Another day, another example of how people cannot handle grammar. One of my local newspapers managed to write an article about how the police now have the power to disperse people gathered in a local park. Except they used the word “disburse.” They have the power to disburse people. To disburse is to pay out funds. To disperse is to cause to separate and go in different directions. So there.
Do you have a crystal ball? Can you see the future? No? So why are you solving future problems now? Can’t we wait until we’re actually having the problem, and use our time to work on solving problems we’re actually having (in the present)? How do you know that your solution fixes the problem when we don’t know what the problem will look like? Yeah, that’s what I thought.
“I’d like to talk with you about the outage you scheduled for server X.” “Sure thing,” I reply. “What’s up?” “You scheduled it during our maintenance window.” “Yeah. I need to reboot the server to apply the latest patches, so there will be an outage.” “Maybe we could investigate another time to do this work.” “You don’t want me to do the work during your outage period?” I ask incredulously. Two months ago these guys were all about only changing things during scheduled outage times. Like, I’d die instantly if I even thought of making any changes to anything. Even adding a user was to be done in the maintenance window. “Well, that’s our maintenance window.” “Okay, well, I need …
Why can’t I save my project as a web page? “Microsoft Office Project 2007 does not support the ability to save a project file as a Web page. Instead, you can save a project as a more flexible XML file. This enables you to apply any style sheet to the XML file.” And by “more flexible” they mean “not useful to someone who just wants to share a project plan with colleagues on Macs and Linux boxes.” B as in B. S as in S. The reason I can’t save my Microsoft Project file as a web page is then there wouldn’t be a need for the Microsoft Project Server 2007! Frankly, I cannot think of a single reason they …
Admittedly I did wait until the last day (but I always do! Except last year when I had a big refund coming because of my house…), and it isn’t so bad because with a return coming it isn’t a penalty situation, but I expected more out of Turbotax. Their whole back end appears to be non-functional now. “Thanks for paying us but we can’t file your stuff. Sorry! Try again at 4 AM! Hope you don’t get totally screwed! BTW our EULA says we rule and you drool regardless of what happens!” And yes, I understand scaling issues, but I also understand planning. And I expected better planning. Lord knows at $20 to $100 per return they can afford it. …
I think that the quotes from Jeff Jarvis are the best part of the BBC article on the blogger code of conduct: “This effort misses the point of the internet, blogs, and even of civilized behavior. They treat the blogosphere as if it were a school library where someone… can maintain order and control. They treat it as a medium for media.” “It’s a place. And when I moved into the place that is my town, I didn’t put up a badge on my fence saying that I’d be a good neighbor.” He added: “I don’t need anyone lecturing me and telling me not to be disagreeable.” Amen. I like the First Amendment because it lets you see who the …
“Sometimes I wonder about the complexifying instinct,” says Brent Simmons over at inessential.com. Yeah, sometimes I wonder about that myself. Two of my coworkers just dreamt up this complex user management scheme, complete with scripts and whatnot. Things automatically add people to other things, another script removes people, and my prediction is that sometime down the road one of the scripts will go nuts and delete everybody. “What’s wrong with the current system?” I asked. “What current system? We don’t have one.” “Sure we do. We have a tool to run ad-hoc commands on all the boxes. When someone leaves you tell us and we do a userdel on that username. When someone new shows up you tell us and …
transparent: a : free from pretense or deceit : FRANK b : easily detected or seen through : OBVIOUS c : readily understood d : characterized by visibility or accessibility of information especially concerning business practices. Transparency does not mean that you can tell two different parties two different things. It is not telling your coworkers and/or staff one thing and your customers another. It is not telling one customer one thing and another customer a different thing. It might look like you are being transparent, you might call yourself transparent, but the right adjective is “manipulative.” manipulate: to change by artful or unfair means so as to serve one’s purpose. Unfair != free from pretense or deceit. Manipulation is …
I have a nasty habit of replying to the statement “I don’t want to tell you how to do your job” with: “Then don’t.” It catches people off guard. It’s fine if you don’t like something I’m doing or something I’ve built. Let’s talk about it, because I doubt I’m intentionally trying to annoy you. Introducing the topic as telling me how to do my job, though, is a hostile way to start a conversation. It guarantees that your message to me will be lost in me thinking about how much you suck, too. Is that what you wanted to happen? You wanted us to be adversaries instead of teammates? Moral of the story: learn how to tell someone about …
DNS is a hierarchy. As part of the hierarchy you can have subdomains. Like, a lot of them, to, like, help organize things and stuff. If your company produces movies you could have movies.company.com. Then craptastic.movies.company.com for your latest thriller, “Craptastic.” Or, maybe you could avoid DNS altogether and have: http://movies.company.com/craptastic. Or http://company.com/movies/craptastic. Like, ohmygod! Also, if you have company.com then the name companymail.company.com is redundant and idiotic. No, really. It is. A simple test is if I have to type the same string of characters twice in a domain name you’re doing something wrong. Okay, that’s out of my system. Thanks for listening.