Haiku 171101

The panicked
Old woman
Sees a message
On her screen

# Get APP!

With APP, you can be sure you are making the right choices. Our friendly APP will let you know when you are staying focused, and will give you a gentle reminder when you stray off task.

Willpower and concentration are sometimes not enough, but with APP, you'll act with confidence, knowing that APP is there to guide you on your journey.

Click to learn more. Our APP will track your activity. It is your day-to-day activity that counts, and APP is there to guide you on your way.

Your goals are our goals, and our goals can be your goals, with APP.

Simply attach the NR* collar, download APP, and you will be guided and controlled by our machines. You will follow a simple program that will make decision-making a snap.

APP tracks every part of your day, and modifies your behavior to make sure nothing is wasted. Productivity is key, and that's where APP comes in. When you stray, lose focus, or engage in unhealthy or illegal activity (we've all been there, right?) APP is there to set you right again.

And it isn't just activity. Attitude is everything, and that's where APP really shines. Unhealthy thinking, unorthodoxy, and thinking that might conflict with conventional philosophy are all discouraged through a series of increasingly powerful electric reminders.

Get with the Program. Let a Machine take over. Thinking is difficult, let APP do it.

APP: In Control.

*Non-Removable™

We Could Put An Unnecessary Blinking Light On It

So the power company put new meters on all the houses in our neighborhood for some reason. Fine, whatever. But this evening, walking around the block, it turns out there's a blinking red light on the side of everybody's house now, because you can't just put in a new meter, you have to put a blinking red light on it, because _________ wtf, I don't know. You've got to put a blinking light on everything, for some reason. God forbid you put up a power meter without a blinking red light. It's a red light, and it blinks. On every house.

 "Bob, I like the design on the new meters, but is there any way we could make them obnoxious, somehow?"

"Well, we could put an unnecessary blinking light on it, you know, to tell the customer, 'hey, don't forget, we're the Power Company. We can make your house blink.'"

 "I like it. It makes it more complicated, for no reason. And obnoxious. Make it red. And make sure it blinks."

#80 THESE OLD CDs ARE STACKING UP

Windows 95 disk,
Why are you still there?
I should throw you out but for some reason, 
I don't dare.

new year, new site

I've killed danmanning.com and I'm sending it here. (i'm keeping the domain name) It was a hobby site that no one ever went to anywhoo.

office move: cubicles in flux

Office moves are the best. Unhooking the computers, waiting on the elevators. The flat-screen monitor has made it easier, but big-ass laser printers seem to retain their original back-breaking weight. The gravitational pull on toner seems to be all powerful. One step ahead of the furniture movers, I deftly save the computer equipment from the random smashing and knocking-over of the moving guys.

The DSL line in place, I reconstruct the network like a smashed face after a head-on collision. Everything works. The patch panels are lined up with the PCs. The router is routing, the printers are printing, the computers are computing.

I am the computer guy.

weekend troubleshooting report

Today I have my coffee. Deb came home from work this morning with the dreaded and mysterious "check engine" light. I checked the engine, and yes, it was still there. Having exhausted everything I know about new engines, I took it to Valvoline Instant Oil Change, where they checked and topped off all the fluids, put the computer thing-a-ma-jig on it to read the codes, and cleared it out. The code was for "gasoline evaporation" or some such nonsense, they said sometimes if the gas-cap isn't on it can cause it. I've never heard of such a thing, but they cleared the light out and it didn't come back on. How much did they charge? NOTHING! Friggin' Awesome.

I have a laptop to fix. I used Microsoft's "Windows Memory Diagnostics" program, a program you can burn to CD to check for memory errors, and yes, it found an error.

All this before 9:30 AM.

Maybe I should bathe . . . naw . . .

Sunday: The day of Easter Bla Bla

The sky is clear, but the air is cold. And that cold air busted me up when I tried to run today. Friggin' winter, go away already. It hangs around like a visitor that has overstayed its welcome. Deb was in Flint Friday and Saturday. We held the fort down reasonably well. Today she got home. It's Easter, so we went out to eat at Johnny Carino's. I had spaghetti.

I finished reading On Writing, by Stephen King. Damn good book. It gave clear advice from a guy who has made a boat-load of money writing books.

I bought a new machine for work. I'm starting to get SATA drives, and my 400MHZ Gateway with the IDE controllers can't cut the mustard. I have a converter that works half the time but the transfer rate is for shit and it takes forever to rescue a client's first season of "Desperate Housewives" iTunes files. So I got a new machine.

My March Madness bracket is in the can already, but as of this writing, Brian is on top by three points.

I keep telling myself, spring warm-up is just around the corner, but I'm starting to have my doubts.

I'm still working on my newest bestseller. I'm 90 typewritten pages in and counting.

Rush's "The Fountain of Lamneth" from "Caress of Steel" is a mere 19:58 minutes of geeky fantasy-rock goofiness, but it is still pretty good. I got the iTunes on shuffle.

Well, if you've read this far, I've got to give you credit for hanging in there. This is a hefty blog post, and I appreciate you reading this last sentence.

Oh yeah, Billy Thorp's "Children of the Sun" just came on. I must stop typing now and commence air-guitar. There is nothing more pathetic than a 41 year old man doing air-guitar in his tiny office.

AOL: a clown-hat duct-taped to the Mona Lisa

I am the king of reformats. I can take a crappy machine and fine-tune it into an Internet slicing work of art.

So some of my customers us AOL, a bloated crapfest software abomination.

So after I make this masterpiece, I have to load this throbbing goiter onto the PC.

It's like if I went to the Louvre in Paris and duct-taped a cardboard clown hat on the Mona Lisa.

What a shame, what a horrible shame . . .

laptop issue from hell

Had the weirdest of problem; one laptop could only access one website from their office network, but all the other machines worked fine. The laptop worked fine on any other network. I got it fixed (reformat) but I never figured out what caused the problem. Otherwise things have been pretty uneventful.

USB - 2.0, 3.0, Wireless, port, Hi-Speed, Gadgets - Everything USB

USB - 2.0, 3.0, Wireless, port, Hi-Speed, Gadgets - Everything USB

informative!

upgrade from Vi$ta to XP today.

Today I get to do my first upgrade from Vi$ta to sweet, sweet Window$ XP. Since the machine is already bulked up with 2G ram to handle the lethargic, massive bloatware that is Vi$ta, it goes really really fast with XP. I love doing "upgrades."

the fastest car in the world

found at Mittopia, a pretty cool blog.

set phaser on AWESOME!

Blu-Ray Laser Phaser! - video powered by Metacafe

electricCar=cool?