Free Beer, SharePoint, and an April Fool

I thought it was a joke. Who could blame me? After all, the announcement began: “Starting on April 1, 2009…” Then again, Microsoft usually ain’t one to make “April Fool’s” jokes.
I read the announcement again. I clicked the buttons. The download started. I double-checked the URL — “Perhaps it was a fancy phishing scheme,” I [...]

Trilateral Symmetry

I’ve been using a dual-monitor setup since before before. In fact, I can’t remember (and can’t imagine) not having two monitors in front of me. My office setup is currently two 20-inch 16:9 LCD flat panels. It’s amazing what you can artfully stuff on that sort of screen-space. I’m here to say that it ain’t [...]

Power Tactics

I’m quite fond of my Kindle. Sure, the design’s a little bonkers; and it’s a wee bit awkward. That aside, it is easy to read, easy to use, and mine happens to be loaded with books I want to read.
Moreover, it’s taken a great weight off my shoulders. I like to read when I’m travelling. [...]

No matter where you go, there you are…

I blame Santa. It was he that started me down this road.
It was he that surprised me with a shiny new Nikon D200 a few years back. Smart, he was, as it happily mated with all my old Nikon lenses, lenses that were pretty much gathering dust in my closet. He eased me in to [...]

Les Liaisons Dangereuses

Connectivity is dangerous. The fricative sounds of German wafting through the open windows of today’s hotel room reminded me of that fact, reminded me of a misadventure long past, a memory from a time when connectivity took a modem and a phone line. Sometimes it took the diligent and careful application of alligator clips. Hotel [...]

A Means to an End

The failure statistic is often cited, usually with a moan and a wail. It goes like this: 30, 40, or 50 percent of all IT projects go bad. The rest — the ones that actually succeed — well, they go “slightly bad too.” At least some of them do. In the end, nobody’s happy. Jobs [...]

The Epoch of Incredulity

Naming an epoch using the superlative prefix of “post” — as in post-industrial, or post-modern, or the particularly unsatisfying post-millennial — is the one true indicator that we haven’t a clue. When I hear it, I tend to silently grumble the opening lines from A Tale of Two Cities:
It was the best of times, it [...]

Digital Pulp Fiction

I think I was eight when I read my first “real” book — of course, that’s not counting comics, Willy Waddle, or books designed to be chewed. The book was Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons, a proper book; a marvelous story for a boy who spent his days poking at squiggly-wiggly things in the tide [...]

Adventures in Telephony — Scaling Skype

I think it was Alan Kay who once said (and I’m paraphrasing here): the personal computer won’t really be personal until you can wear it on your T-shirt. I think of that quote every time I see an IPod commercial.
I find it phenomenal how much of what defines this connected age actually is actually pretty [...]

Dancing with Abby Normal…

You may remember my April adventures with a beta of Microsoft’s “Windows Home Server” (AKA: WHS). WHS is a neat little consumer product. I think it also has some applicability in the NGO-SOHO space. It’s perfect, for example, for a nonprofit with fewer than ten or so people in need of automated backup and some [...]