I have blogged in the past about how people do not know how to use voicemail, but I feel the need to revise this. “People are stupid.” A bit harsh. “People do not listen.” Yes, that’s better.
Okay, here’s the deal: last night, we got a voicemail to our customer service line at Paradigm. It was from a person who was checking on a job application… to be a flight attendant.
Okay, so maybe there’s some wiggle room here. After all, our voicemail greeting does not explicitly say “we are information technology consultants,” but then again, nobody would listen if it did. But if you’re given a choice of “current clients who need technical support,” and “you are not yet a client and have questions about our services,” do either of those remotely sound like a place where you’d send a job application to be a flight attendant?
How I Enabled My 1440×900 Widescreen 19" Flat Panel under Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon
As you may have heard on a November Fresh Ubuntu podcast, I was disappointed at Gutsy’s inability to reliably detect my widescreen 19″ flat panel display. It failed to give me the option to set the display to its native resolution of 1440×900 pixels. However, booting from the live CD correctly detected and set the resolution!
The fix?
- Back up /etc/X11
cd; tar cvfx X11.tgz /etc/X11 - Boot from the live CD, and mount the Ubuntu partition (/dev/sda1 on my computer) into /media/sda1.
sudo su; mkdir /media/sda1; mount /dev/sda1 /media/sda1 - Set the screen to its proper resolution, if it’s not there already.
Click System | Preferences | Screen Resolution | Choose the desired resolution | Click Apply. - Copy the working X11 config over to the inactive copy on the hard drive
cp -fuvr /etc/X11/* /media/sda1/etc/X11/
Reboot from the hard drive and presto! We have 1440×900.
Now… if only I can get Windows to do the same thing. But that’s a separate blog post.
One Blog to Rule Them All?
I’ve been wrestling with the idea of breaking my blog up into separate blogs based on categories, instead of one monolithic mashup of tech, rants, and local politics. I can’t decide.
Ubuntu Holiday Gift Ideas!
Just in time for the end-of-year holidays (Christmas being the one we celebrate in my family), I’ve decided to put together a list of Ubuntu-centric gift ideas! I’ll be updating this post over the next couple of weeks, but if you want to give the gift of Open Source this year, here are my suggestions. Note that these can make excellent gift ideas for your loved ones or yourself! Continue reading “Ubuntu Holiday Gift Ideas!”
The Joys of Off-Shoring
A friend just shared this hilarious YouTube video with me. Ah, the joys of off-shoring. I’m having trouble embedding it into my blog, so you’ll have to click to follow the link, but it’s well worth it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-u9B6nouBo
How to *Quickly* Log on to a New Windows Domain
If you’re not an IT professional, then please skip this article, as it’s? irrelevant.
If you are, and have ever installed a fresh Windows workstation into a domain, or want to switch domains, you may have experienced the phenomenon where the first time you try to log in to the new domain, it takes a long time, I mean minutes, to generate the list of available domains from the Domain drop-down box. This has happened to me on several occasions, regardless of proper DHCP, DNS, etc., settings.
I have found the fix to be to log in with the DOMAIN\username syntax. Instead of taking a chance of being greeted with “Please Wait While Domain List is Created” for several minutes, you can specify the domain you with to log on to in the username box. Without exception, this has resulted in instant logins for me.
Broadband: Good For Jobs
This article points to a study that shows why we need broadband here. I think it ties in nicely with what Justin has to say about the Bethel economy, and how the big three or four businesses in town would prefer to have a steady stream of uneducated labor at their fingertips.
If you’re interested in discussing this, you can comment by joining us at the new Bethel Forums that I’ve set up over at the town web site.
Fiber-Optics? Not in Bethel!
You?ve got to love it when the presenter of a proposal to bring telephone, television, and high-speed Internet access at a fraction of the cost of current providers? services (in places where they are even available) asks ?does anyone not want to see these services available??
And one person, in the approximately 35 assembled, raises his hand. And he?s the Town Manager of Bethel. Continue reading “Fiber-Optics? Not in Bethel!”
E-mail Inbox Management Tips
I frequently run across client machines of all sorts who complain of various problems related to email. Many of them have one thing in common: thousands of messages in their Inbox. I’ve been saying this for years, and I still believe that sloppy email management is the cause of problems on every mail system I have encountered, with the possible exception of Gmail.
Here are the reasons why you do not want to keep all of your mail in your inbox: Continue reading “E-mail Inbox Management Tips”
Fiddling With Fedora 8 First Impressions – Part 1: Installation
Last night, for some reason, I decided to download and install a copy of Fedora‘s latest release, version 8. But “I thought you didn’t like Red Hat releases,” you might say? Hey, I’m sick and on cold meds – I can’t be held accountable for my actions. Continue reading “Fiddling With Fedora 8 First Impressions – Part 1: Installation”