Tag: technology
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They should rename it the Hindrance-Desk
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… Read more
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Extended Warranties: Putting the ‘con’ in ‘consumer electronics’
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… Read more
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Got them ol’ Blu Ray blues
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? That’s basically horror. (Although Shaun of the Dead, is a zombie movie, so also horror, and that didn’t exactly strike a romantic chord…). I’ve spent the past couple of years gradually ‘training’ the wife in the art of high definition. After much cajoling, she’ll… Read more
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Who’s gonna ‘drive your home?
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… Read more
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Technology: The Great Disabler
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,… Read more