ones who came before They are calling from across the distant shore Why do you weep? What are these tears upon your face? Soon you...
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WOrking on my latest book, Mastering System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 , was a long process. However, Monday I got to experience my favorite part of the writing process -- getting the box from the publisher with the author's copies. There's just something cool about seeing the final physical product; I don't think I'll get tired of that feeling after my 20th, 40th, or even 100th book. It's a good thing I have this memory to buoy my spirits; today has been a day jam-packed of small annoyances:...
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Recently, we decided to do something about a problem we've been noticing with our kids. While they're both avid readers, they both tend to re-read the same books -- tens of times serially if we'd let them. Alaric was not happy when we temporarily banned him from yet another end-to-end re-read of the Harry Potter series (by this point, he's easily read them three times more than I have), and for a week or so has been ignoring the assigned reading we gave him off of our bookshelves. He was probably...
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In November we took a family vacation. I don't know if we had ever taken a vacation where we went somewhere on an airplane that wasn't to visit family. We like visiting family but we also wanted our children to experience a vacation where we went somewhere on an airplane, did touristy things, and stayed in a hotel. We were gone for an entire week and we had a fantastic time! Devin only had to work a single day during the middle of the week to do presentations for the conference he was speaking at....
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Chilling at the conference. The lovely brownie-tart thingies they fed us today. My work blogs posts....
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The speaker just said, and I quote, "regular expressions, which are fairly straightforward." That's, um, well, interesting. And wrong....
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So, I'm in Sydney for a training conference that I'm talking about in my work blog if you're interested. There's a lot of interesting small differences that have more of a mental impact to me than the big ones: The exit signs inside buildings are green with white letters. I'm used to the opposite. Didn't find a single country radio station. Of course, this could be because the alarm clock/radio in my hotel room is cheap. Speaking of hotel rooms, holy crap are they small! I'm having flashbacks to...
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