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	<title>interrobang (!?)</title>
	<link>http://www.planetmanuel.com/dirk</link>
	<description>Random Bursts of Ambient Noise</description>
	<pubDate>Wed, 25 Aug 2010 09:29:59 +0000</pubDate>
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		<title>They should rename it the Hindrance-Desk</title>
		<link>http://www.planetmanuel.com/dirk/?p=157</link>
		<comments>http://www.planetmanuel.com/dirk/?p=157#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 24 Aug 2010 20:11:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Dirk</dc:creator>
		
	<category>Life</category>
	<category>Work</category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.planetmanuel.com/dirk/?p=157</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[As Training Lead, one of my responsibilities is to provide User Procedures for the system we&#8217;re implementing. Because users have a nasty habit of taking my official global User Procedures and changing them to match what they want to do, I publish them in Adobe PDF format. And because I generate all of the User Procedures out of OnDemand, I just get OnDemand to publish directly to PDF, which it will happily do if you have the full version of Adobe Suite installed.
In order to meet licensing requirements, here at my current client if you need a piece of software [...]]]></description>
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		<title>Extended Warranties: Putting the &#8216;con&#8217; in &#8216;consumer electronics&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.planetmanuel.com/dirk/?p=155</link>
		<comments>http://www.planetmanuel.com/dirk/?p=155#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 17 Jul 2010 16:33:39 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Dirk</dc:creator>
		
	<category>Life</category>
	<category>Family</category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.planetmanuel.com/dirk/?p=155</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[At the risk of sounding older than my tender 43 years: They don&#8217;t make &#8216;em like they used to. Consumer electronics, that is. Last month my TV finally packed up (and within a month of getting my surround-sound in place, FFS!). This is a Toshiba 50&#8243; plasma flat screen, which I bought for the not inconsiderable sum of $2,000 three years ago (actually as a 10-year anniversary present for the wife - ever the romantic, eh?). About a year ago one of the HDMI ports stopped working, which was irritating but not the end of the world (it has a [...]]]></description>
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		<title>Soul Training</title>
		<link>http://www.planetmanuel.com/dirk/?p=154</link>
		<comments>http://www.planetmanuel.com/dirk/?p=154#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 07 May 2010 20:38:55 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Dirk</dc:creator>
		
	<category>Life</category>
	<category>Work</category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.planetmanuel.com/dirk/?p=154</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I&#8217;m two weeks into an eight-week residency in &#8216;beautiful&#8217; Port Allen, Louisiana. For those not up to speed on their American cities and states, Port Allen is on the other side of the Mississippi from &#8216;beautiful&#8217; Baton Rouge (and about an hour up the coast from New Orleans - you&#8217;ve heard of that, right?). Both Baton Rouge and Port Allen pretty much exist only for the petroleum industry (hence my being here), and both sides of the river are chock full of refineries, tank farms, and barge moorings. Both cities tend to prepend &#8216;beautiful&#8217; to any mention of their names [...]]]></description>
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		<title>iTunes: What a crappy bit of software II - The SQL</title>
		<link>http://www.planetmanuel.com/dirk/?p=153</link>
		<comments>http://www.planetmanuel.com/dirk/?p=153#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 23 Apr 2010 04:53:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Dirk</dc:creator>
		
	<category>Music</category>
	<category>Life</category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.planetmanuel.com/dirk/?p=153</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[After three or four years of pretty much daily usage, I finally ran out of space on my first iPod. This was one of the old (but not oldest) 60gb models, and I&#8217;d already taken the precaution of not ripping all of my CDs to it - leaving off dozens of Zappa bootlegs, but recently I&#8217;d run out off space and had to start removing stuff I just don&#8217;t listen to that often, such as all of my Orb CDs, and my early Stone Roses B-sides. But then of course I&#8217;d get a real hankering to listen to something that [...]]]></description>
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		<title>Corporate America is taking the piss</title>
		<link>http://www.planetmanuel.com/dirk/?p=152</link>
		<comments>http://www.planetmanuel.com/dirk/?p=152#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 02 Apr 2010 03:02:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Dirk</dc:creator>
		
	<category>Life</category>
	<category>Work</category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.planetmanuel.com/dirk/?p=152</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[As a contractor, I&#8217;ve been fortunate to work for the same client for some 16 years. Admittedly this has actually been for six different legal entities, and via four different agencies / consulting companies, but always for the same corporation. During those years, I like to think that I&#8217;ve built up a good reputation as a solid, reliable worker. So I was somewhat miffed recently to find out that I was now - after 16 years - to be subject to a full background check and drug test.
It turns out that this is an annual check, and was brought in as part of [...]]]></description>
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