Technology fetishism
I’ve had few real idols; people of whom I could genuinely say “I want to be like them.” In my early-to-mid 20s, Ben Elton was one of them. Amazingly funny, both on stage and in his writing. I wanted to write stuff that was half as good as his books, but never quite managed to ... [More]
I wrote about this ages ago, but it hasn’t changed, as it still works the same way on my newish Nokia N95 phone: The predictive text, which usually works really well, reckons if you press 752737, the most likely word you want is slaves. I always want plates. So if I’m not careful to change ... [More]
Computer: I like it when computers reach the point at which a good upgrade is cheap, quick and cheerful. In this case on my two-year-old box, tripling the RAM cost me $45, tripling the hard disk space cost $130. And as the new disk is faster than the old one, I’ll take the opportunity to ... [More]
If you’re in customer service it’s good to have some kind of patter worked out to keep your customers entertained. Bad to use the same line twice in one session though. This is why spam fails, actually. One might take notice of a single reputable-ish-looking email, but when a dozen show up at once, it’s ... [More]
Attention: Whoever has tried to initiate a password change for the Gmail address “danielbowen”: It’s not working for you because it’s not your email address. It’s mine. That’s why the password assistance message keeps coming through to me. If you’ve received this mail in error, it’s likely that another user entered your email address by ... [More]
Every so often you realise a clear out is in order. When I realised yesterday there were a thousand items in my Gmail inbox, I decided I had to do something. So I started at the bottom of it, and started clearing and filing. I’m about halfway through it. In the process I found some ... [More]
Fiddling with the web server. Comments will be disabled for a little while, and you may notice some other glitches in the next little while. Update. Moved to new server. Consolidating hosting plans. Not as smooth as I hoped. WP2.7.1 broke some bits of it. 2.7 looks better. Thursday morning. Just waiting for the DNS ... [More]
I always used the term depreciated, but according to Wikipedia it’s deprecated. It’s not trying to say it’s lost it’s value; it’s trying to say you’re discouraged from using it. In computer terms it generally means something that has been replaced by something better/newer, but it’s still kept around for backwards compatibility. I officially launched ... [More]
Becoming a redneck: I was standing in the midday sun for a bit too long on Tuesday at the rally. Foolishly I didn’t have a hat, and didn’t put sun screen on. The next morning, for the first time in years, I could feel I’d got sunburnt. Not really badly, but enough to cause some ... [More]
I’m revamping the blog template with a shiny new one. Please excuse any mess. If you want your picture to show up on the comments, go get a Gravatar. PS. I’ll continue tweaking things for a bit.
On the subject of mobile phones, it’s astounding after all these years how many people look surprised when their phones (on any network) drop out in the City Loop. Perhaps half of people, including myself, know this’ll happen. If I’m on the phone going into the tunnel, I’ll tell the other party I’m about to ... [More]