One customer wanted a way to determine the name of the computer manufacturer. For example, they wanted to make some function call and get back "IBM" or "Compaq" or "Dell". I don't know why they wanted this information, and for the moment, I don't care. And of course, when you're looking for information, you don't search MSDN; that's for crazy pe...

Here's a trick one of my friends taught me. The Zune has two styles of audio playback, one for music, and another for podcasts. For music, clicking right and left move you by song, and when you switch to another album, then come back to the first album, it starts you over at the beginning of the album. On the other hand, for podcasts, clicking r...

Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, author of This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (another book in the Catchy title: Long boring subtitle category), explains why ABBA songs get stuck in your head. Meanwhile, the Earworm Research Institute has some tips on how to get them out.

At Microsoft's consulting divisions, customer visits are a part of the job. A shorthand has developed to describe how formally dressed you should be at the meeting with the customer. (I leave it as an exercise to develop the comparable attire for women.) Note: This Microspeak entry was submitted by a colleague from the UK, so it may be pecu...

When Baby Jesus disappears from a Nativity scene, he might be wearing a tracking device: For two consecutive years, thieves made off with the baby Jesus figurine in Wellington, a town of 60,000 in Palm Beach County, Fla. The ceramic original, donated by a local merchant, was made in Italy and worth about $1,800... Last year, officials took a G...

When you ask Explorer to navigate to a new location, the steps go roughly like this (vastly oversimplified): Pretty straightforward, right? Well, commenter dhiren asks: Any idea why the address bar in Explorer randomly decides to reset itself while you're typing in it? It's not like Explorer is saying, "Ha, ha! Sucker!" Explorer is just...

The Web page associated with my PDC 2008 talk has been updated to include the source code that I used for all of the demos. Other remarks:

On BBC's The One Show, presenter Michael Mosley tests a theory of Professor Richard Wiseman that part of being lucky is simply being more aware of incidental information in your surroundings, information seemingly unrelated to the task at hand but which may ultimately help you achieve your goal. (Professor Wiseman has many interesting videos ...

After five years, the contents of abandoned safe deposit boxes are turned over to the state, which attempts to contact the owners, but if the owners cannot be located after three years, they are put up for auction. Things like this antique watch with a Swedish dedication: "Till min kära syster Nanny fr. Elin — Mors klocka" = "To my de...

We've seen a few instances where people have used a global setting to solve a local problem. For example, people who use the function to prevent a window from redrawing, toggle a global setting to see what its value is, or who change the system time zone as part of an internal calculation. To this, I'll add as an example a program which figures...