Writing ... or Just Practicing?

Random disconnected diatribes of a documentation engineer

Just Collecting Dust...

It's Edinburgh Festival time again, and as usual they voted a winning joke. One of my favorite...

Author: Alex Homer Date: 08/31/2014

Do I R2, or Just 12?

We all know that hardware failures are not unheard of events, and - like most people - I try to...

Author: Alex Homer Date: 08/23/2014

Wandering OOF

How can I not Wallaby in England while the weather is so fair? Though, looking at these three,...

Author: Alex Homer Date: 08/10/2014

Semantically Speaking...

So I've temporarily escaped from Azure to lend a hand with, as Monty Python would say, something...

Author: Alex Homer Date: 07/20/2014

Six Buttons and a Volume Knob

Probably there's not many people who can remember when TVs had just six buttons and a volume knob....

Author: Alex Homer Date: 07/12/2014

General Cluster's Probably Not Last Stand

I don't know if General Custer ever made a last stand against the Apache, but I feel like I have. My...

Author: Alex Homer Date: 07/05/2014

Defensive Writing

One of the facts of life when you write technical documentation and guidance is that it will get...

Author: Alex Homer Date: 06/29/2014

Snakin' All Over

My new pet snake is installed, working, and really flies. Deathly silent, yet it instantly responds...

Author: Alex Homer Date: 06/21/2014

Papa Loves Mamba

Media Center is alive and well! Yes, you can buy a proper no-noise Media Center appliance that just...

Author: Alex Homer Date: 06/15/2014

Seventeen Syllable File Delete in ASP.NET

The days when I played with ASP.NET web sites all the time have, perhaps unfortunately, gone. Now my...

Author: Alex Homer Date: 05/31/2014

Bluetooth Made Me Un-picture My Contacts

Can software become more complicated and yet still be easy to use? It seems that, unfortunately in...

Author: Alex Homer Date: 05/18/2014

Digitally Impecunious Pop Stars

It seems that being a pop star is no longer the route to guaranteed wealth. According to several...

Author: Alex Homer Date: 05/11/2014

Recertified, Un-moused, and Port-holed

You can't believe just how fast a year goes by. It seems like only yesterday I was rebooting all the...

Author: Alex Homer Date: 05/04/2014

Digital Trainspotting

I know that computers and digital electronics have almost completely taken over our world, but it...

Author: Alex Homer Date: 04/27/2014

My Email's Gone Cloudy

For the past several months I've been fighting to resolve network connectivity problems, especially...

Author: Alex Homer Date: 04/20/2014

Infinity = 40

At last our phone company has managed to drag a strand of high-speed cable across the six miles from...

Author: Alex Homer Date: 04/06/2014

Call In a Specialist

In the rapidly expanding realm of computing technologies, it's reasonable to assume that most...

Author: Alex Homer Date: 03/30/2014

An Automatic Upgrade to Uncontrolled Access

How could they get it so wrong? I've been very happy with all the other Netgear hardware scattered...

Author: Alex Homer Date: 03/23/2014

The Royal We Is Working On It...

I really am trying to get used to the dumbed-down (sorry, I should say "user-friendly") move towards...

Author: Alex Homer Date: 03/16/2014

Idempotent Photographical Categorization

It's been many years since I switched from film to digital by selling my old Pentax SLR, extensive...

Author: Alex Homer Date: 03/09/2014

I Can See Patterns In The Cloud

Well, we finally did it. After many months of redesign, reconsideration, rewrites, and recombination...

Author: Alex Homer Date: 03/02/2014

We're All Professional Publishing House Operatives Now

OK, yes, I was tempted to find a title based on Slade's famous hit song Mama Weer All Crazee Now but...

Author: Alex Homer Date: 02/16/2014

I Wished I Was ... in Iceland

Birthdays are usually celebrated with a day off work, perhaps a trip to a garden centre, or just a...

Author: Alex Homer Date: 02/09/2014

Doing the Right Thing

So after I was castigated by Cisco's customer support people for buying from Amazon, who they class...

Author: Alex Homer Date: 01/26/2014

We Are Stardust

I've been watching the BBC program Stargazing on TV this week, and I have to say that they did a...

Author: Alex Homer Date: 01/19/2014

You Have To Trust Somebody...

After spending part of the seasonal holiday break reorganizing my network and removing ISA Server,...

Author: Alex Homer Date: 01/12/2014

Deproxied

Having run out of ideas, and given up Binging a solution for my intermittent connectivity problems...

Author: Alex Homer Date: 01/05/2014

Hotel Cablefornia

So there's another New Year on the horizon and it's time to make some resolutions that will...

Author: Alex Homer Date: 12/29/2013

All I Want For Christmas...

So I continue to battle with Windows 8.1 and Outlook 2103 on my nice big Dell workstation. Our IT...

Author: Alex Homer Date: 12/22/2013

Downwardly Upgraded

So it looks like my upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 8.1 actually downgraded me to Windows 6.3. I...

Author: Alex Homer Date: 12/15/2013

Agile Documentation - Tested to Destruction

Agile development is an important technique here at p&p; and throughout much of Microsoft....

Author: Alex Homer Date: 12/08/2013

The Network Ate My Shortcuts!

It's a bit scary when you turn on your computer and it's different from when you left it the day...

Author: Alex Homer Date: 12/01/2013

Do You Have a Vision?

In the olden days, people with a vision changed the world. Scientists such as James Clerk Maxwell...

Author: Alex Homer Date: 11/24/2013

Why Is There Only One Monopolies Commission?

One of the old chestnuts you sometimes hear from disaffected and grumpy comedians is "How come...

Author: Alex Homer Date: 11/16/2013

A Cloud Service By Any Other Name...

As a firm believer in freedom of expression, I guess I can't complain about the names that the...

Author: Alex Homer Date: 11/10/2013

Who is We?

Windows and its applications are getting even easier to use, and work far better than ever before...

Author: Alex Homer Date: 10/27/2013

Mister (Sometimes) Fixit

No I'm not talking about the clever "please mend my computer" tools that you can run on Microsoft's...

Author: Alex Homer Date: 10/20/2013

Missing The (Access) Point...

Let's face it, the only proper way to connect computers together is with real wire in the form of...

Author: Alex Homer Date: 10/13/2013

Electronic Misroutability

For most of the morning Outlook has been glowering at me and reminding me that it can't connect to...

Author: Alex Homer Date: 10/06/2013

How Much Computing Power Do You Need?

I discovered this week that online shopping is not something new and exciting, but has been around...

Author: Alex Homer Date: 09/29/2013

Next>