Cox Crow

So, if a minor clicks on the EULA is it binding?

8:08:55 PM #
categories: Law

Answering the Call to Duty

What does it mean to be on call?

Does it mean you have a beeper? A cell phone? What's your response time?

Having only a pager is next to useless. You know that someone wants you, but you don't know for what. Have you tried to find a pay-phone lately? What if you're driving? (NOTE: paging more than once in a 10-minute period will result in the pager being thrown across the room.)

Having a text pager is an improvement, but still pretty much useless. You know that someone wants you, you know for what, but you don't have a means of letting that person know that the problem is insignificant. And so you receive page after futile page.

Having a cell phone is a vast improvement. You can receive messages, even text messages, and you can respond. If you leave it on.

Companies which issue only pagers to their staff don't have on-call support.

3:47:49 PM # Google It!
categories: System Administration

Channelling TheShiftedLibrarian

Title: TV O.D.
Artist: The Normal

Now playing on Sirius satellite radio. How appropriate.

1:03:41 PM # Google It!
categories: Media

No Deal

Just wanted to remind the FCC, the consumer electronics industry, the MPAA, and the television networks that I am not planning an upgrade any time soon. The last television set I bought was in 1994. I don't expect to buy one in 2006. If the broadcast is not converted into an analog signal, I won't be watching it in my living room.

Unlike Jenny, I'm not an avid media consumer. Even if I were, the broadcast model fails: it doesn't fit into my schedule. What I want to watch is not on when I want to watch it. I expect some couch potatoes feel the same.

12:49:51 PM # Google It!
categories: Media

Mis-appropriation of Company Resources

What is that screeching sound? It seems that some administrators are shocked, shocked to discover unplanned use of Groove on their internal networks. [Stephen Dulaney via Jon's Radio]

Does the BOFH need to give someone a good LARTing upside the head? Some IT organizations do not understand what their role is.

Note to the Mistaken: If you don't want users installing software, don't grant them administrative privileges on their workstations. Enjoy the rise in support calls that results, and congratulate yourself on securing your job.

11:44:08 AM # Google It!
categories: System Administration

Mea Culpa

It broke. There is something nasty in my news page that is automatically redirecting my browser to udell's new rss feed. I wonder where I configure mozilla to ignore redirects. It's annoying. Very annoying. [Brett Morgan's Insanity Weblog]

Sorry about that, Brett. I included Jon Udell's sample refresh statement in a post yesterday. Radio then failed to encode it properly. I thought it might do that, but didn't bother to check. I must be becoming not unlike a developer ;-)

10:22:10 AM # Google It!
categories: Writing Online

Buffer Overflow

Thinking of too many things at once, again.

10:09:46 AM # Google It!

That thing vines hang from, y'know, a Trellix

Way back in the dark ages (that would be 2001), Dan Bricklin's company Trellix worked a deal with Evan William's Pyra. The fruit of that union was just announced.

Trellix powers the personal web sites at Tripod and c|net, among others. It should be interesting to see how Blogger works within Trellix Web Express, once the beta is released.

9:44:30 AM # Google It!
categories: Writing Online

Good morning, Vietnam!

Spam is not targeted advertising. It's broadcast. Tossed on the street in the hope that one of many millions might be in debt, have a small johnson, have performance issues, want to look at pictures, want to work from home, need a lower mortgage rate — or a higher rate of return.

Oddly enough, the same things that you find advertised on late-night broadcast television.

9:10:42 AM # Google It!