The Pinged Hobbit

If you’re like me I am sure there are times where you receive a lot of emails at once, like the first day back in the office after a break. All those emails can be a little over loading, you hunt through them deciding what order to attack them, which are urgent and need dealing with and then which can wait till later. Once you have decided that you then mark the ones that need dealing with later. This is great until you forget about the ones you marked for dealing with later. We’ve all done it, marked an email to be looked at and then forgotten about it until the client phones up asking where the reply is. This is where Hit Me Later comes in.

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The UK Government today announced that it would accelerate the use of Open Source software in public services(Story here). According to the article there will be a level playing field between Open Source and proprietary software like Windows. If the Open Source solution offers the best value for money then it would be used. Continue reading »

Everyone knows the adverts, both the Mac version and the Microsoft retorts. The Mac ones are quite satirical, they poke fun at the difference between the two

I recently read an article on Daring Fireball that points out how Microsoft missed the point of these adverts when they made their reply. The Mac adverts highlighted the fact Mac mad the computer and the OS while PC is a generic term for a collection of machines made by different manufactures. The Mircosoft adverts merely re-enforced this fact. Read the article here for a better understandng

1. When you are sad — I will jump on the person who made you sad like a spider monkey jacked up on mountain dew.

2. When you are blue — I will try to dislodge whatever is choking you.

3. When you smile — I will know you are plotting something that I must become involved in.

4. When you are scared — I will rag on you about it every chance I get.

5. When you are worried — I will tell you horrible stories about how much worse it could be until you quit whining.

6. When you are confused — I will use little words.

7. When you are sick — Stay away from me until you are well again. I don’t want whatever the hell you have.

8. When you fall — I will point and laugh at your clumsy ass.

9. This is my oath…. I pledge it to the end. ‘Why?’ you may ask; ‘because you are my friend’.

For the past week or so I’ve been using a new email client. I’ve been a big fan of Thunderbird for a while, I like it’s simplistic style and it’s easy of use. I also like that it’s not made by Microsoft! The biggest draw back I’ve found with Thunderbird is it’s search routines. I find it to not always be reliable for looking for things that I know are in my inbox somewhere. I stumbled across Postbox and thought I would give it a try. Continue reading »

I’ve spoken before about how the ease with which the Internet can be both a blessing and a curse, so I felt it was only fair to highlight another instance of it doing good for the community. Earlier this week there was a lot of outrage provoked by a vidoe posted on You Tube which showed a youth dressed in pyjama’s and a balaclava. This youth referred to himself asn Timmy and showed the camera into his ‘laboratory’, once inside he picked up a cat and proceeded to slam it against the wall as well as delivering several blows to it with his fists in what was over a minute of sustained abuse. Continue reading »

As it’s Friday and I am heading away for the weekend I thought I would go with an amusing tidbit.

It’s not often you hear the most powerful man in the world swearing but as April Winchell points out if he reads the audio version of his own book about his life and he has a friend that did swear quite a bit he is bound to do.

Simply put a friend of Obama’s that he talks about a fair bit in the book Dreams from My Father set him self apart from the rest by swearing a lot. This means in the audio version Obama has to speak the swear words he included as quote originally. I give it a matter of weeks before some one does a remix

Listen to the audio snipits and read the article here

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It’s not often big corporations done something for the little man, especially not some one like Mircosoft. As anyone who’s read some of my older posts will know I’m not exactly a big fan of the guys over at Microsoft but for once I am happy to speak about something good they’ve done.

A dot co.uk domain is free for two years and a dot com is free for a year. The only down side is you need to register with a credit card (but then thats normal really) but you are shown a bill stating the discount and it’s microsoft so should be trust worthy on that front.

The domains are shown as Office Live Busness accounts but don’t let that stop you from using it for personal use. See here to register

Once upon a time, in a kingdom not far from here, a king summoned two
of his advisors for a test. He showed them both a shiny metal box
with two slots in the top, a control knob, and a lever. “What do
you think this is?”

One advisor, an Electrical Engineer, answered first. “It is a
toaster,” he said. The king asked, “How would you design an embedded
computer for it?” The advisor: “Using a four-bit microcontroller, I
would write a simple program that reads the darkness knob and
quantifies its position to one of 16 shades of darkness, from snow
white to coal black. The program would use that darkness level as
the index to a 16-element table of initial timer values. Then it would
turn on the heating elements and start the timer with the initial
value selected from the table. At the end of the time delay, it
would turn off the heat and pop up the toast. Come back next week, and
I’ll show you a working prototype.”

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