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Michael Brundage writes an popular article about what it is really like to work at Microsoft. Flexible working environment, minimal paperwork, hard work, gripes about managers, free drinks. So nothing too earth shattering or surprising there.

But what struck me about this blog is that it isn’t a blog. It is simply a good old fashioned Web page.

No categories. No comments. No statistics. No trackbacks. No fancy themes. No calendar. No widgets. No plugins.

1GB memory stick

I was seriously considering selling all my stock options and purchasing a 1GB USB memory stick for an amazing 30 GBP.

Then I thought I would get an account at box.net and upload all the precious files, that my wife sadly lost when my hard disk died a couple of years ago, there instead. This has the advantages that if I ever need to take my memory stick to Seattle to show Auntie Rita, this will be possible, I won’t be able to leave the memory stick in a client’s PC in Eastern Europe and, finally, it will cost me 30 GBP less.

book club

I have started a book club. I am the only member. I realise that this is a little unusual but I prefer to choose the books myself rather than someone else (or even worse, the Daily Mail).

I held my first meeting last night which was very well attended by all members. Norman gave a fascinating review of ‘Into Thin Air’ by Jon Krakauer. This book was written by a journalist and experienced climber who took part in a commercial, guided expedition to climb Mount Everest in May 1996. After reaching the summit, bad weather struck resulting in the death of eight climbers from three different expeditions.

too good to be true ?

I am lazy. I buy my gas from British Gas and my electricity from Seeboard. It takes a lot for me to overcome my inertia and change provider to save money.

However, I am interested in Carphone Warehouse’s offer of 8M/bit broadband, unlimited UK landline and international (28 countries including Australia) calls, all for 21 GBP per month.

This is much less than I am currently paying Telewest for an inferior package of telephone and broadband services.

birth of a photo blog

Absolutely no-one has ever asked me: ‘Norman - why don’t you start a photo blog of all these interesting places you visit ?’

So here we go. No. 1 in a very occasional series.

The Sage Gateshead in Newcastle (from the Tyne Bridge)

perspective

You start to feel small and insignificant. [ Via Populicious ]

in flight humour

I enjoyed these quotes from airline staff with a sense of humour (via Tom Kyte).

A couple of years ago, I was on a British Airways flight that was making its final approach to some anonymous airport in Scandinavia.

Quite suddenly and without any warning, the landing was aborted. The plane stopped descending, quickly started to climb, levelled out and then resumed a familiar, circular holding pattern.

I was a little perturbed but no-one else seemed bothered as though this was perfectly normal so I stopped screaming, apologised to my immediate neighbours, dabbed the sweat from my brow with a napkin and picked up my copy of ‘High Life’.

changes at WordPress

I go away to spend a few days sitting on the UK’s gridlocked motorway network and I discover those chaps at WordPress have been making yet more changes.

The Regulus theme has been upgraded to 2.1.1 and now includes bug fixes, support for sidebar widgets, personalised header graphic and lots more besides.

In addition, every single post is now prefixed by ‘Posted by Andy C’. This is completely superfluous in my case and I would dearly like to turn it off. This is my personal blog. Who else is going to be posting to it ?

more wireless fun

Buoyed by my recent, successful firmware upgrade of my Linksys wireless router, and for the sake of completeness, I decided to upgrade the driver software of the Linksys Wireless USB adapters to the latest version (2.0.2).

In addition, prompted by my wife’s perceptive question of ‘Is it not working because someone has hacked into it ?’, I also decided to increase the security on my embryonic wireless network by disabling SSID broadcasts and enabling MAC address filtering so only specified PC’s can connect.

wireless upgrade

I have been experiencing more wireless weirdness recently. What once was stable and reliable has become increasingly sporadic, unreliable and damned irritating for no obvious reason.

I am not a networking sort of guy. I am not particularly interested in wireless networking. I use WEP in an effort to secure my network and stop my neighbours piggy backing off it but that’s about it.

I am ashamed to admit that, on one occasion, when my wireless network was broken, I briefly piggy backed on an unsecured network just to temporarily solve the problem.