Jarrett House NorthSecond verse, same as the first.

Following up on my earlier post about built in system services sucking CPU: when we last left the story I had disabled the Offline Files service, better known as CSCService, as a likely candidate for my regular out-of-resources situation. Four days later, it looks clear that CSCService is the culprit. I have had no resource [...]

Who knew: the Microsoft gym towel flap turned into a real turnaround in Microsoft HR. Microsoft screws up an Office Online feature launch by simulshipping it with an announcement of a delay in the Mac version of Office. How can Microsoft be surprised at the reaction that got?

…It’s time to wait for the Cavaliers to blow it in the fourth quarter, on NCAA football (tomorrow) night. Speaking of the Hoos, a UVA undergrad on Facebook told me that the South Lawn project (building new academic buildings over Jefferson Park Avenue and into the parking lot across from New Cabell) has claimed the [...]

Guitarist/vocalist Thurston Moore says Sonic Youth should have broken up years ago—so they could make mad Benjamins on the reunion circuit like the Pixies, Dinosaur Jr., and Mission of Burma have. Heh. (via)

So: the Comics Curmudgeon rips regularly on Sunday newspaper feature Slylock Fox (“Kids! Find the 6 differences between these two panels! Help Slylock figure out how Cassandra Cat murdered those girl scouts and turned them into cookies!”)—probably incidentally driving up readership of the strip. Slylock Fox creator Bob Weber returns the favor with a custom-designed [...]

RIP Beer Hunter Michael Jackson, whose writing taught me everything about beer that I never learned at college. The front page of All About Beer has a tribute and his final column, ironically about surviving a near-death experience earlier this year (sorry, no permalink). They also have a guestbook, which currently features signatures and stories [...]

A ton of links that have stayed open in various browser windows for a few days as I dug out of work in the next few posts: Let’s start with an oldie but goodie: Lawyer and administration critic Daniel J. Solove investigates the Playmobil Airport Security Screening playset, which is now even further behind because [...]

Last Friday, Gartner released the Magic Quadrant for the IT Services Desk, a research report that identifies the top players in the enterprise market for IT service desk software. iET Solutions made the Magic Quadrant for the first time this year. The report costs $1,995 from Gartner, but you will be able to access the [...]

My previous exploration of Vista service packs and hotfixes led nowhere close to fixing my Vista issues. I was a little dejected for a while. But now I may have something to go on. Excel 2007 just locked up on me today, as did Outlook. Recognizing the symptoms of an incipient total freeze-up of the [...]

When an artist is so moved by the release of his new album to break a world record for highest-altitude concert, it’s hard to avoid puns about other high things: spirits, melodies, hopes. Norwegian artist Magnet raised just such allusions in a March solo acoustic performance of his new album in a plane between Oslo [...]

I had one of those dreams last night, the kind I almost never have: I dreamed about an ex-girlfriend. No, not that kind of dream. I don’t, as a rule, dream of ex-girlfriends; as Lou Reed once sang, “when things/end for me, they end.” But last night I did. In this dream, I was at [...]

I keep telling the engineers who work with me that once we ship, we’ll have to write some articles with all the tips and tricks that we’ve discovered in Microsoft’s .NET Framework v.3, specifically WPF and WCF. The technology is easy enough to use, as I’ve written before, that even a product manager can do [...]

I got a nice score for a collection of Glee Club memorabilia today: I purchased an LP on eBay called Songs of the University of Virginia that was recorded in the late 1940s with the Virginia Glee Club and a University band. I am eagerly awaiting the arrival of the record, as much to clear [...]

I managed to make it through a family reunion this weekend. The family part was fine; the traffic and weather almost did us in. It managed to pour the whole day of the August Brackbill picnic for the first time in a number of years, stranding us on the porch of the house. This after [...]

I have been interested for a while in the Getting Things Done productivity methodology, but one thing that has stood in my way is my email. I have email messages that date back to 1993 in my archives. When I was in grad school I had separate mail folders for every class I was in, [...]