General

If ever there was a blog post that I didn’t ever expect to be writing it’s this one. For such a long time, Notepad has been such a simple and stable application. That no longer seems to be the case. Symptoms Recently I had a situation where Notepad just didn’t work properly. I saw these things: If I double-clicked a .txt file, it no longer opened. What would happen instead, is that Notepad started, then reported that it could not find the file that I’d just double-clicked.

2025-01-17

One of the events that I try to take part in each year is the Hack Summit. I’ve always enjoyed it. The next edition of the The Hack Summit is on October 17th online and October 18th in Warsaw at Stadion PGE Narodowy. It’s a conference fully dedicated to cybersecurity. I so wish I could have been there, but unfortunately, that’s not possible for me this year. The organizers describe it as having “a diverse and rich agenda, featuring more than 15 thematic tracks, over 150 presentations, networking opportunities, an afterparty, and much more….

2024-09-20

On July 27th 1993, Microsoft released Windows NT, the forerunner to the versions of Windows we use today, particularly the server versions. If you’re old enough, one thing you’d remember about this event is how signficant it was. At the time, if you wanted a server-based operating system on a PC, you didn’t have that many choices. We were predominantly using variants of Unix, most commonly Xenix. Importantly, most other server systems were largely text-based.

2023-07-27

I’ve worked in this industry a long time now. From 1981 to 1986, I worked as an engineer for Hewlett-Packard. Yep, I’m “have actually met both Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard” old. They’d retired when I met them and John Young was in charge, but they came to Palo Alto to a shareholders’ meeting and I was there at the time. Most of my work was on HP3000 commercial mini-computers. The level of engineering on those systems was unlike anything I’d ever seen either before or since.

2023-03-05

A while back, I reviewed a book called Atomic Habits by James Clear. I mentioned at the time that I nearly didn’t get past the first chapter as I thought it was going to be another pretty cheesy self-help book. But I ended up loving the book. James really made me think about habits in a way that I hadn’t done so before. And so I was interested when Luke and Phil from Mandarin Blueprint released a new online course called the Habit-Building Bootcamp.

2023-01-18

One weekend many years ago, my youngest daughter Erin was looking for something to do. She was a very creative child so I suggested “why don’t you write a book?” She said she could write one, if she only had a title. I told her that you could write a book about almost any title. I randomly picked: What the duck didn’t see (with the emphasis on didn’t) To get her started, I wrote some content, then asked her to continue.

2022-01-25

If you follow anyone that’s part of Microsoft’s MVP program, you might have heard there has been a global cloud skills challenge happening lately: #TheMVPChallenge. There were three challenges that each of us could complete: Azure Data & AI Challenge Dynamics 365/Power Platform Challenge Microsoft 365 Challenge You can imagine which one I chose to complete. I did the Azure Data and AI challenge. Data and AI are a pretty common grouping.

2021-05-07

Camtasia is one of my favourite products. I use it regularly. I’ve been so excited to start to get to use Camtasia 2021 that was released just recently. It’s a nice step up from an already great product. But what I didn’t like after upgrading, is that every time I started Camtasia, instead of the “normal” editing screen, I got a cutesy little popup that asked me what I wanted to do with the product today.

2021-04-30

IT people get accused all the time, of being out of touch with other people, and for using language that is overly complex. So many times lately, I’ve come across dialog boxes like the one above. It’s clearly asking a Yes/No question. Why on Earth doesn’t it give the user Yes and No as answer choices? Why do we do this to users? If you’re building apps, please don’t do this.

2021-04-02

I’ve been amazed as the pandemic has continued, how many companies that claim to understand remote work, still really don’t get it. I’ve decided that a good test of that, is whether job advertisements still show a city or location for the work. Now, not everyone can work remotely, and not everyone has anywhere suitable to work from remotely, but the majority of knowledge workers can do just that. That’s who I’m talking about here.

2021-03-16