Category Archives: Rants
2001 Toyota Camry bumper cover support
Although I am not a gear head I took on the job of replacing my 2001 Toyota Camry’s front bumper myself. This involved navigating a maze of little plastic parts, the most confounding of which was the “bumper cover support”. … Continue reading
Apple backstabs customers with MacBook Pro 2011 GPU flaw
UPDATE: Apple has finally responded to this problem with a repair program. I was able to work with Apple to refund the $350 I paid to have my MBP fixed. Apple really does not want to admit that its entire … Continue reading
MacAuthority customer service fail
One month ago I purchased a new 15″ MacBook Pro from MacAuthority. I then promptly dropped about $300 at crucial.com to bump my RAM to 8GB, and (more importantly) upgrade to an SSD. And yesterday I find out that the … Continue reading
Fatal flaws with TalkSwitch TS-850i IP phones
I was initially excited at the chance to install and configure a TalkSwitch 240vs PBX phone system. With twelve TalkSwitch 850i cordless phones spread across four base stations, I figured I would have my work empire bathed in telephony goodness. … Continue reading
The League: a television flop
The League is a sitcom about a group of 30-something adults who are in a fantasy football league. After seeing the promo (and being a fantasy football addict), I raced to the DVR to acquire some League action. I’ve since … Continue reading
I hate licensed software
Speaking as the “IT guy” for my workplace, I hate obtaining/installing/upgrading licensed software. This hatred has little to do with the monetary cost or purchasing process; it’s the backbreaking overhead that one incurs when dealing with licensing. The pain is … Continue reading
Norton Nightmares: Windows cannot connect to the Internet using HTTP, HTTPS, or FTP
The Problem: following a Norton Internet Security uninstall, I could ping IP addresses and hostnames, but not browse to either. Running XP’s Network Diagnostic gave me something like: “Windows cannot connect to the Internet using HTTP, HTTPS, or FTP”. The … Continue reading
Mac OS X (10.5.6) Spotlight search results are crippled
Open a Finder window, run a search, and you’ll see that the results are presented in three sortable columns: Name, Kind, and Last Opened. You might expect to be able to adjust those columns to include/exclude whatever file attributes you … Continue reading
PHP zlib.output_compression fails to set Content-Encoding
This is what the PHP docs say about the zlib.output_compression INI directive: Whether to transparently compress pages. If this option is set to “On” in php.ini or the Apache configuration, pages are compressed if the browser sends an “Accept-Encoding: gzip” … Continue reading
Mediawiki extension WTFs
Had a number of WTF moments when looking for a wiki2pdf type of Mediawiki extension. I came across Pdf Export which seemed to be what I wanted. But as I looked over the extension, the WTFs began to pile up: … Continue reading