Belastingdienst, the Dutch tax service, sent a form for me to fill out in which I needed to indicate projected future earnings. They do this almost each year—well, regularly—so that they can let you pay your taxes for 2020 in 2019 instead of the more reasonable 2021. And every year I postpone filling out this … Read More

I found the following in a mail from a client: I want this done tonight or tomorrow. It can’t take long and I don’t understand how to do it. I have nothing to add.

Today I had to move a Drupal installation from one domain (dev.example.com) to another (www.example.com). Most of my time was spent in waiting for back-ups to finish, but there was one other problem that took a good half hour to solve: one page (www.example.com/portfolio/) would give 403 errors, even though the page existed (as a … Read More

A couple of years ago I reviewed a book by web usability experts 37 Signals called Defensive Design for the Web in which they gave side by side examples of how to do web shops right and how to do them wrong. One of the examples had two sports stores go head to head. Both … Read More

I have been using the simplests of wikis, Usemod, as a business organizer on my laptop. For every day in the near future I make a link. I link to days from other days, and from month pages, and to month pages from year pages. The great advantage of the wiki as opposed to proprietary … Read More

I feel like such a rube! The Discovery Channel is organizing a reality show “in which the contestants will build elaborate Rube Goldberg machines“, according to BoingBoing. Being of a sometimes curious nature, I decided to check out the site they linked to, RealityWanted.com, but in order to view the entire application form I had … Read More

It’s a question I have to ask regularly of the direct marketing scum that call me on the phone: “Excuse me, are you calling me to sell me something?” For some reason, the phonetards try to postpone the anti-climax of the conversation as long as possible by trying to obscure the reason for their call. … Read More

If you wish to report a bug to a FOSS project (FOSS = Free and Open Source Software), you may run into a couple of snags. One is that some of the developers are zitfaced asshats who consider the slightest mention of the possibility of maybe something being wrong with their software as a direct … Read More

A while ago, one of my brothers explained that he had not only made the switch from making pots of coffee using the traditional method of Putting the Kettle On to making cups of coffee using a Philips Senseo coffee maker, but that he actually liked the switch for practical reasons. As it turned out, … Read More

Wikipedia used to have a warning label that said something to the effect that you had to take everything there with a grain of salt; which is sage advice for any encyclopedia. The idea being that a tertiary source like an encyclopedia can never be as authoritative as a primary or secondary source. (Let’s gloss … Read More