Tom McGee's Blog

What Time Is Your Appointment Again? The Fateful Day For My FIOS Installation

July 23rd, 2010 | 0 Comments | Home, Tech Stuff |

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Thank You For Waiting: My FIOS Installation Drama Continues

July 21st, 2010 | 0 Comments | Home, Tech Stuff |

Despite my ear­lier rant, I decided to give Ver­i­zon another shot at installing the FIOS ser­vice. After all, it could save me $60–80 a month — money that I could cer­tainly use.

Fol­low­ing is the tragi-comic run­down of how it went down. How much patience do I really have? We’ll see — they can’t get it done today, we’ll try again Fri­day afternoon.

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Fios, Feh. [updated!]

July 15th, 2010 | 0 Comments | Tech Stuff |

If they can’t even do a basic thing like show­ing up, why would I want to entrust all my com­mu­ni­ca­tions to them?

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System Upgrade

July 2nd, 2010 | 1 Comment | Tech Stuff |

матрациRemem­ber­ing what a hor­ror show it was to upgrade Mov­able Type at the job — and only for a 4.x to 4.x+1 release — I finally bit the bul­let and upgraded from Word­Press 2.9.2 to 3.0. After care­fully back­ing up every­thing, includ­ing all my files and the data­base, push­ing the “Upgrade Now” but­ton, hold­ing my […]

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It’s Our Anniversary!

June 11th, 2010 | 0 Comments | Tech Stuff |

Four years of blog­ging here on tom​-mcgee​.com. Hope you’ve enjoyed it. In that time, we’ve pushed over 920 posts — roughly two posts for every three days. It’s like a job. Except that it doesn’t pay and I only have to work about five min­utes a day. So what have you been read­ing? The most-visited post […]

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Mozilla Lays An Egg

May 21st, 2010 | 0 Comments | Tech Stuff |

I’ve been a fan of the Thun­der­bird email pro­gram for a cou­ple of years now. Light­weight, feature-packed, great cal­en­dar inte­gra­tion via Sun­bird which cou­ples neatly with my Google cal­en­dar. When a notice popped up that my copy was going to be the last sup­ported ver­sion of 2.x, and I ought to upgrade to 3.04, I did. […]

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Facebook Is Losing It

May 18th, 2010 | 0 Comments | Tech Stuff |

It might be time to start reel­ing it back in.

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Music Sharing and Music Streaming

May 17th, 2010 | 0 Comments | Music, Tech Stuff |

A longish run­down of a bunch of music shar­ing and down­load sites around the Inter­net. Please com­ment, and feel free to add your own sug­ges­tions and sources.

This one’s all about legal sites; so please, no LimeWire!

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This Is How The Cylons Started Out

April 29th, 2010 | 0 Comments | Entertainment, Music, Tech Stuff |

Play­ing trade shows for peanuts. No won­der they turned mur­der­ous.

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Powerpoint’s Problems Hit The Mainstream

April 28th, 2010 | 0 Comments | Tech Stuff |

Back in 2006 I noted a crooked​tim​ber​.org piece about the prob­lems in using Pow­er­Point for mil­i­tary plan­ning in Iraq. Here we are three and a half years later, and it’s even worse. Tuesday’s edi­tion of The New York Times has an above-the-fold page one story about it. Briefly: “Pow­er­Point makes us stu­pid,” Gen. James N. Mattis […]

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Yahoo! Pipes

April 16th, 2010 | 2 Comments | Tech Stuff |

Not Quite Ready For Prime Time

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Vista Was Not My Idea

March 13th, 2010 | 0 Comments | Tech Stuff |

On the teevee, Microsoft com­mer­cials have peo­ple proudly claim­ing that Win­dows 7 was their idea. I bet nobody takes that kind of credit for Vista. At the risk of beat­ing a dead horse, here’s a funny quirk.

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