Somehow this became a full-fledged political hot button this election year, and I have to wonder what all the bullshit about it is. Personally, if you set all of the religious issues aside, and they should be set aside, since this is a government issue, this is a very simple thing to figure out.
Continue reading Amendment To Prevent Same Sex Marriages?
Monthly Archives: February 2004
Howard Stern Suspended?
[New York Times]: Clear Channel Communications, the biggest radio broadcaster in the nation, suspended the Howard Stern show from its stations yesterday after announcing a policy to prevent the broadcasting of indecent content.
I never thought I’d see this again in the headlines, not after he found a home at K-ROCK and put most of this kind of crap behind him… anyone know what he said?
Literary Quandary
Here it is, in a nutshell: I’m having trouble selecting a textbook for my class and I’m looking for some Geek-feedback. The class is an Introduction to C#, for graduate-level CS students. I’m using it as an “overview” of the language, an introduction to Windows Forms and the .NET Framework, and I plan to offer a glimpse of Web Services, Mobile Forms and version 2 of C#. The problem that I face is the fact that most books either focus on C# as a language and ignore Windows Forms or they gloss over C# and focus only on Windows Forms. I wanted to try to avoid using two books – to save students’ money – but I fear I have no choice.
Continue reading Literary Quandary
“I Don’t”
Saw this proposal on Good Day New York this morning, but a local-to-the-scene NBC affiliate was nice enough to put up a link so that we could share it on the ‘net. I would love to interview both of them to see if a) they had talked about it and the guy hoped that something public could temper her feelings or b) if she was caught completely by surprise and had no idea it was coming… either way, I pissed myself when I saw it; I’ve always wondered if all those proposals at Yankees games were accepted…
Big Steak Thursday
Familiar with Fat Tuesday and Ash Wednesday? If you are, you have to be familiar with Big Steak Thursday. It’s a cornerstone of the whole [secular] aspect of the Catholic church.
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The Apprentice: Season 2
There’s something sorta surreal about watching your own goatee bounce while you talk on your own TV, babbling through a video resume, while you dub a Mini-DV tape to a VHS tape because that’s what the interview process requires. Am I sending it in? Well, why not? If only because it’s tangible proof that I’ve been interviewing at companies while looking for a job. Besides, I haven’t been on TV for a couple of years now and I figure I’m due: I’d rather pick where or when I appear, rather than seeing myself flip off Martha Stewart on Court TV or something.
Continue reading The Apprentice: Season 2
Tuesday is Whitehead Day!
Fuckin’ OI. Have you been out driving on a weekday morning or afternoon lately? I run my errands now – as I have my days free still – and I find it to be far more hazardous that a weekend. I figured there would be fewer people on the road, what with the workforce being at work, but I didn’t realize that a whole gaggle of old people would be out the roads. I also didn’t know that Tuesday is Senior Citizen Discount day at every retail place in Derby (Connecticut) – anywhere that you try to get to will take you at least twice as long, due to the brigade of drivers that won’t go over 20mph. Do yourself a favor: stay at work on Tuesday unless you want to wade through a sea of white (and silver) heads at the local WalMart, IGA or Shop Rite.
Ghost 2003, a ThinkPad T41, and Me
IBM recently released a firmware upgrade for one of the hard drives that is used in their ThinkPad, this time out it’s for a 60GB drive that runs at 7200rpm. I have a similar drive – both are TravelStar drives, from Hitachi – and while mine is 60GB it runs at 5400rpm. Since I’ve had trouble with IBM’s Active Hard Drive Protection System (APS) – trouble as in I think it’s what has reliably, yet randomly, crashed my ThinkPad with blue screens of death – I’ve been eagerly awaiting a new firmware update… (the moral of the story is how neat Ghost 2003 is, but it takes a little while to get there)
Continue reading Ghost 2003, a ThinkPad T41, and Me
SharpMT 2.2 Official Release
This marks the official release of the 2.2 version of SharpMT. The feature list and download links follow…
Continue reading SharpMT 2.2 Official Release
I Hate That “Ewwy” Feeling
When someone asks me for an email address of someone that isn’t in my contacts list, I often rely on the “address popup” feature of Outlook to find an address for me. It’s nice enough to keep track of who I’m sending email to, so why not use it to lookup people you’ve recently email? Um, well, a good time not to use it is when someone emails you for the address of an employee of a company that you both used to work at, especially when that you’ve gone on to complain about annoying their inability to complete paperwork on time or to reply to email and phone calls in the body of the original email. Odds are you will do what I have done: accidentally CC the person you’re complaining, which is rather embarrassing even if you don’t work there anymore… and I don’t get embarrassed as a rule, but this is pretty fuckin’ close to it.
Now I just wonder how long it will take for that annoyingly ugly “ewwy” feeling in my stomach to go away, so I can eat lunch without massive agita.
SharpMT: New Icon for 2.2
Thanks to Jessica, SharpMT is getting a new icon! She posted four different options to choose from and I pass it on to you, in case you like one of these other ones better than the one I picked and want to replace the icon on your shortcuts. For me it was a hard decision to make between the four but I went ahead with one and you’ll see it in the final version later this week.
Smoking Ban Bad For Business (NOT)
So lately there’s been a bit of a hubbub about smoking in public places here in Connecticut and New York. I know NY has had different levels of non-smoking in restaurants both in and out of the City, but I think they are smoke free for all restaurants. Right now, CT has banned smoking in all restaurants; smoking in bars is allowed until April 1, 2004, when those too go smoke-free. Do I smoke? No. Do I care? You’d better believe it.
Continue reading Smoking Ban Bad For Business (NOT)
SharpKeys 1.1 – Beta 3
Couple of new features this time out, both of which are related to the list of keys that are available.
Download SharpKeys 1.1 Beta 3: Install | Zip
Continue reading SharpKeys 1.1 – Beta 3
IBM ThinkPad T40/T41: Annoying Beep Fix
This one came from one of the users on the ThinkPad Mailing List and it’s a very welcomed fix! There are a number of key combinations that cause a ThinkPad to beep at seemingly random times. For example, if you hold down W E and R there’s no beep, but if you hold down T Y and U the machine beeps at you (and really has no reason to).
The fix – thanks Deanna! – is simple. Go to Device Manager and “Show Hidden Devices”. Under “Non-Plug and Play Drivers” you’ll see an item named “Beep”. Disable that and the “random beep” disappears. Once done, of course, you can hide the hidden devices again.
Update: Windows 8 no long exposes the “Non-Plug and Play Drivers” as part of the Device Manager, but there is another way to disable the “Beep ” driver/service. In fact, this likely works in Windows 7, Vista, and XP, but I can only confirm it’s use in Windows 8:
To stop the Beep sound for one session, open Command Prompt as Administrator and type:
sc stop Beep
To disable the Beep sound across reboots, open Command Prompt as Administrator and type:
sc config Beep start=disabled
To re-enable the Beep sound across reboots, open Command Prompt as Administrator and type:
sc config Beep start=system
Progress. It’s not every day I get to add value to a 8 year old thread.
SharpMT 2.2 – Beta 6 (Release Candidate 3)
So much for freezing the feature list… made a change to how custom tags work (so you will lose the three that you currently have set – sorry!) and that brought about a change to the toolbar/menu bar that I’ve been using (a new version with lots of internal changes) so here’s a new version with some new stuff…
Download: SharpMT 2.2 Beta 6
Continue reading SharpMT 2.2 – Beta 6 (Release Candidate 3)