Geekdom

My wife and I were doing some holiday shopping, and we decided to buy a few gifts at Best Buy with our Best Buy RewardZone gift certificates. We got to the checkout and asked for a gift receipt. The cashier told us that the recipient would't be able to exchange their gift. The only option would be to return it and the Rewards would be credited back to our account. We were told to go to Customer Service, return the items for the credit of our points and then re-purchase them with our credit card to enable the giftee to be able to exchange. We confirmed this with two other employees. Am I the only one who sees problems with this policy? READ MORE>

If you've been following my twitter lately, you might know I've been having a rough weekend trying to get Win7 to work on my ASUS EeePC 1002HA. The problem started when I upgraded and I found that when I powered the machine on, the screen would be blank unless I hit shift+F1 to put it into sleep mode and wake it up again. I tried upgrading the drivers from the ASUS download site, and that ended up getting me into a myriad of problems. However, I have finally gotten it all sorted out, and everything works like a charm. My observations on installing Win7 properly on this machine after the jump. Hopefully you read this BEFORE you start :)

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 As I write this, my completely-full 160GB IDE hard drive is making a very unhealthy sound, and I'm trying to make sure I don't get too many browser windows open lest my single-core processor gets bogged down.  Yep, it is time for a new desktop.  This one has served very well over the last 4+ years, but its time to go to Dell.com and . . . what, what?   READ MORE>

 The other day I had to set up Apache, PHP, and MYSQL on my Windows XP machine to host a test a Drupal site I am helping develop.  The http folder was in a different folder because it was in a Git repository (more on that experience in a later post). Needless to say, I went to the places outlined in Drupal's installation requrements page, and I had a very difficult time getting Apache and PHP to link. It was so much easier in Linux. I tried until I gave up and found a much easier solution.  READ MORE>

 Just earlier today, I blogged about the leaked e-book reader from Barnes & Noble.  Just half a day later, they go ahead and release it.  Here is the link to the Nook site. 

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I had heard the other day that Barnes & Noble was possibly releasing a Kindle-like e-book reader with a better interface (two screens including a small color one to browse books and type). It didn't excite me too much, as I find e-books to be a bit expensive and you're a bit limited with them the way they are implemented (you can't lend them to a friend for instance). READ MORE>

No, that's not a typo.  I randomly came across this article in Wikipedia.  Apparently it is used by teachers to demonstrate punctuation and the ambiguity of the word "had".  The sentence really does go as follows: James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a READ MORE>