As I contemplate the purchase of a house, I’ve been giving some thought to what kinds of furnishings I’ll need to make into my home. For my dining room table, I think one of these will suffice. I have no idea how much they cost, but I suspect I won’t be getting one anytime soon with my current job. 
Category Archives: General
Spyware screenshot
This is a screenshot from a system I had to clean of spyware a few weeks ago at work. (Click the thumbnail for the full-size image.) You’ll note that not only does the system have three different spyware search toolbars installed, its home page has been hijacked, and it’s also running DateManager and PrecisionTime from the assholes at Gator Claria Corporation. Before I could make this screenshot I had to remove some other spyware in order to get the system stable enough that Explorer (and Internet Explorer) wouldn’t crash on startup.
![Screenshot thumbnail image [PNG, 400×300, 21.4 KB]](http://www.beauvais1.com/images/spyware_toolbars.png "Click for full-size image in a new window [PNG, 1024×768, 90.3 KB]")
Thank you, Microsoft, for making it possible for garbage such as this to install itself via Internet Explorer with little to no help from the unsuspecting user. That’s very kind of you since so many people are out there who would otherwise be unable to install this wonderful software. And an extra special thank you goes out to all the companies who are creating the garbage; I appreciate the job security that you provide me with!
Date and time standards
I’ve been asked a couple times why the dates on my site are displayed the way they are. I use ISO 8601 for writing dates because it removes any ambiguity and eliminates confusion between the various common regional and international formats. YYYY-MM-DD is also logical for sorting and categorizing data using computers. I use a 24-hour time format, but tend to use my local time zone rather than UTC. The linked document above goes into detail about why ISO 8601 exists and why it’s a good idea to use it.
My PDA history
This is a list of the various electronic organizers and PDAs that I’ve owned over the years. (Hey, judging from some peoples’ forum post sigs, some folks are interested in this kind of stuff for whatever reason! 
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List updated 2004-10-25
List updated 2010-04-12 Continue reading
Want to write like an AOL user?
I saw a link to “The English-to-12-Year-Old-AOLer Translator” on someone’s blog this evening and thought I’d pass it along. If you ever need to write something that will make you look like an AOL subscriber, just use this free service to translate it! It’s guaranteed to take even the most well-crafted language and turn it into the kind of meaningless drivel you’d find in an AOL chat room.
User-hostile software
I have just experienced what I believe to be one of the most user-hostile pieces of software I have ever seen: Memorex CD Labelmaker v5.0.
The downloaded “Setup” program is actually just a stupid self-extracting archive file which decompresses itself into the root of C:, creating a directory structure. It dumps files into C:\Program Files\Memorex\CDLabelmaker, as well as C:\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\CD Labelmaker. This is crappy for two reasons: Continue reading