Author Archives: brad

While your qualifications are noteworthy, I regret to inform you that you are not among the finalists for the position.

I’m thankful for some clarity, finally. Looks like I’m staying at Etown, and I’m happy about it.

I’m part of a really good team. There’s Dave, who quite frankly, needs me to look after him and wouldn’t be able to function effectively without me. And Mike, who’s been a faithful friend and companion since seventh grade (and who also happens to be the best hardware guy around). And Nicole, aka Niner, who will realize tomorrow what I did to get even for the stunt she pulled during the “Change Process” seminar at the IM conference. Not to mention Angry Young Dan, my favorite libertarian, who is now so sneaky that his website can no longer be read by mere mortals. Throw Doris and Brenda into the mix, and you’ve got yourself quite a crew. A crew that I’m proud to be part of.

I know it’s really easy to say stuff like after you’ve been rejected, but you can ask Dave and Mike – I made my decision before I got canned.

Which Nigerian spammer are You?

Which OS are You?

Are these people computer programmers or serial killers? Find out here. I scored 6/10.

While I still intend to create a standalone comments system for use with tangelo, I’m not going to do it tonight. So I’ve temporarily signed up with HaloScan, which is actually providing trackback as well. I’m reasonably happy with the look of the HaloScan comments. I just wish it provided email notification in the free version. Oh, well, I suppose one can’t have it all.

I’ve ripped out tangelo’s old FTP code and replaced it. Seems much more stable and reliable now except for one specific case that I need to nail down, when republishing a huge number of individual posts. Otherwise, it’s in way better shape than it was.

This weblog is now powered by tangelo, and no longer Movable Type. Hopefully you won’t notice too much of a difference. I need to find or build a new commenting system, and there are some template tweaks that need to be made, but everything is coming out of tangelo now, and that’s a big step. I can now verify that tangelo can produce PHP with embedded JavaScript without any hassle. I’m using an unreleased version, 1.0b4. I hope to polish it up and release it this weekend, but that will depend on a number of factors, not the least of which is how long it takes Clair and me to install the new French doors. Or as Mike would say, Freedom doors.

Here’s another good reason not to use Internet Explorer, or Windows in general: Browser hijackers are malicious programs that change browser settings, usually altering designated default start and search pages. But some, such as CWS, also produce pop-up ads for pornography, add dozens of bookmarks — some for extremely hard-core pornography websites — to Internet Explorer’s Favorites folder, and can redirect users to porn websites when they mistype URLs.

1) Instead of “Hello” or “How are you today?”, greet me with “I’m ready to throw this stupid machine out the window.” That helps to give me the illusion that I make a difference in the world, since I can save this computer from certain destruction.

2) Ask me if I have “an extra laptop” for you. Because, surely, I have lots of spare equipment sitting around unused. That’s why I use a four year old PowerMac G3 as my web server.

3) Don’t ever try to restart your computer when you have a problem, even though that solves many, many technical problems. It’s much better use of my time to spend fifteen minutes walking or driving to your location and restart the computer myself to get the print queue going again.

4) Don’t write down error messages. I love a good mystery. And keep the description of your problem as vague as possible. After all, the computer is hard to use, so it should be hard to fix.

5) Tell me things like “I never use this stupid computer anyway” after I spend an hour fixing a trivial problem at your urgent request.

6) Ask me to fix your personal computer. Better yet, bring it to my desk and wait for me to fix it. While I’m eating lunch. I love that.

7) Ignore any memos that I send out, especially the ones marked Urgent. If it’s important, I’ll come and find you to talk to you personally.

8) Install each and every piece of freeware and shareware you can find. No problem; I’m sure none will do anything nefarious or conflict with anything critical. But, when I send you an update to an internal application I wrote, be totally clueless and refuse to drag and drop it to the proper location yourself.

9) Change email programs yourself. Our “standards” are really just recommendations. If you want to use a different email program, that’s perfectly fine. We love maintaining user directories in multiple formats to suit you. And make sure you do all of your word processing in a six year old bootleg copy of WordPerfect.

10) Bring in your own equipment and hook it up to the network. We love seeing mysterious DNS entries and rogue servers, especially if they don’t have any virus protection on them.

Just checking through my referrers and such and discovered that one person found this site by typing “brad and jen rumors” into a search engine. They must have been rather disappointed to find this Brad and my Jen. Fortunately for them, we’re the better-looking Brad and Jen duo.

I’ve released tangelo 1.0b3 to my beta testers. I indicated to them that this release is code-named “The Appetizer.” 1.0b4 will be the “Dog Food” release, at which point I’ll begin to use tangelo for this weblog. I’ll be, as they say, eating my own dog food.

This means I have to figure out how to get posts from Movable Type into tangelo, since I’m sure as crap not re-typing them all 566 of them. The first thing to try is the default export format from Movable Type. If that works, that will make life a lot easier for me, and for anyone moving from Movable Type to tangelo.

I also have to choose a commenting system to use until I develop my own. Hopefully I can salvage all 669 comments as well, because there’s stuff in there that shouldn’t be lost. Well, OK, some of it maybe should be lost, but there’s still some really good stuff in there.

By the way, whoever’s been stuffing ballots for Snow White: knock it off.