Arnout's Eclectica

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.

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...

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

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:

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: