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
Category Archives: GeekStuff
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
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.
Pre-Compiling a Bad Thing?
And from the Oops department: I’ve gotten a couple emails that point to a couple of articles that say that NGEN and pre-compiling is not a good idea for everyone. It could run into problems with newer versions and other types of issues… of course none of this was mentioned on the original MSDN article that I got this from – I know, because I double checked it, to make sure that I didn’t run off without reading everything.
As usual, the typical “speed versus ease of use” trade-off has fucked up a wet dream – and now new versions of both SharpMT and SharpKeys have been released.
Continue reading Pre-Compiling a Bad Thing?
Microsoft… The Good Guys?
Had to share this as Microsoft rarely gets press as being the “good guys” of an industry – the fact that I agree with them doesn’t hurt any either. Read about it: RE: Microsoft is good, Nokia is evil – it is that simple
iPod, the Second Life
I’ve had gift cards collecting on my kitchen counter for the over a year now. I love the little buggers – hard plastic works out so much better than the old fashioned paper gift certificates (which are easily destroyed). I usually get a bunch of gift cards over the holiday season and I normally spend the first two months of a new year debating on what to buy. Last year I got too busy with work to think about it, which is why I had a surplus that included a mall-based card, a Filene’s card, and an AmEx-certificate. Today I went shopping for slippers.
Continue reading iPod, the Second Life
IE Scrolling Bug: Fixed!
That very, very annoying scrolling bug that was introduced with a IE Service Pack from November has finally been fixed with the “Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer 6 Service Pack 1 (KB832894)” that showed up on Windows Update today! [insert Snoopy-esque happy dance here]
Blog Change: New Category
Over 500 downloads in 24 hours? Yes, SharpKeys has been getting that much notice. Who knew? Anyway, seeing as it’s taken off as an “official” project, it now gets it’s own category: SharpKeys.
Continue reading Blog Change: New Category
Scoble on Dean and iPods
For the casual Blog reader, you might not have heard of Robert Scoble. Simply put he’s a very well known Blog writer in the tech community and he also happens to work for Microsoft. His Blog, however, has nothing to do with Microsoft – his opinions are his own and he’s not blindly “pro-Microsoft”. If anything, I probably have more blind faith in MS than he does. Having said that, he’s recently posted about how Howard Dean has screwed the respectability-pooch and his impressions of why people should avoid the iPod. Obviously this draws a comment from me.
Continue reading Scoble on Dean and iPods
Bad Geek Karma: Revisited
A while ago, I talked about something that I called Bad Geek Karma and mused as to whether or not it was a real thing. It is. I’ve spent the last five days living in it. And man does it suck.
Continue reading Bad Geek Karma: Revisited
Outing the Competition: BlogJet
I don’t believe in blood thirsty competition when it comes to free software. Don’t get me wrong: I put a lot of work into making software and I get an enormous amount of pride in watching my projects work, especially when they work well. And I do like to have rivalries with other projects, because that helps to drive new features. However, this does not mean that I will automatically hate applications that compete with mine and bash them relentlessly in the support of my own bits… especially when trying to gain market share of a money-less market.
Continue reading Outing the Competition: BlogJet
How To Know You’ve Played Too Much
How do you know you’ve played too much Halo? When you look at this picture (from BWG’s vaction to Guilin, China) and think, “Wait, did I just hear a banshee go by?” Makes me wonder if some of the Halo coders spent some time here when designing a level or two – quite a coincidence if they didn’t. Or it could just be too much Halo.
RSS Aggregator: In Use
I was talking to a guy at work the other day about how RSS Aggregators are a great idea, yet often suck. The clients aren’t the problem; the publishing is! Of the blogs on my Links page that do support RSS – and not all of them do – half of them only put the first 80 characters of their entry in the RSS document, as a synopsis. Hey blog authors? That sucks!
Continue reading RSS Aggregator: In Use
iTunes Plug-in
Since Outlook marked it as Spam, I almost missed this: it seems that Bill Zeller (of Zempt fame) has created an iTunes Plug-In that works like the “Now Playing” plug-ins that he’s made for WinAmp 2 and 3. Neat thing is that it is fully supported by SharpMT’s “Now Playing” tag.
We Hates Software
Incessant Ramblings has we hates software because inside everyone is a little software tester trying to get out.
Boy does this hit close to the heart these days… the XML makes me angry alone is reason alone to add a bookmark.