Writing ... or Just Practicing?
Random disconnected diatribes of a documentation engineer
Just Collecting Dust...
It's Edinburgh Festival time again, and as usual they voted a winning joke. One of my favorite...
Date: 08/31/2014
Do I R2, or Just 12?
We all know that hardware failures are not unheard of events, and - like most people - I try to...
Date: 08/23/2014
Wandering OOF
How can I not Wallaby in England while the weather is so fair? Though, looking at these three,...
Date: 08/10/2014
Semantically Speaking...
So I've temporarily escaped from Azure to lend a hand with, as Monty Python would say, something...
Date: 07/20/2014
Six Buttons and a Volume Knob
Probably there's not many people who can remember when TVs had just six buttons and a volume knob....
Date: 07/12/2014
General Cluster's Probably Not Last Stand
I don't know if General Custer ever made a last stand against the Apache, but I feel like I have. My...
Date: 07/05/2014
Defensive Writing
One of the facts of life when you write technical documentation and guidance is that it will get...
Date: 06/29/2014
Snakin' All Over
My new pet snake is installed, working, and really flies. Deathly silent, yet it instantly responds...
Date: 06/21/2014
Papa Loves Mamba
Media Center is alive and well! Yes, you can buy a proper no-noise Media Center appliance that just...
Date: 06/15/2014
Seventeen Syllable File Delete in ASP.NET
The days when I played with ASP.NET web sites all the time have, perhaps unfortunately, gone. Now my...
Date: 05/31/2014
Bluetooth Made Me Un-picture My Contacts
Can software become more complicated and yet still be easy to use? It seems that, unfortunately in...
Date: 05/18/2014
Digitally Impecunious Pop Stars
It seems that being a pop star is no longer the route to guaranteed wealth. According to several...
Date: 05/11/2014
Recertified, Un-moused, and Port-holed
You can't believe just how fast a year goes by. It seems like only yesterday I was rebooting all the...
Date: 05/04/2014
Digital Trainspotting
I know that computers and digital electronics have almost completely taken over our world, but it...
Date: 04/27/2014
My Email's Gone Cloudy
For the past several months I've been fighting to resolve network connectivity problems, especially...
Date: 04/20/2014
Infinity = 40
At last our phone company has managed to drag a strand of high-speed cable across the six miles from...
Date: 04/06/2014
Call In a Specialist
In the rapidly expanding realm of computing technologies, it's reasonable to assume that most...
Date: 03/30/2014
An Automatic Upgrade to Uncontrolled Access
How could they get it so wrong? I've been very happy with all the other Netgear hardware scattered...
Date: 03/23/2014
The Royal We Is Working On It...
I really am trying to get used to the dumbed-down (sorry, I should say "user-friendly") move towards...
Date: 03/16/2014
Idempotent Photographical Categorization
It's been many years since I switched from film to digital by selling my old Pentax SLR, extensive...
Date: 03/09/2014
I Can See Patterns In The Cloud
Well, we finally did it. After many months of redesign, reconsideration, rewrites, and recombination...
Date: 03/02/2014
We're All Professional Publishing House Operatives Now
OK, yes, I was tempted to find a title based on Slade's famous hit song Mama Weer All Crazee Now but...
Date: 02/16/2014
I Wished I Was ... in Iceland
Birthdays are usually celebrated with a day off work, perhaps a trip to a garden centre, or just a...
Date: 02/09/2014
Doing the Right Thing
So after I was castigated by Cisco's customer support people for buying from Amazon, who they class...
Date: 01/26/2014
We Are Stardust
I've been watching the BBC program Stargazing on TV this week, and I have to say that they did a...
Date: 01/19/2014
You Have To Trust Somebody...
After spending part of the seasonal holiday break reorganizing my network and removing ISA Server,...
Date: 01/12/2014
Deproxied
Having run out of ideas, and given up Binging a solution for my intermittent connectivity problems...
Date: 01/05/2014
Hotel Cablefornia
So there's another New Year on the horizon and it's time to make some resolutions that will...
Date: 12/29/2013
All I Want For Christmas...
So I continue to battle with Windows 8.1 and Outlook 2103 on my nice big Dell workstation. Our IT...
Date: 12/22/2013
Downwardly Upgraded
So it looks like my upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 8.1 actually downgraded me to Windows 6.3. I...
Date: 12/15/2013
Agile Documentation - Tested to Destruction
Agile development is an important technique here at p&p; and throughout much of Microsoft....
Date: 12/08/2013
The Network Ate My Shortcuts!
It's a bit scary when you turn on your computer and it's different from when you left it the day...
Date: 12/01/2013
Do You Have a Vision?
In the olden days, people with a vision changed the world. Scientists such as James Clerk Maxwell...
Date: 11/24/2013
Why Is There Only One Monopolies Commission?
One of the old chestnuts you sometimes hear from disaffected and grumpy comedians is "How come...
Date: 11/16/2013
A Cloud Service By Any Other Name...
As a firm believer in freedom of expression, I guess I can't complain about the names that the...
Date: 11/10/2013
Who is We?
Windows and its applications are getting even easier to use, and work far better than ever before...
Date: 10/27/2013
Mister (Sometimes) Fixit
No I'm not talking about the clever "please mend my computer" tools that you can run on Microsoft's...
Date: 10/20/2013
Missing The (Access) Point...
Let's face it, the only proper way to connect computers together is with real wire in the form of...
Date: 10/13/2013
Electronic Misroutability
For most of the morning Outlook has been glowering at me and reminding me that it can't connect to...
Date: 10/06/2013
How Much Computing Power Do You Need?
I discovered this week that online shopping is not something new and exciting, but has been around...
Date: 09/29/2013