Nicole: 
Web Sites That Auto Play Things
This has been one of my top gripes since the age of the internet began, I honestly don't know how I didn't include it in the first few gripes! I hate any web page with auto-playing multimedia with sound (auto playing silent video, while annoying, is a little more tolerable.) Just what the hell am I talking about? I'm talking about visiting a web page that has a movie or maybe a song, and the web page author just loves it so damn much they have to start playing it right away. It's annoying. It's stupid. Worse, it's just plain bad netiquette. Give your visitors the option of playing your content.
Switch to Linux
It's so cool...
A funny cartoon about Switching to Linux (opens in a new window). Cuz, you know, Linux can do anything. 
Observations of a Computer Technician
End Users are fun.
Observations of a Computer Technician
- If you're taking night classes in computer science, feel free to go around and update the network drivers for you and all your co-workers. We're grateful for the overtime when we have to stay until 2:30am fixing them.
- When you have a tech fixing your computer at a quarter past one, eat your lunch in his face. We function better when slightly dizzy.
- Don't ever thank us. We love this AND we get paid for it
- When a tech asks you whether you've installed any new software on this computer, lie. It's nobody's business what you've got on your computer.
- If the mouse cable keeps knocking down the framed picture of your dog, lift the computer and stuff the cable under it. Mouse cables were designed to have 45 lbs. of computer sitting on top of them.
- If the space bar on your keyboard doesn't work, blame it on the mail upgrade. Keyboards work much better with half a pound of muffin crumbs, nail clippings, and big sticky drops of Coke under the keys.
- When you get the message saying "Are you sure?", click on that Yes button as fast as you can. Hell, if you weren't sure, you wouldn't be doing it, would you?
- Feel perfectly free to say things like "I don't know nothing about that computer crap". It never bothers us to hear our area of professional expertise referred to as crap.
- When you need to change the toner cartridge, call tech support. Changing a toner cartridge is an extremely complex task, and Hewlett- Packard recommends that it be performed only by a professional engineer with a Master's degree in nuclear physics.
- When something's the matter with your computer, ask your secretary to call the help desk. We enjoy the challenge of having to deal with a third party who doesn't know diddly about the problem.
- When you receive a 30-meg movie file, send it to everyone as a high-priority mail attachment. We've got plenty of disk space and processor capacity on that mail server.
- Don't even think of breaking large print jobs down into smaller chunks. Heaven forbid somebody else might get a chance to squeeze into the print queue.
- When you bump into a tech in the grocery store on a Saturday, ask a computer question. We work 24/7, even while at the grocery store on weekends.
- If your son is a student in computer science, have him come in on the weekends and do his projects on your office computer. We'll be there for you when his illegal copy of Visual Basic 6.0 makes your Access database flip out.
- When you bring us your own no-brand home PC to repair for free at the office, tell us how urgently we need to fix it so your son can get back to playing DOOM. We'll get right on it because we have so much free time at the office. Everybody knows all we do is surf the Internet all day anyway.
Klingon Programmer
Klingon Programmer
- Specifications are for the weak and timid!
- This machine is a piece of GAGH! I need dual Pentium processors if I am to do battle with this code!
- You cannot really appreciate Dilbert unless you've read it in the original Klingon.
- Indentation?! - I will show you how to indent when I indent your skull!
- What is this talk of 'release'? Klingons do not make software 'releases'. Our software 'escapes' leaving a bloody trail of designers and quality assurance people in it's wake.
- Klingon function calls do not have 'parameters' - they have 'arguments' -- and they ALWAYS WIN THEM.
- Debugging? Klingons do not debug. Our software does not coddle the weak.
- I have challenged the entire quality assurance team to a Bat-Leth contest. They will not concern us again.
- A TRUE Klingon Warrior does not comment his code!
- By filing this SPR you have challenged the honor of my family.
- You question the worthiness of my code? I should kill you where you stand!
- Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are!
Dongly Things
A pox on the panoply of plugs
By Douglas Adams
Time to declare war, I think, on little dongly things. More of them turned up in the post this morning. I'd ordered a new optical disc drive from an American mail-order company, and because I live in that strange and remote place called "Foreign," and also because I travel like a pigeon, I was keen to know, when ordering it, if it had an international power supply.
"Yes, it does," said Scott, the sales assistant.
"You're sure it has an international power supply?"
"Yes," repeated Scott. "It has an international power supply."
"Absolutely sure?"
"Yes."
This morning it arrived. The first thing I noticed was that it didn't have an international power supply. Instead it had a little dongly thing. I have rooms full of little dongly things and don't want any more. Half the little dongly things I've got, I don't even know what gizmo they're for. More importantly, half the gizmos I've got, I don't know where their little dongly thing is. Most annoyingly, an awful lot of the little dongly things, including the one that arrived this morning, are little dongly things that run on 120 volts AC--American voltage, which means I can't use them here in Foreign (state code FN), but I have to keep them in case I ever take the gizmo to which they fit (provided I know which gizmo it is they fit to) to the USA.
