The folks on the logon team wish me to remind you that the ForceAutoLogon setting does more than just log on an account automatically. They've had to deal with large numbers of people who set the key without really understanding what it does, and then getting into trouble because what they get is not what they expected. In addition to logging on ...

NPR's Only a Game interviewed the authors of The Baseball Uncyclopedia, an irreverent guide to our national pastime, and it was a blast to listen to. The two authors clearly are huge baseball fans, but they bring to it a fascination not with mind-numbing statistics but with the deep history of the sport. (Plus the fact that they disagree on man...

I have not forgotten about the Chinese/English dictionary series, but I simply haven't had the motivation to sit down and write up descriptions and discussion for the code that I wrote along the way, so instead of adding to the program, I'm going to answer some questions that were asked back when I started the series but which I didn't respond to a...

Martha Stewart was in town this past weekend signing her book on baking. Although I'm a Martha fan, I didn't attend the signing because I already have a really awesome book on baking. I've listed below some of the ground rules for the book signing, mixed in with some stuff I just plain made up. Your mission is to pick out which of these rules ar...

I'm satisfied with the MSDN documentation for the message, but for the sake of mind-numbing completeness, I'm going to state the obvious in the hope that you, dear readers, can use this technique to fill in the obvious in other parts of MSDN. The one-line summary of the message says, "The WM_COMMAND message is sent when the user selects a com...

The instructions that came with my new monitor are printed in several languages. One of those languages is Polish, or at least it would be Polish if... well, you'll see. UWAGA: Szczegó³owe informacje dla u¿ytkownika znajduj¹ siê na do³¹czonej p³ycie CD. This is garbage. What they meant to write was UW...

On penmanship.

I can't believe he saves this stuff.

Sometimes you need to state the obvious, and that's fine. You can learn a lot from the obvious. For example, the first topic in my PDC talk consisted of simply stating the obvious. Occasionally, when you state the obvious, you have to follow up by stating the obvious. When I pointed out that the effect of lasts only until the next , one comment...

I know nothing about cars. Driving fast scares me. But I still enjoy the British car show Top Gear. The hosts clearly enjoy driving, and they don't hold back in their commentary. ("This was the first seven-seat 4×4 designed by someone who had children, not by an engineer who read about them in a book.") Last week was their Winter Olympics ...