AT&T MIS wins the award for “most laughable use of an automated hold message”. Called in today to close some auto-generated tickets for circuits that I’m in the process of shutting down. While holding to speak to an agent, their automated attendant chimed in every 20 seconds to apologize for the wait and to let me know they were “searching for an available agent to take my call”. I know attention spans are short these days, but that just might be overkill.
April 17, 2013
April 10, 2013
TP-Link TL-WR703N – OpenWrt Wiki
http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-wr703n
Neat little system for possible embedded controller.
April 9, 2013
Build A Space-Saving Roll-Out Pantry that Fits Between the Fridge and the Wall
I ran across this and can see it being pretty handy, though it will require some modification to work properly in my environment. It will need to be narrower, and I think I would probably configure it facing out from the fridge as it would then be open to my counter and a great spice rack while working in the kitchen.
Evaporated Milk From Powdered Milk
http://www.food.com/recipe/evaporated-milk-71192
I keep some powdered milk on hand as a “just in case”. The other day I was looking at a recipe which called for evaporated milk, which I knew I didn’t have on hand. I assumed there had to be a way to substitute, so I did a little looking and sure enough there was. As always everyone seems to have a different recipe, but it looks like a combination of 1 1/3 to 1 1/2 cups water with 1 cup powdered milk and 1 to 2 tbsp of butter or vegetable oil generally does the trick.
April 1, 2013
Worth or value criteria
I was reading an article on ComputerWorld today that considered changes to the way technical employees are evaluated. The thought that crossed my mind was, perhaps we should also be thinking about similar changes in the way we compensate employees – and not just technical employees, but across the board. The hourly and salary based models are as broken as paying by lines of code produced or shortest development time to test. They have been gamed and gamified to the point where their viability as metrics of worth and utility are questionable at best, and quite possibly contributory to our inflationary spiral at worst. Just an interesting thought that came to mind and I wanted to make a quick note of in case I have time to come back and ponder it in the future.
March 29, 2013
Siracha Kettle Corn | Domesticated Academic
http://domesticatedacademic.wordpress.com/2013/03/26/siracha-kettle-corn/
Yeah, this looks good. If it’s anything like the new Lay’s Sriracha chips, I would like it.
March 26, 2013
T1/ESF Alarm Conditions
http://www.whitsnet.com/Tutorials/T1/
It always seems to be tough to find the T1 alarm documentation I’m looking for when I need it. This page provides a nice little graphic that shows what alarms are present and in which direction the alarm indications are being sent (RAI/yellow alarm and AIS/blue alarm).