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13 December, 2002

More on "The Dude"

Yesterday I wrote about "The Dude" from Microsoft who was arrested for stealing $9 million dollars worth of software, and then flaunting his new toys on his web site.

Here's an interesting tidbit from a Microsoft TechNet article (The Scriptomatic Tool). The article starts out...

If you're like most of us, you've spent many sad hours staring out the window, watching your fellow system administrators drive by in their Jaguars and Porsches, preparing to flit off to Monte Carlo or some other exotic locale. And no doubt you've said to yourself, "Man, I know just as much about system administration as those guys do. Why do they get the fancy cars and the yachts and the Rolex watches?"

Well, we're here to let you in on a little secret. Why do some system administrators get fancy cars, yachts, and Rolex watches? It's because they know how to write WMI scripts, and you don't!

Well, actually, that's a lie. If you know any system administrators who are driving fancy cars, it's more likely that they're embezzling company funds than spending their time writing WMI scripts.

Amazing! This is the actual text from the article. I'm not making this up. But I've got a feeling that this article won't be around for long.

Posted on 13 December, 2002

Untied Airlines

Jeremy Cooperstock doesn't think much of United Airlines. For nearly six years, he's kept up his Untied Airlines web site, which is filled with customer complaints and negative stories about United Airlines. I'll bet he's having some fun now!

Posted on 13 December, 2002

Tiny Apps

TinyApps.Org has a collection of small, but useful free programs for download. There's something here for everyone. I guarantee it.

Posted on 13 December, 2002

Trashlog

A Dutch fellow named Nico Van Hoorn has an ongoing project that involves collecting trash and posting photos at his web site. He's been doing this since May.

The project consists of a half an hour daily walk looking for a piece of trash lying in the street. I don't need to dig in waste baskets, there is enough trash to find in the street. The trash may be of paper, plastic or metal, but it may never be bigger than 10 x 15 cm and it must be as flat as possible. From the founded items I choose one item to be scanned and this item will be on view on internet.

I don't know why, but I find this site to be strangely compelling.

Posted on 13 December, 2002

Toolbar Overload

Did you ever wonder what it would look like if you displayed all of Excel's toolbars at the same time? Probably, something like this.

Posted on 13 December, 2002

MS Challenge for 2003: Revive Office

ZDNet's David Coursey made a list of Microsoft's top 10 challenges for 2003. The #1 challenge? Revive Office.

Office XP didn't do much to help Microsoft's bottom line and Office 11, due out next summer, might not do any more. Why? Because most of us have all the Office we need and the additional features don't bring us noticeably greater ease-of-use or productivity--at least not when compared to the expense and hassle of upgrading. Microsoft's offer of a $129 Office for Students and Teachers lowers the cost for some users, but getting the rest of us to upgrade remains a challenge.

Office 11 will add a bunch of enterprise features--group collaboration stuff mostly--that are supposed to improve corporate productivity and communication. But it also requires the installation of Office servers, which will further slow adoption.

Microsoft also lacks any real strategy for making Office more meaningful to individual and small business users. While not a large market, Microsoft ignores us at its peril: Given the right incentive, like finding StarOffice, WordPerfect, or some other alternative suite preinstalled on a new PC, many of us could easily switch. If that customer rot became serious, it could spread to the corporate offices of these individual users.

Amen, David!

Last month I wrote a short piece called Is Microsoft Excel Ready For Retirement? But the truth is, the entire MS Office suite needs to be replaced. Not upgrade. Replaced.

The user interface is very confusing, mainly due to the fact that the programs are old, and have undergone many revisions over the years. The result? This product is much more difficult to use than it should be, and the vast majority of users simply don't take advantage of the features that are available. We old timers take it for granted. But have you ever seen a new user try to perform some non-trivial task in MS Office?

It's time for Microsoft to bite the bullet, and come up with a fresh product that is both usable and powerful. But it's not going to happen in 2003. Office 11 will be the same old product with a few new bells and whistles added. This time around, Microsoft's whiz-bang Marketing group will be hawking the wonders of XML support -- even though 95% of Office users have absolutely no need for these features.

Posted on 13 December, 2002

Nigerian Scam Makes the Comic Strip

In case your daily newspaper doesn't carry Greg Evans' Luann:

Posted on 13 December, 2002

Enter Your Birthday...

... at the Re-date.com site. In a few seconds, you'll know more than you wanted to know. For example, I've blinked about 267 million times during my life. Left untrimmed, my fingernails would be 51 inches long. Etc., etc., etc.

Posted on 13 December, 2002

Collecting Childhood Beliefs

The I Used to Believe web site collects ideas that adults thought were true when they were kids.

This project was begun late in 2001 for amusement. It captures the moment of change, when a childhood belief is suddenly realized to be ridiculous


The site has hundreds of entries. Here are just a few:

  • I used to think the ice cream man played music to let everyone know he'd run out of ice cream - because that's what my mother told me!
  • i used to think that if you flushed the toilet, whatever is inside would go out the shower because my dad always said not to flush when he was taking a shower.
  • I used to believe that "car pools" were cars with pools in them, like in the rock videos.
  • I used to think that whenever we were out on our boat and we hit a really big bump, that we were hitting the parts of the rockets that fell off the space shuttle and fell into the ocean.
  • When I was younger my father told me if I slept with my head under the pillow the tooth fairies would kick my teeth in.
  • At five, I sat in the Chinese restaurant saying "ping, pang, pong" and thinking I was speaking their language. Then I thought the waiter got mad because I said something bad.
  • I used to believe when their was black and white TV every saw black and white through their own eyes. When color TV came along everyone went to the eye doctor to see color.

Posted on 13 December, 2002

IAO Biographies Deleted

According to this article, the staff biographies have been removed from the Information Awareness Web site -- home of the Total Information Awareness program. In other words, the IAW doesn't want you to know the life history of guys like John Poindexter. The most likely reason is John Gilmore's recent idea to dig up all the details of J.P.'s life.

Posted on 13 December, 2002