Excerpt: An essay about working in the post-office 2000s, with brief forays into my life as a technical writer, working out of a Starbucks, and some verbs.
Posted at 12:22 PM -05:00. Archive Link
Excerpt: A meditation on sabbaticals from professional, non-academic positions
Posted at 2:54 PM -05:00. Archive Link , TrackBack [0]
Excerpt: A briefer treatise on referer spam
Posted at 2:42 PM -05:00. Archive Link
Excerpt: Back in the day (the day being sometime in the 1990s) I tried to convince various and sundry people I worked with that all network related activity on behalf of the company I then worked for should occur under the domain we managed. My argument then was: Sure, this product/service/release/announcement/gopher is the most critical thing in the world today and I'm sure you feel you need...
Posted at 7:57 PM -05:00. Archive Link
Excerpt: When I first joined IBM in 1990 the company was still in the thrall of PROFS and VM/CMS and mainframes in general.... It had 512Mb of main memory and (hey, I'm forgetting the terminology finally) another 512Mb of "secondary" memory (which was slower and used for hiperspace, paging, swapping ,etc.... I still need to sift through the great suggestions I got, but I think that that request originated with this sense I have of: I have all of these great tools, but none of them really help me do anything new.
Posted at 4:44 PM -05:00. Archive Link
Excerpt: I've been watching The History Channel's Modern Marvels Engineering Disasters marathon today and have picked up a few ideas to keep in mind: Cost Savings Measures need to be scrutinized left, right, up, down, and then put on the shelf for further thinking before implementing or putting into production. With a number of these disasters, someone somewhere decides to change or tweak a design to use...
Posted at 1:42 PM -05:00. Archive Link
Excerpt: This is a collection of notes about the redesign I'm doing for epcostello.net this labor day weekend. It'll be updated occasionally as I do the work. Remember: I'm a rank amateur. I am not a professional. Thank &deity;. Don't try this at home. If you do, I don't care. Current Problems: Let's start with the obvious: I'm not a graphic designer. I don't even try to...
Posted at 8:57 PM -05:00. Archive Link
Excerpt: Time-Warner CEO Richard Parsons has been quoted as saying a la carte cable pricing [...] is a bad idea for consumers. Yet, oddly, when Time-Warner Cable of NYC has a tiff with CableVision they can magically pull stations on/off the air. Now, I know that that's comparing apples and oranges, they just yanked the feed for all subscribers at the head end. However, last year when...
Posted at 1:24 AM -05:00. Archive Link
Excerpt: I am writing a separate post about ala carte Cable TV pricing which was kicked off by this message from Time Warner Cable of New York City: To our customers: Cablevision has forced the removal of MSG, Fox Sports New York, and the Metro channels from your channel lineup. Cablevision has refused to sign an extension allowing us to continue carrying these channels while we work...
Posted at 1:14 AM -05:00. Archive Link
Excerpt: I found Gaming Open Market via buy sell buy sell from Ben Hammersley's Dangerous Precedent and am now wondering how long it will be before you see an EverQuest hedge fund. See, when you play online games you can earn various rewards, usually denominated in some sort of virtual currency. In the game world you can trade currency for items and vice versa. Someone, somewhere got...
Posted at 11:21 PM -05:00. Archive Link
Excerpt: If you're looking for a news aggregator try out bloglines.com.
Posted at 12:04 PM -05:00. Archive Link
Excerpt: I decided to change the structure of the /articles/ site slightly, to remove the /archives/ path from the URL and to change the filename from the article number to a munged form of the title. As there weren't many articles, I could easily manually create a redirect list for my .htaccess file, but I wanted to see if I could use a MovableType Index Template to...
Posted at 2:53 PM -05:00. Archive Link
Excerpt: I bought my first, and last, GM car on June 11, 1990. I'd just started my intersnship at IBM's Myers Corners Lab near Poughkeepsie, NY. As an intern I didn't get moving & living, so I'd returned to Chicago to borrow the utility van my dad owned, drove it back to Pittsburgh, and then headed to Poughkeepsie. Somewhere just south of Wilkes-Barre, PA on I-81 I...
Posted at 11:45 AM -05:00. Archive Link
Excerpt: I bought a new IBM Thinkpad x31 earlier this month and am really enjoying it. It replaces an IBM Thinkpad x21 from 2001 so I picked up two+ years of updates with the new system. Oddly, it has a slightly smaller footprint than the x21. For the most part this isn't noticeable, except that it means the x31 is not compatible with the ultrabase I bought...
Posted at 3:26 PM -05:00. Archive Link
Excerpt: ibm.com has been online for ten years now. This is a collection of sites which discuss ibm.com over the years (note that some links may decay over time or require registration).
Posted at 10:00 AM -05:00. Archive Link
Excerpt: Wherein the young technical writer blossoms into a Corporate Webmaster.
