After writing my last post, I discovered what may be another sure thing: unpredictable failures to work by Windows. Our printer is networked; it sits downstairs, connected to an old laptop, and we print everything to it over the network. It has been working fine. Well, okay, it’s been a little flaky for a few [...]

Well, we made it to the other side of the Texas bar exam intact. That was not a particularly fun experience. When taking the bar, a person definitely reaches a point where he knows very little law, knows this, and just can’t fit any more in his head without forcing out something truly important, like [...]

In my ongoing battle against comment spam, I have finally decided to write myself a WordPress plugin as an additional layer of defense. It’s called WRECK (WordPress Regular Expression Comment Killer). WRECK (WordPress Regular Expression Comment Killer) is an extremely simple plugin for marking comments as spam if they match certain regular expressions. DOWNLOAD: wreck.zip [...]

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 [...]