Showing results for Non-Computer - The Old New Thing

Some time ago, I told the story of how one employee's phone received calls intended for a local radio station's contest line due to people dialing seven digits instead of ten and defaulting to the wrong area code. Upon reading that story, a colleague of mine pointed out that one of the conference rooms in his building has a similar problem. The d...

As I noted some time ago, there's a mailing list devoted to chatting among people who work in a particular cluster of buildings. It's not a technical support mailing list, but people will often ask a technical question on the off chance that somebody can help, in the same way that you might ask your friends for some help with something. Of course...

July 7, 2011: David Ortiz hits a home run against the Baltimore Orioles. As he rounds third base, Orioles third baseman Mark Reynolds casually finishes off a package of sunflower seeds (photo 6 in the slide show). An Internet meme is born. Follow the hilarity.

Many of my friends gave names to their unborn babies. Most of them were based on various objects that were the size of the adorable little parasite¹ at the time they discovered that they were pregnant: There were a few outliers, though. That last one takes a bit of explaining. Having grown tired of people asking her what she was planning...

Many years ago, Microsoft instituted a new security policy at the main campus: all employees must visibly wear their identification badge, even when working in their office. As is customary with with nearly all new security policies, it was met with resistance. One of my colleagues was working late, and his concentration was interrupted by a membe...

In college, one of my classmates (who is now the conductor of an orchestra, so I guess that whole music thing worked out for him) coined the term halftime to refer to a resounding cadence in the first half of a piece, the type of cadence that might fool an inattentive or unseasoned listener into thinking that the piece is over, when in fact it's ju...

Portugal has been going through a rough patch. Its international stature has diminished over the years, its economy has always struggled to remain competitive, the government had to accept a bailout to avoid defaulting on its debt, and on top of it all, it is losing control of its own language. In Portugal, the latest round of Portuguese spelling...

I know two people (siblings) who are experts at those claw games. They can look at a claw game, assess the situation, decide whether there is a winnable toy, and if so, drop in their quarter and grab it. I asked the elder sibling how they arrived at this amazing skill. "As a teenager, I spent something like $20 pumping quarters into one of these m...

An informal tradition in a former group was that whenever somebody bought a new car, we all went out to lunch to celebrate, but the person with the new car had to be one of the drivers. During one of our new-car trips, the proud owner of the new car showed off its fancy features. "Check this out, this car has a voice-controlled radio: Radio, On." ...

I found it amusing that somebody considered the fact that Microsoft employees can read my queued-up blog entries before the articles are published to be further evidence of Microsoft's evil essence as a monopoly. Just for the record, this is not evidence of Microsoft's evil essence as a monopoly. Rather, it's evidence of Raymond's evil essence a...