Day: October 10, 2003

I would like to read more. I have piles of books that I’ve purchased over the past few years (many with bookmarks buried inside) and very few that I’ve actually read. Yet I am still looking for more to buy. Most recently I’ve been considering Al Franken’s liberal-minded Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them and possibly even Ann Coulter’s freak fest for a look at the other side (and a good laugh). For some odd reason I decided to read a few reviews. We all know my general take on Internet reviews, so I’m not sure why I thought this would be any different. I don’t see a way to link directly to the reviews on Amazon.com, so I’ll simply quote them.
Continue reading “Double negation and the art of reviews”

So I’m called up to our production facility yesterday. I don’t even know that I can say much about the specifics because of FDA regulations and all, but I’ll try to tell the story anyway. Basically Paul and Denis were in a bit of a panic because they needed to start some processes by next week and the control system kept rebooting. It turns out that the control box was just a modified PC chasis mounted inside a metal box with just a touch LCD screen exposed – it even ran Windows XP. The whole rebooting issue was actually just that – no crashing, no memory dumps, no kernel panics – the machine just suddenly shutt off and restarted. There was no indication that the software was causing the problems, and it continued to happen even when it was isolated from the rest of the systems. Eventually I concluded that, although the power seemed clean, there must be an issue with the power supply. After replacing it with one from an old system everything ran perfectly and they proceeded to sing my praises.
Continue reading “Computer geek or fraud?”