The site for ranting and reporting by John Masters
This category is used for articles related to technology, particularly computer and information technology.
I’m taking this week, so today I gave myself a little time with my hobby, Deep Sand. If you’ve watched the stream, you noticed a number of posts sort of catching up on some movie reviews, and I still have a couple to do. I also incorporated some new functions into the front facing parts of the blog.
Read moreThe Raw Story is reporting that some bloggers have been checking out the telephone and address listings for the many offices Diebold is claiming to have around the country. It turns out that most of them have phones numbers that go unanswered and the listed addresses turn out to be Wal-Mart or Sam’s club addresses.
Read moreLast Tuesday night/Wednesday morning was certainly a bittersweet time. As I’ve said before, I’m not one of the millions of Obama-maniacs, but I was glad he won. I think America will soon be in far better hands than she is now. I was even more pleased to see a good number of hateful and bigoted Republicans kicked to curb, and their nasty campaign rhetoric repudiated. Obviously though, the passage of the three anti-marriage amendments was a great disappointment. In this post, I’ll provide my observations on where we are now relative to the election.
Read moreAs a records manager by trade (and having worked in the government sector for a bit), I have had to learn a thing or two about preservation. An article concerning the use some special eye readable technologies to store thousands of pages in a durable media to last thousands caught my eye, and I found it to be fascinating project. The Long Now Foundation has undertaken a project to try to preserve language for 1,000- 10,000 years, and has come up with a cool way to do that. It’s called a Rosetta Disk.
Read moreI seem to be doing lots of upgrading lately. I’ve been having an issue for some time now with my Outlook crashing several times each day, and often taking multiple attempts to restart it. In some cases, it will even break the connection to the pst file, and I’ll have to restart the computer. I’ve tried everything without success, so I’m now considering an upgrade to Office 2007.
Read moreIf you visited Deep Sand earlier this week, you might have gotten a message saying we were temporarily unavailable. I was performing an upgrade to a new version of the software. Normally, that’s not a huge task, but this time I wanted to get as clean a database and code base as possible. Over the years, a lot of additional tables for plugins and files and folders and options settings have been left behind. I wanted to get that cleaned out.
Read moreFor those who don’t know, “WTF” is the short hand today for “what the fuck.” A lot of people know that, but a lot don’t. And unless it’s in the context of an email of IM message, I’d think nothing of it. However, that’s not the case with every North Carolinian.
Read moreI don’t get a ton of traffic on this site, and have always been disappointed with the lack of comments. I get a few, but I know I have opinionated friends, and would expect a little more from them. I suspect one of the reasons is that this blog is so far ranging in the topics I write about. I’ve read some good articles lately on blogging, and most say to narrow the focus of your blog. The people writing these articles do have very widely read blogs, so one must give them their props.
Read moreThe Family was no different. This bothered me a bit, so I went to the Tivo website, got a number for their corporate headquarters and called. A very nice person named Alyson called me back, and we had a nice discussion about the situation. i followed up my conversation with the following letter.
Read moreIt’s hard to believe, but Deep Sand debuted on May 24, 2004. I can’t believe I’ve maintained this blog for that long. Lot’s of blogs out there have been abandoned over the years. Here’s to the last four years of blogging on Deep Sand, here’s to the unbelievable team of developers and the open source community that make WordPress and unbelievable software platform, and here’s to four more years of raising hell.
Read moreWell, it appears Vista has become the Windows 95/Windows ME disaster of this decade. It seems that most people who have tried it, especially on laptops, have found it to be a useless resource hog, with cool graphics, but not much else ot offer. Count me amongst that crowd.
Read more