What, you may ask, the hell am I talking about? The little dongly things I am concerned with (by no means the only species of little dongly things with which the microelectronics world is infested) are the external power adapters which laptops and palmtops and external drives and cassette recorders and telephone answering machines and powered speakers and other incredibly necessary gizmos need to step down the main AC supply from either 120 volts or 240 volts to 6 volts DC. Or 4.5 volts DC. Or 9 volts DC. Or 12 volts DC. At 500 milliamps. Or 300 milliamps. Or 1200 milliamps. They have positive tips and negative sleeves on their plugs, unless they are the type with negative tips and positive sleeves.
By the time you multiply all these different variables together, you end up with a fairly major industry which exists, so far as I can tell, to fill my cupboards with little dongly things, none of which I can ever positively identify without playing gizmo pelmanism. The usual method of finding a little dongly thing that actually matches a gizmo I want to use is to go and buy another one, at a price that can physically drive the air from your body.
Now why is this? Well, there's one possible theory, which is that just as Xerox is really in the business of selling toner cartridge, Sony is really in the little dongly power-supply business.
Another possible reason is that it is sheer blinding idiocy. It couldn't possibly be that, could it? I mean, could it? It's hard to imagine that some of the mightiest brains on the planet, fuelled by some of the finest pizza that money can buy, haven't at some point thought, "Wouldn't it be easier if we all just standardised on one type of DC power supply?" Now, I'm not an electrical engineer, so I may be asking for the impossible. Maybe it is a sine qua non of the way in which a given optical drive or CD Walkman works that it has to draw 600 milliamps rather than 500, or have its negative terminal on the tip rather than the sleeve, and that it will either whine or fry itself if presented with anything faintly different. But I strongly suspect that if you stuck a hardware engineer in a locked room for a couple of days and taunted him with the smell of pepperoni, he could probably think of a way of making whatever gizmo (maybe even the new gizmo Pro, which I've heard such good things about) it is he's designing work to a standard DC low-power supply.
In fact, a kind of rough standard already exists, but it's rather an odd one. Not many people actually smoke in their cars these days, and the aperture in the dashboard which used to hold the cigar lighter is now more likely to be powering a mobile phone, CD player, fax machine, or according to a recent and highly improbable TV commercial, an instant-coffee-making gizmo. Because the dashboard socket originally had a different purpose, it's the wrong size and in the wrong place for what we now want to do with it, so perhaps it's time to start adapting it for its new job.
The important thing this piece of serendipitous preadaptation has given us is a possible DC power standard. An arbitrary one, to be sure, but perhaps we should probably just be grateful that it was designed by a car mechanic in an afternoon and not a computer-industry standards committee in a lifetime. Keep the voltage level, design a new, small plug, and you have a new standard.
The immediate advantage of adopting it would be that you would only need one DC power adapter! Think of that! Well, not exactly one--you might need a dozen of them, but they would all be exactly the same! Just get a box of 'em! They'll just be a commodity item like, um, well, I was going to say lightbulbs, but lightbulbs come in all sorts of different wattages and fittings. The great thing about having a DC power standard is that it would be much better than lightbulbs.
Apart from doing away with endless confusion and inconvenience, the arrival of a new standard would encourage all sorts of other new features to emerge. Power points in convenient places in cars. DC power points in homes and offices and, most important, DC power points in the armrests of airplane seats . . .
I have to own up and say that, much as I love my PowerBook, which now does about 97.8 percent of what I used to use the lumbering old desktop dinosaurs for, I've given up trying to use it on planes. Yes, yes, I know that there are all sorts of power-user strategies you can use to extend your battery life--dimming modes, RAM disks, processor resting, and so on--but the point is that I really can't be bothered. I'm perfectly capable of just reading the in-flight magazine if I want to be irritated. However, if there were a DC power supply in my armrest, I would actually be able to do some work, or at least fiddle with stuff. I know that the airline companies will probably say, "Yes, but if we do that, our aeroplanes will fall out of the sky," but they always say that. I know that sometimes their planes do fall out of the sky, but--and here's the point--not nearly as often as the airline companies say they will. I for one would be willing to risk it. In the great war against little dongly things, no sacrifice, I think, is too great.
Source: http://www.douglasadams.com/dna/980707-03-a.html
Time to declare war, I think, on little dongly things. More of them turned up in the post this morning. I'd ordered a new optical disc drive from an American mail-order company, and because I live in that strange and remote place called "Foreign," and also because I travel like a pigeon, I was keen to know, when ordering it, if it had an international power supply.
"Yes, it does," said Scott, the sales assistant.
"You're sure it has an international power supply?"
"Yes," repeated Scott. "It has an international power supply."
"Absolutely sure?"
