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You know, I can't remember which giant insurance company Fushigi works for. I think it's Aon. Maybe AIG. something that started with an A.

Health care and retirement savings are worth a lot more than 20% and you know it.

True story: There's a woman I met through another forum who is the Windows system admin for a business with about 150 users. She sends me E-mails and IMs and stuff and basically I tell her exactly how to do her job. Today her boss, who really knows even less than she does asked her "Who is...

I think I be paid maybe around half what I'm worth too, but that part bothers me not so much. Yarr.

Yarr!

The company I work for provides no benefits other than my very flexible schedule, and my employment isn't all that secure. Given the choice of going back to contracting full time and moving, I'd probably look longingly at my wrists, then a razor blade, then my wrists again, and then I would...

Just remember that when I'm looking for a job, Mr. CIO guy.

Ahem.

OK so I'm slightly wrong and was misremembering the Parallel port. The board I'm thinking of was a DG33TL.

My gaming PC sits inside my network with access to all the cool stuff I've collected and have access to. It's also connected to a nice 40" Samsung 650A TV and an awesome home theater, so I kind of want to be able to trust that computer to remain uncompromised. PC Game manufacturers have finally...

Intel has made several of those. I built one a few weeks ago that had a VGA + DVI setup, which apparently worked well enough for my user's needs. I can't remember what model it was but I distinctly recall that it also had parallel and an IDE port but no PS/2. Anyway, it could and did run two...

The problem with a cracked game is that you really don't know what the crackers did to the game besides remove the copy protection. How do you really know that you didn't install some remote registry hack, or a turn your PC into a spam relay?

Ars Technica tried it and said they were just given more keys. The "no daemon tools" shit is a far bigger concern. Just like using Steam, it's punishing people who want to just play a fucking game. Between the utter lack of fun that is console gaming (I have rented 57 Wii titles at $3.50 a...

Well, if you go by my ex's favorite T-shirt, that just means that they have an alternate lifestyle. :D

Where the hell is this money coming from? There are congressional debates that can last hours or days over paltry half-billion dollar sums of money, but we're able to dole out tens of billions to banks and insurance companies with no approval from Congress?

During the brief period when I had some hiring responsibilities, I asked specifically what experiences my prospects had with IT "emergency" situations and how those situations were resolved, what tasks related to past jobs they were most apprehensive about doing and their worst experience with a...

Personally, I'm not about to install a game that won't operate if I have an ISO mounting tool installed. Holy crap that's dumb.

I certainly feel some amount of schadenfreude.

I think this is more like 10 - 12 hours from someone who knows Visual Basic, though I might be underestimating how difficult it is to break the existing data out of the Act database.

There is a tool called "Hiren's BootCD" that can be found all over the place. It is an amazing tool for computer techs and it includes several programs that can strip passwords from Windows. It's not legitimate from a legal standpoint; it includes DOS versions of several commercial programs...

I have no idea if Outlook would come close. I know that Outlook does not allow Notes to be shared between clients, even in an Exchange environment, and a lot of what the other people in the office are doing is making Notes on the contact information (ordered stuff 9/14/2008 etc) No, I don't...

Yes, and performance continues to suck even if you filter the data you're looking at to something like "current week."

Nope, they're the same thing. The Activities (tasks) are a list view and the calendar is a calendar view of the same stuff.

The way I understand the whole Sage Software operation is that the company more or less runs on fee based support rather than software licensing, and one of the big reasons Symantec ditched Act was that its support was a cost center. I did suggest a full blown SQL Server install when I was...

I've done Linux/MySQL and Server2003/SQL2005 on VMware and found that it's acceptable for small datasets and classroom use.

His current server is a four CPU, 8GB Xeon rig with a pair of RAID1 SAS X15s in it. While I'm sure that the SSDs would work better I'm equally sure that he already has the next best thing. And which his office uses to access a 350MB (SQL Server Express) Act Database and his ancient, DOS based...

Inside the battery back plate? I pretty much just want network integrated phones to die. Blackberry people are the whiniest people on the surface of the Earth.

