From whiskey river:
A Word on Statistics
Out of every hundred people,
those who always know better:
fifty-two.
Unsure of every step:
almost all the rest.
Ready to help,
if it doesn’t take long:
forty-nine.
Always good,
because they cannot be otherwise:
four — well, maybe five.
Able to admire without envy:
eighteen.
Led to error
by youth (which passes):
sixty, plus or minus.
Those not to be messed with:
four-and-forty.
Living in constant fear
of [...]

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In my day job, I have a couple of stock responses to questions from clients or just to my (and their) experiences with computers. One of these stock responses is something which clients almost never like to hear, because it translates, roughly, to This may sound like a “yes,” but if you believe that you’re [...]

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[Technology alert: If you're not into PC tech, especially wonky stuff about operating systems and such, you might want to give this post a pass.]

As some of you may know, I almost never use Microsoft Windows anymore — at least, when at home. (At work, there’s no other option.) Until a couple days ago, in [...]

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This March — the 12th, and isn’t it interesting I remember the exact date? — marks my 30th year as a computer guy.
When I started out at AT&T, my job title was Member of Programming Staff (with a digression into Managerhood); at my present job, I’ve been a Distributed Systems Specialist, a Business Systems Analyst, [...]

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They say old habits die hard, and I guess it’s true.
But traditions are a sort of shared old habit, and traditions don’t die hard at all — although they don’t flat-out die, either. Traditions evolve. People come and go. What’s possible replaces what you could never do, and what you used to do all the [...]

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My brother the architect once explained to me the key to building things successfully. By building he meant not just framing, erecting walls and roofs and so on, but everything: flooring, painting, pouring foundations, and so on. All of it, he said, had one critical element: edges. How an architect or builder or home handyman [...]

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Sometimes using the Web loses all its charm, because you’re too focused on problem-solving.
You need the answer to a question, say, about some damn thing or other that’s locking your computer up, and you don’t know if it’s Linux, or a video driver, or that cheese Danish which inadvertently fell from your mouth (of course [...]

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In a post a few days ago, I talked about BookRabbit.com — a (fairly new) site which lets readers share the titles of books they own, in hopes of discovering other books they might be interested in. The clever mechanism which BookRabbit have come up with for communicating this information is bookshelf photographs: take a [...]

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