Arnout's Eclectica » Uncategorized

KEYWORD= no_go: relationship

amg — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 21:14:17 +0000

My company sent out an e-mail newsletter today, and I was just taking a quick peek at the bounces and out-of-office messages.

One stood out:

Microsoft Forefront Security for Exchange Server has matched a filter.
Filter name: "KEYWORD= no_go: relationship"
State: Purged

I guess "relationship" features relatively frequently in spam, but bouncing an email just because the word appears seems a bit blunt to me.

Debugging a printer

amg — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 17:28:25 +0000

Lately, our Canon S750 printer has started showing its age (nearly 6 years, which is not bad at all). It begun with a very sudden change in B&W print quality, which was mostly taken care of by cleaning the print head.

Today it stopped functioning altogether. It took me a while to notice that the printer light was alternating between green and orange (quite subtly so, at least to my colour blind eyes), but once I noticed that, a quick Google showed that it was suffering from a full waste-ink absorber.

That's not really a user-servicable part (I do software, not hardware...), but since the printer wasn't working anyway and I wasn't going to have it repaired, I thought I'd give it a try.

So: opened up the printer, spent some time figuring out which screws to unscrew, took out the sponge, rinsed, rinsed, rinsed, and rinsed some more, and cleaned up the sticky inky sludge that had collected at the bottom of the printer.

Am now waiting for the sponge to dry, so I'm not sure yet whether I fixed the problem or wrecked the printer completely. However, the reason for this post: while cleaning up my work area afterwards, I noticed that something had fallen out of the printer:

I'm calling her Grace...

And then, for the main course we’ll have…

amg — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 09:39:36 +0000

I was just looking at Recipezaar for some culinary inspiration, and found the following "popular recipes" on the home page:

Zen error messages

amg — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 09:12:57 +0000

Triggered by Brent Strange's recent Defect of the day, I remembered a few similarly Zen-like ones from a product I worked on years ago:

Colleagues from home

amg — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 19:47:47 +0000

When I was enjoying my sabbatical last year, I'd set up my LinkedIn profile to read "Principal Sabbatical Enjoyer at home".

Ever since, I've been receiving notifications from LinkedIn, telling me to get back in touch with colleagues from home:

Terminology clash

amg — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 18:55:47 +0000

Sometimes, words can have a very different meaning from one night to the next...

Last night, I looked at some CDO-related stuff on MSDN, and then hibernated my computer.

Tonight, I woke up my computer after having watched an episode of Dexter.

Having a Firefox tab titled "BodyParts Property" didn't have any special connotations last night... Funny, that.

Bereavement and other administrative projects

amg — Fri, 05 May 2006 19:27:46 +0000

Trying to notify my manager of a few upcoming days off using Microsoft Project Web Access, I got:

Microsoft sure has interesting ideas about "administrative projects"...