"Yes."
This morning it arrived. The first thing I noticed was that it didn't have an international power supply. Instead it had a little dongly thing. I have rooms full of little dongly things and don't want any more. Half the little dongly things I've got, I don't even know what gizmo they're for. More importantly, half the gizmos I've got, I don't know where their little dongly thing is. Most annoyingly, an awful lot of the little dongly things, including the one that arrived this morning, are little dongly things that run on 120 volts AC--American voltage, which means I can't use them here in Foreign (state code FN), but I have to keep them in case I ever take the gizmo to which they fit (provided I know which gizmo it is they fit to) to the USA.
What, you may ask, the hell am I talking about? The little dongly things I am concerned with (by no means the only species of little dongly things with which the microelectronics world is infested) are the external power adapters which laptops and palmtops and external drives and cassette recorders and telephone answering machines and powered speakers and other incredibly necessary gizmos need to step down the main AC supply from either 120 volts or 240 volts to 6 volts DC. Or 4.5 volts DC. Or 9 volts DC. Or 12 volts DC. At 500 milliamps. Or 300 milliamps. Or 1200 milliamps. They have positive tips and negative sleeves on their plugs, unless they are the type with negative tips and positive sleeves.
By the time you multiply all these different variables together, you end up with a fairly major industry which exists, so far as I can tell, to fill my cupboards with little dongly things, none of which I can ever positively identify without playing gizmo pelmanism. The usual method of finding a little dongly thing that actually matches a gizmo I want to use is to go and buy another one, at a price that can physically drive the air from your body.
Now why is this? Well, there's one possible theory, which is that just as Xerox is really in the business of selling toner cartridge, Sony is really in the little dongly power-supply business.
Another possible reason is that it is sheer blinding idiocy. It couldn't possibly be that, could it? I mean, could it? It's hard to imagine that some of the mightiest brains on the planet, fuelled by some of the finest pizza that money can buy, haven't at some point thought, "Wouldn't it be easier if we all just standardised on one type of DC power supply?" Now, I'm not an electrical engineer, so I may be asking for the impossible. Maybe it is a sine qua non of the way in which a given optical drive or CD Walkman works that it has to draw 600 milliamps rather than 500, or have its negative terminal on the tip rather than the sleeve, and that it will either whine or fry itself if presented with anything faintly different. But I strongly suspect that if you stuck a hardware engineer in a locked room for a couple of days and taunted him with the smell of pepperoni, he could probably think of a way of making whatever gizmo (maybe even the new gizmo Pro, which I've heard such good things about) it is he's designing work to a standard DC low-power supply.
In fact, a kind of rough standard already exists, but it's rather an odd one. Not many people actually smoke in their cars these days, and the aperture in the dashboard which used to hold the cigar lighter is now more likely to be powering a mobile phone, CD player, fax machine, or according to a recent and highly improbable TV commercial, an instant-coffee-making gizmo. Because the dashboard socket originally had a different purpose, it's the wrong size and in the wrong place for what we now want to do with it, so perhaps it's time to start adapting it for its new job.
The important thing this piece of serendipitous preadaptation has given us is a possible DC power standard. An arbitrary one, to be sure, but perhaps we should probably just be grateful that it was designed by a car mechanic in an afternoon and not a computer-industry standards committee in a lifetime. Keep the voltage level, design a new, small plug, and you have a new standard.
The immediate advantage of adopting it would be that you would only need one DC power adapter! Think of that! Well, not exactly one--you might need a dozen of them, but they would all be exactly the same! Just get a box of 'em! They'll just be a commodity item like, um, well, I was going to say lightbulbs, but lightbulbs come in all sorts of different wattages and fittings. The great thing about having a DC power standard is that it would be much better than lightbulbs.
Apart from doing away with endless confusion and inconvenience, the arrival of a new standard would encourage all sorts of other new features to emerge. Power points in convenient places in cars. DC power points in homes and offices and, most important, DC power points in the armrests of airplane seats . . .
I have to own up and say that, much as I love my PowerBook, which now does about 97.8 percent of what I used to use the lumbering old desktop dinosaurs for, I've given up trying to use it on planes. Yes, yes, I know that there are all sorts of power-user strategies you can use to extend your battery life--dimming modes, RAM disks, processor resting, and so on--but the point is that I really can't be bothered. I'm perfectly capable of just reading the in-flight magazine if I want to be irritated. However, if there were a DC power supply in my armrest, I would actually be able to do some work, or at least fiddle with stuff. I know that the airline companies will probably say, "Yes, but if we do that, our aeroplanes will fall out of the sky," but they always say that. I know that sometimes their planes do fall out of the sky, but--and here's the point--not nearly as often as the airline companies say they will. I for one would be willing to risk it. In the great war against little dongly things, no sacrifice, I think, is too great.
Source: http://www.douglasadams.com/dna/980707-03-a.html