I don't sign in to search (and started using DuckDuckGo a while ago), I run adblock and Ghostery. I remove google cookies all the time. What else should I be paranoid about?

They are being evil. Big time.

It was a few weeks ago, and the caller ID identified it as "Phone Scam". I googled the number and "Phone Scam", and it appeared to be just that. It was robocallers just trying to get credit card numbers from India or the Middle East.

IT is always portrayed in the media/culture/ads as somewhat of an outcast? Who amongst us remembers the rooster looking dude in the Ameritrade (I think that is what they were called) commercials to the "SWEET" idiot of the horrible CDW commercials. While many (if not most) of us were professional and CAN talk to an average user, we are portrayed as some weird punk-rock drummer.

This made us easy to demonize, and demote. We weren't 'leaders', professionals, or whatever.

Who came out on top on this trade? Or was is spread amongst many?

"So far, every study done on the ribbon shows it as being significantly more efficient (i.e. fewer clicks to perform task, more discoverable, etc.) than the toolbar/menu mess in Office 2003" [CITATION NEEDED]

You want me to use a stopwatch in my office, but then cite 'every study'? Cite one that wasn't produced by or paid for by Microsoft.

At my place of employment, I HAVE to use Win7, IE, MS Office, etc. I have no choice. I hated XP and made it work like 2000. When Vista came along I figured I'd best learn how to use it as it was. I loved the Quick Launch buttons (put my most used applications there) and especially the "Show Desktop" button (I have a bad habit of putting a lot of files on my desktop so I can find them quickly, then remove them when they are no longer useful.) Win7 removed the Quick Launch (found a hack to put it back) and the "Show Desktop" moved, unlabeled to the right bottom of the screen. Took a while to find that.

Then came Office with the ribbon. No way to put the menus back that I had been using since Windows 95. Ugh. I hid the ribbon so I could get screen real estate back when using Word/Excel/Visio/Outlook. It still takes a while to find the things that I don't know the keyboard shortcuts for. Real productivity waster. It's not the minute or two that I am not doing my work that bugs me, but the break of my chain of thought that is most annoying.

We just upgraded to Sharepoint 2010-- Now with the RIBBON! What a waste. They took a good tool and made it tedious. More clicking just to find anything. I will get used to it, but I want my old Sharepoint back.

With the Sharepoint upgrade the URL's for some things I follow changed. I have documents that others may change, and it would email me when someone did that. Outlook couldn't connect to Sharepoint with the old URL, so I thought I would just go in and change it. After about 10 minutes I just deleted the damned .ost as I could not find where in the ribbon I could change it. Frustration won out.

I've had non-IT folks I know ask me how to do things in Office/Sharepoint/etc with the ribbon. My stock response is "I have no idea."

Do I hate GUI's? Heck no. Full disclosure: I own Macs at home and love Snow Leopard. I'm not sold on Lion, but some things are easier. But the machine that I spend nearly 10 hours a day working with I still stumble around trying to figure out why the heck Microsoft hid whatever function I was trying to use.

That wants downtime and lost data in the EC2 cloud.

In the corporate world it is all about looking cool in the airport. Which means we have to support iPads.

This. This. This. A million times this.

Nothing is made to last. You won't need to buy another one if it is. I'm on my third microwave in the last 10 years. My mother still uses the first one she got in late 80's. Cheap and disposable is the way the world is, and I have stopped buy cheap products from so many companies that I am starting to lose options.

What they don't get is that I will spend more for quality. But most things that cost more now are no better than the cheaper products.

My first day working in IT I came across PC with Natas on it. Had to wipe that PC, and a few others in the office as well. Not fun.

Did United outsource their IT?

http://www.apple.com/library/test/success.html is the URL that I've sniffed iPhones going after.

Remember that the Pledge of Allegiance was written for the youth group of the "Christian Socialists" way back when. It wasn't always this way.

One of those times I wish I had mod points....

Which, where I work, everyone just goes around anyway. I've been working on a project for three weeks, and we are almost done. It got approved yesterday.