General

Three years back, with much fanfare at a partner conference, Microsoft announced the Microsoft Professional Degree program. It was going to be a set of courses that you could take that would lead to one of their professional degrees.

Now here in Australia, you can’t just call something a degree, and I’m guessing that’s the same in the USA, so I wasn’t surprised when I noticed soon after I started with it, that the name had changed to the Microsoft Professional Program (MPP), and they’d dropped the “degree” word.

2019-07-23

I continued to be stunned at how banks don’t get security.

Had a call just now from a sales guy from the my bank. It’s annoying enough that they call at night, but I really don’t like it when they want to confirm who you are before they can talk to you.

Told him, Sorry, can’t do. Have no idea who you are.

Why would I tell personal details to some guy who just calls out of the blue, claiming to be from my bank?

2019-07-16

I’m writing this post more to remind myself next time I run into the same problem, but hopefully it’ll help someone else too.

curl is a useful utility but the Windows version of it certainly has some quirks. Often though, that leads to error messages that aren’t helpful at all.

I kept running into an error where it complained that HTTPS protocol was not supported in libcurl. When I tried HTTP, I saw the same error.

2019-07-09

I’m an unashamed fan of TechSmith and it’s products. In particular, SnagIt and Camtasia.

Whenever I’m asked for a list of products that I wouldn’t want to live without, SnagIt is near the top of that list. I use it all day, every day. I’ve tried a number of screen capture programs over the years, and I’ve watched people struggle to do simple things, just to avoid buying a commercial application. Don’t be that person. Use the right tool.

2019-06-25

For better or worse, I spend a lot of time in hotels, airline flights, dealing with many suppliers, etc. What’s become really common now, is that a few days later, they’re sending me a survey asking me how they did.

Now I’m sure that they’re just trying to follow some best practice to make sure they’re delivering what was expected, but lately, I’m finding many of the surveys really quite annoying. I’d like to suggest some simple rules to avoid that.

2019-06-11

In a previous post, I discussed the way that adjectives have been replacing adverbs, and pondered about what had happened to “ly”. For example:

Drive Safe

rather than:

Drive Safely

I had quite a bit of feedback on this, both on and offline. Language discussions are always busy. But another similar trend came up in a discussion that I recently took part in.

A friend asked that if you used the term:

2019-06-04

In recent years, there’s an odd trend that I’ve been noticing. Adverbs seem to be getting replaced by adjectives, and at an increasingly fast rate. I see signs that say things like this:

Drive Safe

Now when I was at school, we’d have been given a hard time for writing that. We’d have been told in no uncertain terms that it should have been:

Drive Safely

I was trying to work out if it was more of a US-based thing. I see it far more often in US-based writing, yet it’s also happening in the UK, Australia, and others as well.

2019-05-28

Who moved my cheese (diagram tool)?

I was part of an interesting email chain today. It started with a guy complaining that in SQL Server Management Studio 18x, the database diagram tool had been removed.

Now I was disappointed to see the tool gone. Mind you, I didn’t ever think it was a great diagramming tool. I would have hoped they might have replaced it by a better one instead of just removing it.

2019-05-07

Over the years, many product names have become verbs that describe what the product does. The typical example is to google for something, or to super-glue something to something else, and so on. The first and dominant product in their markets tends to become associated with the action that they perform.

But was has me puzzled in recent years, is I keep hearing company names used as nouns for something that their applications deal with.

2019-04-02

After some recent upgrade to Windows 10, I’ve found that the headphone volume is way too low for me. I’m using Microsoft LX-3000 headsets, and have always really liked them.

So I was really puzzled what makes the volume so low.

The thing that’s made the biggest difference for me is to enable loudness equalization in the properties of the device. For those that aren’t sure how to do that, here’s a quick set of screen shots:

2019-03-27