my neighbor's Christmas gift..

Well, my internet connection has been shut down recently. Seems like wep keys are being slowly but surely phased out.

On another note, I found out first hand what my neighbor got for Christmas: a new wireless router.. One with WPA+PSK authentication..

listening to music...

public object Crystal() {
return "pun";
}

what a nerdy way to start the day...
I hope not many people get this joke.

Out here in Scottsdale...

just a quote I heard – "…here in Scottsdale, our 90’s Mercedes are the equivalent of your Phoenix Hondas…"

– Very much verified

My two cents on Vista ...

I've been playing with Vista the past few weeks since it was released to manufacturers... There are a lot of quirky things to it.

What I found to be the funniest yet, has been the way Microsoft dealt with some of their new folder arrangements. User profiles are no longer stored under "C:\Documents and Settings\" now they are under "C:\users" - so in a desperate attempt to work with poorly written older applications Microsoft places a hidden shortcut named "C:\Documents and Settings" that basically points to "C:\users" ...

There are quite a few of these hidden shortcuts all over the place which basically tell me that for a while there will be this 'patchy' arrangement where holes are covered up with shortcuts to the new os defined paths... Hopefully what I said made sense...

Usually if a driver installs services (like my lexmark printer for example) you have a pretty small chance it will work on vista.. There are also annoying things like hardware incompatibility issues that still occasionally cause blue screens for that classic Microsoft moment...

I found it most frustrating that installing Visual Studio 2005 does not work very well. You have to go out of your way and apply a work-around to get the desired compatibility.. All the compatibility issues are understandable, but still pretty frustrating until new software is released with vista in mind..

There are a lot of features really that I found pretty cool to have built in, but at the end of the day - you're paying for a more reliable and secure operating system with a rich UI..

I hate to say mac did just that a few years ago.. Maybe I haven't compared it well enough yet - but overall thats what I got out of it so far. For windows people its a great improvement. But mac users kinda had this already...

I dont think my soup's ready yet..

Certification Passed

Yay I passed that cert upon retake... So now I'm an MCP! (such an important title to hold)

no no, not as in Membrane Cofactor Protein.. I mean Microsoft Certified Professional. haha... ha.. ok.

Office 2007 rant

As you can see, Office 2007 uses the finest quality text parsers.

This is just one of many screenshots that leave you wondering "huh?" - working with microsoft beta software can be quite charming...

you are not a winner

this is probably my favorite comic strip out there (src: get fuzzy)

Corporate Laptop..

I work off a laptop, Laptop #1. It was working great then suddenly, LCD burned out - no display just a white screen.. it was actually entertaining while it was going on (to see your screen slowly fade to white - kinda like it was passing out.. )

... So I send it to the corporate warranty & repair people ...

They take forever so I call and they tell me - "oh you didnt get it let me check -pause- theres been a mistake it should be there tomorrow!" um ok..

Laptop #2 arrives the next day.. I thought the problem was over, but this one, despite its working new LCD screen, had its keyboard not fully bolted down (ribbon popping out with keys pressing against the rubber mouse dot).. The dead pixels it came with werent that appealing either.. I imagine that when I called they went "oh *&@$! Its still here!" and put it together in a hurry to ship it out..

In short - The thing was unworkable - even disabling the mouse made some keys useless. They also left out the hard drive cover so I had to duct tape the thing in place. Awesome.

Laptop #3 arrives ... chocolate stains and over all wear and tear. (yes chocolate stains in case you had to read twice). I figure no big deal I'll clean it off but at least I'll have a good laptop now. Booting it up I see the computer has half the RAM I used to have and a slower CPU.. Hmmm...

Laptop #4 arrives ... this one is in perfect shape! hooray.. not so fast, I boot up only to see there are Three pretty good size impact spots on the LCD - pretty annoying depending on my screen content / background (when they are more visible)...

Laptop #5 arrives ... this one has more wear and tear but I figured well, at least I'll have a good LCD.. nah, The LCD frame had a crack on the plastic, yeah probably just cosmetic but ... looked pretty bad.

So there it is 5 laptops no dice - I kept the "impact spot" one - and I'm done with computer repair people..

Certification Failure

I failed my certification exam today .. So I hung it on my fridge...

Friday the 13th...

Today is quite a UNIQUE day... Friday October the 13th 2006

Lets play with the numbers:

2006 + 10 + 13 = 2029

2 + 0 + 2 + 9 = 13 !!!

It can be further broken down as follows:



There's more too but after going through making a diagram i figured.. i'm done...

Starting a blog, sometimes there are things worth sharing...