First, stop sucking
Here’s a great Google Tech Talk by Merlin Mann. The best bit of advice he gives is to “First, stop sucking”. You have to stop whatever bad habits you’re doing (like ignoring the 500 emails in your inbox) before you can get better at it. The whole talk is below, it’s definitely worth a look.
Phonetic Alphabet Cheat Sheet
Below is a quick cheat sheet I made up to help out when I was on the phone with people. Inevitably you have to either read off an account number or spell out some weird URL and run into a conversation like this:
Tech Support: Please read off your account number
Me: k, 005V345
Tech: Thank you, I have that as 005B345
Me: No, that’s V as in Victor not B as in Bravo
Now I keep this next to the phone so I don’t have to think of a word that clearly begins with V.
Phonetic Alphabet Cheat Sheet: Download (PDF)
squirrels with lightsabers
I knew the little bastards were up to something in my attic!
Originally uploaded by rylanddotnet
Command Line Beauty
This is so geek beautiful
(originally from this Lifehacker article)

Companies and open source
The company I work for makes is submit for review all FOSS/Open source software we use. As far as I know they don’t actually donate any money to them, its just a software license review.
How does your company handle this? Do you donate money or time if you use putty or Firefox? Do you think they should?
Rant: LiveJournal doesn’t lend to your credibility
Mark Cuban predicted the death of BitTorrent and and the creator, Bram Cohen, responded yesterday on his LiveJournal blog. LiveJournal?!?!?! Oh come on, using a service full of 13 year old girls having their hearts broken by boys that didn’t know they had crushes on them doesn’t exactly lend the the credibility to BitTorrent.
BitTorrent is an awesome protocol and works really well. It has made moving large files like video podcasts around the internet much less painful.
What I don’t understand is why its so hard for Bram to use his own domain and install some blogging software so his posts come from a more credible source than LiveJournal.
Technorati Tags: rants, bittorrent, livejournal, mark cuban, bram cohen, technology
Wordpress Roundup
- Wordpress 2.0.7 Released - a few bug and security fixes
- How to Tag and Categorize Your Content - you should only have a handful of categories, but lots of tags
- Wordpress Post-install Checklist - Step-by-step things you must do after a new installation (I don’t agree with turning off the visual editor but that’s mostly your own opinion)
Technorati Tags: wordpress



