Married, actually. A girlfriend like that wouldn't last long.

> dropped the third one in the toilet trying to answer it when I was taking a piss

Because calling them back wasn't an option? I wish I got important phone calls like this...

My dog, somehow, knows when we've ordered pizza. My wife's a pizza nut, and between her and the two teenagers, we order pizza at least once a week. Somehow, our dog knows when pizza is on the way. She'll sit on the couch, staring at the driveway, and as soon as she sees the pizza guy coming down the street, she goes nuts. She'll ignore every other car that drives down the street. We don't order from the same place every time, ordering from whoever we have coupons for. I don't know if she can distinguish between a car with a sign on top vs. one without, or how she knows, but somehow she does. It's weird, but funny as hell to watch.

My TomTom will do this out-of-the-box, it's called "Find POI Along Route".

>> I want pounds and inches you insensitive clod!!!

I got yer pounds and inches right here...

I have the same basic hardware, quad-core, 4GB, fast video. I'm dual-booting between Vista and XP. The performance difference between the two is utterly amazing. Vista runs well, but XP is lightning fast on this box. Not advocating one over the other, but there IS a significant performance difference.

It's almost as hard as trying to prioritize enhancement requests that users submit for our internal applications...

My daughter doesn't use her phone to talk, with her it's texting. 23,000 text messages in one month. Luckily, our plan includes unlimited texting for all phones.

I *am* on the DNC... I'm using a broad definition of "telemarketer". I get calls from various charities seeking donations, "we'll be in your neighborhood tomorrow". I get scam calls telling me that my car warranty is about to expire, or trying to get me to subscribed to my local newspaper. There was the election spam during the month of October. The list goes on and on, but the bottom line is, I used to get a LOT of annoying, pointless phone calls - those all stopped thanks to GrandCentral.

I'll admit it - I still have a landline phone in my house. My satellite receivers require it, my DSL service requires the line, I feel better knowing it's there in case of an emergency, AND it keeps my teenagers from using up all of our shared cell minutes (the boy used 2700 minutes all by himself last month). In spite of these reasons, I was growing to hate that phone. We get maybe 2 legit calls on that phone a month, the rest are all telemarketers, a dozen a day sometimes, almost always between 6:00pm-9:00pm. It was driving me nuts.

Along comes GrandCentral. Now, my home number is call-forwarded to GrandCentral. From there, I've whitelisted the numbers that are allowed to call us. Some of those numbers ring my cell, some ring my wife's, some ring both. Everything else goes to voicemail or is blocked as spam. Blocked callers hear a "number not in service" message. Voicemails are sent to us as emails.

Very slick, VERY convenient, and it's removed a serious annoyance. Bliss...

This post made me laugh out loud. I've had this work-issued laptop for three years. The first 2-1/2 years, it was fast, speedy, no problems. Six months ago, corporate rolled out Symantec Endpoint Something-Or-Other, and ever since, the laptop has become extremely sluggish, bordering on unusable at times. The hard drive runs constantly, "rtvscan.exe" is always at the top of the task list, claiming 10-15% of the CPU. Hell, there are times that the machine can't keep up with my keystrokes, I'll type several characters, then watch them display, one by one. Norton/Symantec stuff is crap.

Well, that joke went over like a Lead Zeppelin...

I landed my current job (production support DBA) partly because two of the guys interviewing me knew I was active in some online SQL Server forums. Manage your online identity properly, and it can be a great tool. If you have idiot friends using MySpace/Facebook/Twitter/whatever, be very careful what you give them to work with, or find new friends.

You know that you can whitelist domains with OpenDNS, right? Or just not block the "webmail providers" category?

You could send a couple of them my way, for, ummm, safekeeping....