Posted at 9:22 PM -05:00. Archive Link , Comments [2]
Excerpt: Referer spam is a recent innovation
by the lesser cruft of the internet which relies on the blogland notion of embedding the referers to a given page in that page's content. Here's some techniques for blocking referer spam and having some fun while you're at it.
Posted at 7:52 PM -05:00. Archive Link , Comments [7]
Excerpt: How to use MTIfEmpty with MTSetVar to customize an MTEnries list
Posted at 6:17 PM -05:00. Archive Link
Excerpt: This is a posting-in-progress on my experiences with compression in PHP.
Posted at 10:37 PM -05:00. Archive Link
Excerpt: My Yahoo! email address, which I use primarily for registering at sites but never for anything of value or importance, gets mostly spam. One of the most consistent, and insistent notes I receive is to veerify _your_ _E-MAIL_ addres. Now, one would think that one would run your fraudulent email through an English language spell checker before sending it out. Now, I don't know what the...
Posted at 10:34 AM -05:00. Archive Link , Comments [1]
Excerpt: So, last night I was reviewing various bills which have come in for my mother's estate since January and came across the Verizon Wireless bill. My brother had cancelled the service last month telling VZ that she'd passed away. As a result of cancelling the service before the end of the contract period, Verizon Wireless assessed a $175 early termination fee, less a refund of the...
Posted at 10:25 AM -05:00. Archive Link , Comments [1]
Excerpt: Back in September I wrote about a phish note I received on my Yahoo! account. Basically, it's an email puporting to be from some financial institution asking you to verify sensitive personal information by pointing you to what appears to be a webpage from that institution. Today I received another phish note which I just have to share: From: "_CITICARDS_" To: my-yahoo-address@yahoo.com Subject: CITI E-mail Veerification...
Posted at 7:23 PM -05:00. Archive Link
Excerpt: After ten years you'd think IBM's Corporate Web Site, www.ibm.com, would be professionally operated, but no.
Posted at 12:47 AM -05:00. Archive Link
Excerpt: After reading this: Thought experiment [dive into mark] and playing around a bit with the W3C's Amaya, I attempted to make the blog bits of this site (the journal, comment blog, and this section) more XHTML compliant. All of the markup I control is XHTML. The problem is (not was) with the markup generated by Movable Type. I thought that I could craft clean code using...
Posted at 11:29 AM -05:00. Archive Link
Excerpt: I grew up in Downers Grove, Illinois. My family moved here in 1969 or 1970 and had a little two bedroom cottage on Wilcox Avenue. Around 1972 we moved to a house in Naperville, IL but returned to Downers Grove again in 1976 after a detour through Culver City, CA, Yorktown, IL and Lisle, IL. I lived here at the house for about ten years, moving...
Posted at 4:42 PM -05:00. Archive Link , Comments [1]
Excerpt: So, last week (12/15) I ordered a bright, shiny (ok, that's meant to be figurative) new IBM Thinkpad X31. Loaded it up with all sorts of goodies (I briefly considered the implications of owning a laptop with more memory and disk space than the entire mainframe complex I worked on when I first joined IBM, but that passed). Key thing to me was getting it before...
Posted at 11:53 PM -05:00. Archive Link
Excerpt: In my Yahoo! email account this morning I received this message: Dear Yahoo! User, We encountered a billing error when attempting to renew your Yahoo! service. This type of error usually indicates that either the credit card you have on file has expired or that the billing address we have is not current. This is your final notice. Please take a moment to update your credit...
Posted at 9:56 AM -05:00. Archive Link
Excerpt: Chuq von Rospach writes about the negative effects of employees deciding to leave on their own, when a company least expects it (especially in this economy). I have to admit, I was somewhat surprised when I left IBM that there was no kerfluffle. By the time I left, I’d been exiled to Business Innovation Services, far from my role as either the alleged Corporate Webmaster or...
Posted at 7:10 PM -05:00. Archive Link
Excerpt: On this day five years ago I was not at Superbowl XXXII. Instead, I was freezing my tail off in Nagano, Japan. 24 hours earlier (maybe somewhat more due to time-zone shifting) I had been in San Diego, CA, with full media access, supporting superbowl.com. Silly me, I'd even packed my passport. See, in the Fall of 1997, someone in IBM got pitched the idea of...
Posted at 9:50 PM -05:00. Archive Link
Excerpt: Note: This is an essay I wrote in 1991 when I thought I could walk and talk with the best of the Literary Theoricists. I couldn't of course, but much of what I researched for this paper ended up informing and biasing my later work as IBM's Corporate Webmaster. I'd like to claim that in 1991 I thought the Internet would become a massive, worldchanging technology,...
Posted at 12:44 AM -05:00. Archive Link , Comments [1]