As you may have noticed, this diary has finally been brought kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Yep, I’ve done what I swore I wouldn’t do – switched to a content management system. (In geekspeak that’s CMS.) As a result, some of the stuff has changed, some of it looks different. The old diary ... [More]
Category: Geek
Technology fetishism
Word of the week
The word of the week is: ameliorate. a-mel-io-rate. To make or become better; improve. No, it didn’t come up in the spelling bee on Spellbound (at least not that I noticed). I’ve spotted it in two separate news articles I’ve read today. Okay so one was a few weeks old, but oh well: A Melbourne ... [More]
Yeah, smash the state! Victory for hax0rs! Let’s vandalise Daniel’s diary on a Sunday morning! Turned out to be an ISP-wide problem. Full credit to them though, they’re making amends by offering an upgrade to people’s accounts. So there you go. Thanks to Tony, who notified me first (and the others who let me know ... [More]
Damn machine
A couple of weeks ago at work I got an e-mail telling me some marvellous patch would be installed overnight on my computer. “Do nothing!” I was told, “it’ll be great!”, I was told. So I did what I was told, and sure enough overnight my computer was patched, and then it wouldn’t boot. Nup. ... [More]
My 17 inch is back
3pm. A while back I took the bigger of my two monitors to be repaired. It had been playing up – spontaneously turning itself off, then on again. So I looked at my various monitor-related bits of paper and discovered it was still under warranty, and that a mob in Hawthorn were authorised service type ... [More]
Lessons to be learnt
I learnt two important lessons today. This’ll get a bit geeky, but when I got into work this morning, my PC was off. Odd, I left it on. With the screen turned off (that’s the manual power saving feature in Windows NT 4) but definitely on. So I booted ‘er up. But I couldn’t logon ... [More]
Y2K eve
Well, here we finally are, the eve of the year 2000. Will the Y2K bug (design decision, actually) destroy civilisation as we know it? Somehow I doubt it. I think there’s going to be a lot of embarrassed survivalists on Monday, humming and haa-ing and wondering what on earth they’re going to do with all ... [More]
Ah yes, Microsoft Office 2000, the most powerful, most user-friendly yet… So there I am, re-installing Frontpage 2000, and it wants a qualifying upgrade product. Fair enough, and it probably won’t settle for selecting itself, like Office 97 did. So I reach for my old FP98 CD, and bung it in the other CD drive. ... [More]
Re-re-re-re-re-installation
Well, just my luck, the hard drive I thought I’d resurrected started dying again. This time I cut off life support: unplugged it from the machine. I just couldn’t bare to see my data go on suffering like that. As it turns out, it was a snip to go out and find a new drive ... [More]
The pre-emptive strike
I’ve launched a pre-emptive strike against my hard drive. I’ve pulled all the data off it and done a low level format on it before it died on me. Oh, make no mistake, it was in the process of kicking the bucket. Ever since I dived into the innards of my PC last week to ... [More]
Last Monday I got a warning about the Melissa virus. To my surprise, it turned out to actually be genuine. The number of times I’ve had the Good Times virus warning and its clones arrive in my e-mail – not to mention legends of stolen kidneys, bloody Craig Shergold and the cards – is alarmingly ... [More]
Famous for fifteen milliseconds
Apparently I’m a Net identity. And the web site you’re reading is infamous! I know, because I just read it in black and white – well, okay, in black and beige – in the February issue of Australian Personal Computer. They reckon I’m getting a prize for reporting a bug in their own magazine CD. ... [More]