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 […]

At the risk of sounding older than my tender 43 years: They don’t make ‘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″ 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 […]

A couple of weeks ago, Twilight came out on video. Not that the I was eagerly awaiting its release or anything, but the wife was, which meant that I was facing a couple of hours watching a chick-flick if I expected to fulfil my ’conjugal rights’ later that night.  Still, I reasoned, it could be worse - it was a ‘vampire movie’, right?  (Although so was Shaun of the Dead, and that didn’t exactly strike a romantic chord…).
I’ve spent the past couple of years gradually ‘training’ Louise in the art of high definition.  After much cajoling, she’ll now watch the 1080 HD version of a channel, instead […]

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 while back, I decided I wanted to upgrade to a BlackBerry.  I prefer to communicate in writing rather than on the ‘phone, but find that I don’t communicate as much as I should because I can’t be arsed to get off the sofa and walk upstairs to my study and log on to my PC every time I need to fire off an e-mail.  I reasoned that if I could check/send emails from the comfort of my armchair there was more chance of me doing it. Plus, I now get proofreading work assignments via email and I like to […]

I’ve been avoiding the ’social networking’ sites for a while now (I’m not exactly a social person at the best of times…) but recently I’ve started to feel a bit left out, as everyone else I know seems to be joining in, and my paranoia had me thinking that maybe it’s all some great club and everyone but me is having a jolly old time of it all.  I don’t normally make a habit of bowing to peer pressure, but when Farhad told me I needed to sign up for Facebook I thought I may as well jump on the bandwagon.  I’m […]

Fans of Apple tend to be pretty, well, fanatical, hailing everything Apple Inc. do (at least with Steve Jobs at the helm) as the greatest thing since sliced white bread.  The Mac is better than the PC; the iPod is better than the Zune; apples are better than oranges; and so on, and so on, ad nauseam.  In some respects they’re right: certainly Apple’s designers have flair and their hardware products sure look good, but I’m not entirely convinced of their supremacy on the software side of things.  Specifically, iTunes (the software that ships with iPods) is just horrible.
I was […]

(Sorry, I can’t think of a witty title, because this just isn’t funny…)
About a month ago, a representative from AT&T called round offering me their Uverse service free on a couple of month’s trial.  This is a combined cable TV and internet service, and although I already used AT&T’s DSL service for my internet connection, I’d shied away from the cable TV service as a friend of ours round the corner had had bad experiences with AT&T.  The rep  told me that they had since upgraded their network to fibre-optic, and I’d have an optic cable running right into the […]

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again.  I’m a complete whore for technology.  I wouldn’t quite put myself in the nerd/geek camp (although some would) but I do love the good, practical use of technology.  And with the convergence of a couple of new-ish technologies, I’ve finally turned my home into something that could have featured on Tomorrow’s World - albeit back in the seventies.
It started with the recent purchase (as a 10th wedding anniversary present) of a new TV - a 50″ Plasma HD TV, which now hangs on the wall above the fireplace (where it doesn’t look as […]