Something I'm kind of stumped on today. This dick that I do work for, hereafter known as "dick", has an Act 2008 setup. He has apparently been using Act for his very limited CRM needs for about 15 years. I'm talking Windows 3.1-era, here. So he has an accumulation of Act data. Maybe 20000...

I wouldn't even let people HAVE wireless keyboards and mice. Anyway, I'm low tech about that stuff. I've been on projects where full bar coding schemes tied in to MS-SMS with custom asset tracking databases and all kinds of other crap. I tag the box. I tag the monitor. In a few cases I might...

There's an issue with Google's EULA that's really nasty from a legal standpoint. Basically they claim some kind of IP rights (to index and datamine) on whatever you do through Chrome. It's a webkit browser, so it should be on par with Safari or Konq as far as security goes.

25 millibits per second is indeed pretty slow. m = milli (thousandths) u (well, μ, if that character shows up) = micro (millionths) M = mega (millions) b = bits, the standard unit for data transmissions B = Bytes Just feeling a little pedantic.

My folks have had a serious run of bad luck with fairly high end laundry equipment. They lost three ~$2000 washing machines in three years (all of them in the "it's cheaper to get a new one than get the old one fixed" category), and they also had a gargantuan $3500 25 cubic foot fridge that...

AMD announced some price cuts today that undercut Intel dual core CPUs with three core Phenom chips. The Phenom 8750 (3x2.4GHz) is supposedly going to retail for $135 now, which is in line or a bit less than the current low-end Core 2s. I realize most people don't have tons of need for that...

Ahem. $99 slow ass OCZ 32GB SSD Don't all click at once.

Modern Promise SATA controllers aren't any better. I have a 4-port PCI controller that I can't get to work on anything newer than an nForce2 or Intel i915, under Windows or Linux. At least the crappy $20 SiL controllers work when you tell them to.

At the moment I own nine 1TB drives and 12 750GB drives. Most of the 1TB units haven't entered service yet, but they will the next time I get a free day on a weekend (I will probably also own more 1TB units by then). Capacity is still the only thing I'm interested in. I really should invest...

Sage Software's Act 2009 lists a 1Gbit network connection as a minimum hardware requirement.

Spore was supposed to be one of the bestest games of all time. Several gamers I know have told me how completely disappointing it is. Basically, if you take the most retarded parts of a bunch of games you actually like, you end up with Spore.

And a muzzle. And hopefully a full-body cast.

Oh. I also use User Groups (usually defined as distributiongroups on Windows Servers) to keep track of who needs which application. So there can be, say, a Wordperfect group vs. a Goldmine group. This is helpful for communicating about potential software upgrades or concerns.

Documentation can mean whatever you or the client wants it to mean. I tend to be thorough. I tend to do documentation for my own benefit so I go pretty light on billable time for it. With that in mind: I start with a log book in the server room. This is the most basic document of all. I take a...

At least John is cheating on his wife with a member of the opposite sex, unlike some self-hating "family values advocates" I could mention. And for what it's worth, John's wife is terminally ill and they've known that for quite a while. He may very well have been having his affair with her...

... and the Comcast thing just gets worse. $150 a month for Business Service isn't so bad, really.

As I said before, Democrats aren't particularly good for adult entertainment. Wanna bet this time next week I have a news posting about Minneapolis hookers with more business than they can stand? Also, I wanna go to a strip club named after a Puccini opera.

Dell Ultrasharp displays all have USB ports. They're kind of handy for things like webcams, USB phones, thumb drives et al.

I built a box for my dad for a retirement gift. He's all happy because I can bring whole series' worth of TV shows over on a thumb drive instead of waiting for me to burn DVDs. He is not using BluRay, though.

I've got several Shuttle K45s doing various things, but they don't have 5.25" drive bays. My HTPC is sitting in an Antec NSK2480 nowadays, but of course that's $100 and doesn't include a motherboard, either.

Apevia products are usually pretty unimpressive. Cheaply made. Or at least they were a couple years ago.

I have three laptops in my office right now. On one of them, I was told that some of the keys on the keyboard don't work. All the keys on the keyboard are working, but the thing has so much spyware it's in the 15 minutes to start XP category. On the second, I was told that it "has trouble...