By John Bowen, 21 August, 2008

From email:

"Political Correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end."

By John Bowen, 8 August, 2008

Earlier this week, I started receiving emails (apparently) from the folks at junkemailfilter.com. Actually, the messages are from unmonitored accounts on their mail servers, but let's not split hairs. The point is, jef is passing rejected email messages 'back' to me...apparently they're seeing (and stopping) spam messages that originated on my own mail server.

By John Bowen, 9 July, 2008

While troubleshooting what I *thought* was a problem with my Linux DHCP/DNS/File/Gateway server today, I found myself knocked off the Internet. I wrongly assumed something in the Linux box had broken (will I ever learn?) and focused there. It wasn't until I tried shutting down ZoneAlarm on my client (Windows XP Pro) machine that the Internet came back. Very weird, since ZoneAlarm didn't seem to update or anything prior to the problem.

By John Bowen, 7 July, 2008

I've been building up for a blog-rant over this issue for weeks...

"Windows recently downloaded and installed an important security update to help protect your computer. This update required an automatic restart of your computer."

That's the message you get when you leave your Windows machine sitting overnight, when Windows has downloaded something _really_ important, shut itself down, and wiped out all the work you had in progress. VERY annoying.

By John Bowen, 30 May, 2008

I've been having trouble forever with viewing some attachments in ChatterEmail on my Palm 755p; some attachments just don't appear at all. When I go to a desktop PC, the attachments appear and load just fine with Thunderbird, but Chatter can't see them.

So, I tried the OTA upgrade from within Chatter. It looked neat, said it downloaded the update and installed, but when I tried to load the application I got "The version of chatterutils on your treo is out of date" as a fatal error message.

By John Bowen, 20 May, 2008

In a moment of severe mental weakness, I couldn't remember how to assign an integer's value as a text (string) value (yes, really). I found it funny enough to write up here. Here's what I tried (this actually works!):

this.lblItemID.Text = ((int)0).ToString();

After I wrote it, I just stared at it for a few seconds, before realizing the better (and easier, and obvious) way:

this.lblItemID.Text = "0';