"Lawn-Baa"

We just work from home those days and stand on our front porches, then let the Amazon Ring do the videoconferencing for us.

Raid Is Not Backup

Are you speaking about a problem that still exists in Windows Update for Win7 beyond the fix available in https://support.microsoft.com/... that is not a mandatory update? I've recently had to install this one myself (manually) to fix a computer that became utterly unusable while Windows Update was scanning for available updates. Its memory management is a joke.

Last week I had a situation where my package was both at "my house" (according to FedEx, no signature required--left on doorstep), and "still in transit" (according to me, working from home and saw the truck pull up near my driveway, driver set a package on the dashboard then go into the back to fetch a 2nd package which he delivered to a neighbor, then drove off without actually delivering mine).

After a complaint call to FedEx about no packge, they promised to get back to me straight away. Never did, but my package did appear on Monday (mis-delivery was on a Friday) without any mention of it in the tracking log or a follow-up phone call.

So, I believe this is a case of Schrodinger's status, where it was both "delivered" and "in transit" at the same time for the entire weekend.

My family is visiting D.C. this summer, and in order to take a tour of a government facility (Capitol Hill, Congress, Dept. of Engraving, etc.) you need to apply through your congressional representative's office.

The "official and only" way to apply for a tour is to fill in and return, by email, unencrypted, a non-protected Excel spreadsheet with full names, SSNs, and other personally-identifiable information for your entire tour group (family) in one page of the spreadsheet.

Basically, if you want a tour, you must be willing first to roll over and put your goods out for anyone to sniff. No exceptions.

I was sick to my stomach over the idiocy of it all.

I had a friend who was bemoaning how his "crappy" AT&T DSL service would flake out every evening at about the same time, and he'd had techs out to replace his DSL modem twice, re-do the wiring to his house, everything! He asked me whether I was happy with TWC (I wasn't), because he was fed up and was going to switch.

We got talking in general. I asked him whether he'd also done any renovating around his house, no matter what type. He admitted that he'd recently replaced all of his exterior house lights with CFL equivalents, and I asked him whether any were on timers, sensors, etc. He admitted that there was an exterior flood light on a light sensor.

I asked him if that sensor turned on that lamp about the same time of day his DSL service flaked out. His expression dropped. He replaced that one light with an incandescent, and the problem went away.

Amara's Law: prov. The effect of a technology will be overestimated in the short run and underestimated in the long run.

What seems like just a fringe now, from far away, will soon be the whole surrey with the fringe on top when it gets closer.

I just got back from exploring Iceland, and was left wishing I had waaaaaay more time to spend there. The differences in a "young earth" geography are striking, and someplace cooler than my local climes is much appreciated in mid-Summer.

I have to hand it to this individual for definitely thinking outside-the-box and hooking up three types of systems using interfaces you'd not expect to be used in this manner, and coming up with something which is (at least in his case) useful.

This was very gratifying to watch.

My first impression was that I accidentally clicked through to news.yahoo.com, which I abhor.

I think you're missing the point of your legacy readership wanting information-dense content, with a minimalistic "user experience".

I know I'm late to the party, but the better way to write this is always to put the constant first:

if (1 == i) {

...so that if you forget to use '==' it will cause a syntax error.

Not a chemist, but I really appreciate this blog about chemicals that seem crazy-dangerous:

http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/things_i_wont_work_with/

The oldest hard drive I'm still actively using holds patches and sample data in a keyboard--a little 200MB SCSI drive. I think it may eventually outlive the keyboard itself. At one point in time, the keyboard itself also had the largest RAM of any computer I owned, at a whopping 64MB. When I was driving it back and forth from college, the keyboard was insured for more than the car it was in.

This comment reminded me of Derek Lowe's chemistry blog, Things I Won't Work With.

You'd need to be sufficiently stupid to want one of these, and almost recklessly negligent to sell them without vetting the customers thoroughly.