interrobang (‽)

As Training Lead, one of my responsibilities is to provide User Procedures for the system we’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 […]

Just before Christmas my eldest managed to frag the hard drive on his laptop.  I’m not sure how he managed it (probably deliberately, to get out of doing his homework), but when you tried booting it up you’d just get an “Operating System not found” message.  Freya has an identical laptop (to avoid sibling rivalry) so I swapped her drive into Finn’s laptop and confirmed that everything else was fine - just a blank hard drive. It could have been that he’d just deleted everything, but that’s pretty hard to do by accident, so I’m guessing he dropped the laptop and crashed […]

We’re pretty tight on security in this company.  Not quite Pentagon tight, but tight to the point where some buildings have X-ray machines and walk-thru metal detectors (although thankfully they don’t make you take your shoes off…).  Even so, every so often some bright spark in upper management decides to tighten things up a notch, seemingly just for their own perverse pleasure.  For quite some years now we have had electronic badge-access to most of our buildings (at least in the United States).  So now you can’t get into the car-park, let alone the actual building, without your badge.  Hell, […]

A couple of weeks ago, my PC died (again). This is a major catastrophe in our house, what with the kids and Webkins, and the wife and on-line shopping. In theory we can access the Internet via the PlayStation 3, but actually doing so is an exercise in exasperation - the browser window is either too big or too small (you can’t get it to simply re-scale for the TV size the way HTML should), and entering even the shortest URL via the controller is truly painful (and the PS3 refuses to recognize my (non-Sony) bluetooth keyboard). A life without […]

Unless you’ve just emerged from a coma (in which case you have probably have better things to do than read this ‘blog) you’ll no doubt be aware that Radiohead’s latest album In Rainbows was released last Wednesday (10th October 2007). 
In typically contrary style, Radiohead have eschewed the traditional release approach, and have made the new album available as a (effectively) free download.  This is not a new tactic - Dead Heart Bloom did the same thing with both of their first two albums.  What made Radiohead unique is that they left the price up to the individual purchaser - “It’s up […]

Well, that’s another near-death experience narrowly avoided.  Someone from PC Support just came round to my desk and started fiddling around the back of my PC.  I asked him what he was doing, and he pointed out that he had been ‘disabling’ the voltage selector on the back of the PC.  [For the uninitiated, most PCs these days have a voltage selector on the back that allows you to switch (with the aid of a starightened-out paperclip) between 110v (used in the U.S.) and 240v (used just about everywhere else in the World) - it means that the PC manufacturers […]