My feelings about recent infographics…

Monday, March 22nd, 2010

Happy New Year

Sunday, January 3rd, 2010

Happy New Year from my family to yours.

How to win a fight on the internet

Friday, December 11th, 2009

I don’t recommend arguing on the internet, however if you do feed the trolls and end up getting into an heated argument I have the solution for you.

Send them here.

They will be so absorbed by the pure awesomeness of this page, they will have no choice but to smile, accept their defeat and walk away.

–

Seriously though, I saw this page about 4 or 5 years ago on a URL called e-thug.net (intentionally not linked, because the site is no longer up). The page cracked me up and I loved the irony of the URL and it was used for the above purpose: to end an argument (or sometimes as a similar link prank as rick-rolling).

Anyway, earlier today someone’s ringtone reminded me of that song and to my chagrin the site was no longer live. So I spent 10 minutes and went to the wayback machine, did a little digging, found the page, tweaked it to work on my site and voila, it’s resurrected. I hope you enjoy.

P.S. - If you are the real “Thomas” and want me to take this down, by all means contact me and I’ll be happy to remove it.

Lessons From a Failed Hard Drive and Failed Genius

Wednesday, November 11th, 2009

So last week I had an unexpected problem with my MacBook Pro when it just stopped working… Uh oh:

I guessed based on what was going on that it was a problem with the hard drive and decided to schedule an appointment with the “Geniuses” at the Apple Store [Mistake 1].

I was running late due to an accident on the highway, so I politely called to say I’d be a few minutes late [Mistake 2], the nice woman I talked to said:

No problem, I booked you a backup appointment in case you can’t get here on time.

So I showed up about 5 or 10 minutes late for my appointment and I wasn’t listed as still having an appointment at that time, but instead for 2 or 3 hours later. I explained the situation and the “concierge” said they could still get me in at my original appointment time because the woman with an appointment before me wasn’t finished yet… Nor did her appointment finish for a while. So I sat there waiting patiently… fast forward a 1/2 hour and the “Genius” tells me that since I missed my appointment he would try to fit me in between his next appointment… Which of course, is wrong, because he was running 30 or 40 minutes late for my appointment. I explain the situation, he looks at my Mac and says:

I think it’s the hard drive

Umm, really, Genius, me too. Got anything to help confirm that suspicion?

Well I could try a boot DVD or drive?

That would be great since I’m here and all, and by this point I’ve been here about an hour. For the next hour or two he tries this to no avail, asks me if I brought the original Leopard install disk with me [mistake 3] and of course, I didn’t. He explains he can’t confirm it’s the hard drive without taking out the hard drive (?) and if I want the repair it’ll cost upwards of $300, at which point I said I’d be happy to do it myself.  My only real reason for bringing it in was to confirm it wasn’t a logic board or something worse, nevertheless, I left went to Best Buy and bought a new hard drive (after googling it myself since the Best Buy staff had no clue what size hard drive fits in a MacBook Pro).

I followed these great instructions on iFix for replacing my hard drive, and in the process fixed my loose bluetooth antenna and put it all back together.  

So I take the laptop to the office, install that boot DVD the goofball from the Apple Store told me about and tried to restore from my Time Machine backup that I had from about an hour before my Mac crashed, waited three and a half hours and… nothing.

Why? Well since I’m running Snow Leopard, I can’t restore from a Leopard install disk. Thanks again guy at Apple Store.

So after another 3 hours of booting from Snow Leopard install DVD, success, MacBook Pro is working, good as new (faster / bigger hard drive, better Wireless antenna).

What did I learn in this process? Well a few things:

• The Apple Store does not really employ geniuses
• It’s not that hard to fix items on a Mac yourself (if you are a techie)
• Time Machine alone makes a Mac worth the cost (my Vista laptop’s backup process – ugly and horribly slow)
• I’m still a Mac and now I’m faster.

Linksys Firmware Upgrade Fail

Thursday, May 28th, 2009

So in the midst of upgrading our router’s firmware I got this nice popup window:

Fail

Pandora – Weird Ad

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009

I love pandora.com, which I’ve mentioned in previous posts, but today their advertising which I’ve given them kudos on before had a weird blip – I was listening to the Pixies – Wave of Mutilation and suddenly saw an add for Tennessee with what must be country musicians (didn’t recognize any of them).

Weird, ad. I wonder if I got it because I have a station named Country?

Also, earlier I had weird thing were it played a song called “Battle of New Orleans” by Johnny Horton that clearly didn’t belong in the station. It was really out of place and was followed by a U2 song and after I accidentally closed my browser, the song shown in the pic above.

Ghosts in the machine at Pandora today?

A Dance off in baseball??

Tuesday, May 26th, 2009

Yes, I can’t believe it either. I guess there is only so much to do during a 5 hour rain delay.

Hat tip to Derrick Goold’s birdland blog (and his informative 10 @ 10).

Do you block or support IE6?

Saturday, May 16th, 2009

With the recent launch of Internet Explorer 8 and recent campaigns to block IE6, kill IE6 and end IE6 (this one is even by a .Net magazine), and pleas by countless bloggers (like this one here by me) have people finally relented and either installed a new browser or started supporting IE7 in their corporate environment?

Well…there was 1.6% drop of market share in April 2009 from 17.0% to 15.4%, but unfortunately 15.4% of users is still a significant percentage (see all stats here).

So this begs the question. Web developers – are you helping bring about the demise of IE6? Are you allowed to at your business / corporate environment?  My answer is yes and no. I don’t support it here, I use the pop-up, and I don’t support it on our spoken whirred blog. But I do degrade using hacks for IE6 on Spoke’s main site.  Love to hear your comments about this as well.

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