Techmeme linked me to this amazing Bill Gates e-mail rant. It’s gratifying to know that even the creator of the operating system finds it infuriating, especially when it just took me 10 minutes to reconnect my old laptop to my 802.11g (WiFi) network. I mistyped the WEP key, allegedly, either in the first box or [...]

I detailed here the problems I had trying to craft a script-based backup solution using vshadow and robocopy. I never did figure it out, even after a BIOS upgrade and hours and hours on various forums. I ended up downloading a trial of SyncBack SE, which has worked very well so far, even with open [...]

Alright, all you Windows geeks: I need help. I tried to implement a backup script that uses a number of Microsoft tools. I keep getting errors that look like this: ERROR: Selected writer ‘ASR Writer’ is in failed state! – Status: 7 (VSS_WS_FAILED_AT_PREPARE_BACKUP) – Writer Failure code: 0x800423f4 () – Writer ID: {be000cbe-11fe-4426-9c58-531aa6355fc4} – Instance [...]

If you are not familiar with the “Paste Special” options in Word, you should read this article. If you are already familiar with it, but find it frustrating that there’s no shortcut, you should definitely read this article. Paste Special Unformatted Text At Your Fingertips. Enjoy!

For all the Web 2.0 ad cloud computing enthusiasts out there: Intel: “Web 2.0″-style cloud computing just a passing vapor.

What in the world is going on with my blog’s comment spam in the last few days?

Call this a post on learning to trust my instincts. Last spring, my old Dell laptop suffered simultaneous hinge cracks, making it unusable as a mobile computer. In desperation, I went to a couple of local stores to buy whatever I could find without a multi-week delay. My options were an assortment of machines by [...]

My Entrepreneurship seminar instructor asks, “Are entrepreneurs crazy idiots?” His answer is, “Not necessarily, but some of them are.” It’s basically a risk vs. rewards calculus – if you have little to lose and much to gain, you probably should take the plunge, but if that’s not you, you probably should not. I think that [...]

Or rather, 230,000 of them? That’s the promise (and achievement) of Ning, the latest effort by serial entrepreneur Marc Andreessen. The principle is simple: let people create their own social networks, for whomever and whatever reason. The results are amazing: the site is growing at 0.4% per day and aiming to host 4 million networks [...]

As I mentioned before, Sarah and I are in Randy Picker’s Tech Policy Seminar, which has so far produced three weeks of really good discussions. The last two weeks were spent discussing Nicholas Carr’s The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google. It was a very interesting and provocative read. While I think [...]