Browse by Tags
All Tags »
Geekrant (
RSS)
I'm not really in the mood to argue. I mean, I've had some excellent food lately, which should really put anyone in a good mood. But I'm still shocked and appalled. And I really should've replied to the news that photography is banned from the station with a chilly, "what for?" You see, according to the best guess of the Montreal train station's security, I apparently must look like a terrorist. Wow, they should've seen me when I was all scruffy and bearded in university. One of my friends from back then thought I was a History, rather than a Commerce student, for that simple fact. This is the second time in two months that I've been witness to an instruction from security to stop taking photos in a government-owned facility. And it's so stupid I wish I got drop the hammer on someone the way America's Henry Waxman does two and a half minutes into this video . Waxman is understandably annoyed with the stonewalling he gets from the EPA about...
This is funny if you know a few basics about quantum physics, simply because of the instant joke that stems from it: Quantum Cryptography Broken, and Fixed . The joke is in the comments to the article - " It was actually broken AND fixed at the SAME TIME! " It's an easy one - an earlier series of comments is even better: > Quantum stuff is so illogical to us mortals that you'd expect attempting to break it would just make it stronger. Which is precisely what happened. It continues along these lines, becoming progressively more incomprehensible to people who aren't interested in this sort of thing. Which of course is a sign that I should probably get back to studying for my exam. Ironically, however, reading articles like these at /. (slogan: New for nerds, stuff that matters) is technically a form of studying if you focus on security issues and ignore the non-essential nerd stuff, like HP's deal to buy EDS which is important for many reasons - perhaps you own...
A week after they sent me the e-mail making it official, my certificate finally showed up at the office, proudly proclaiming to the world that I'm a CA. Whee! The other 1157 pieces of 'mail' where spams that hit me - roughly as much as last month . Although the ICAO should probably be ashamed of itself for actually INCLUDING some old fashioned junk mail with the certificate - an offer for insurance with TD Meloche Monex. How. Incredibly. Tacky. Whoever thought of that idea should be stripped of their CA, if they have one, for bringing disrepute upon the profession. We have a bylaw along those lines which mandates for an expulsion or a flogging of some sort. I say we enforce the rules, even if the offender does work for the Institute. Scratch that. Especially. I exaggerate a bit - they're quite nice and friendly people at the ICAO. Their procedures could use some efficiency improvements, though. You see, I noticed that although my e-mail arrived last Friday, but it was the...
Unfortunately you won't learn how to pass most exams with this knowledge, but applying the rules or tips in Dave Pollard's "When not to use e-mail" posting will make you a much better communicator. This list applies to all people, but there are specific insights for auditors. Especially when you're starting out, and you find yourself thinking, "this is great, I can just e-mail everything and wait for answers to come back." Although it can, funnily enough, often work in spite of Pollard's list, it's important to know how this can and will fail. Above: there are media other than e-mail which you can use for communication, more successfully too Remember, that time is precious, and e-mail can unfortunately waste it. Consider these two 'rules'. 3. When you are seeking information that is not simple and straight-forward 4. When you're sending a few people complicated instructions The rules are tightly linked - the more confusing something gets...
Here's something post that Growth , Nancy and just about any Canadian should care about: a quick look at the current status of interest rates paid for small cash investments. Let's see how three banks measure up on 1 year GICs, as of right now: TD Canada Trust: 2.05% or 3% (poorly defined money market version) ING Direct: 3.75% HSBC: 2.30% I didn't do an exhaustive search because there are charts available at baystreet.ca and redflagdeals.com , among, no doubt, a few other places too that do the job for you. I figure banks must have decided that people are so sufficiently lazy that they'll take whatever product they're offering instead of moving their cash over to another bank. Only that can explain the over roughly 2% difference between the lower TD rate and the over 4% rates on redflag . What I like about redflag's site is that you can sort by any column, making it easy to identify who gives the best 1-year or 5-year rate. I had trouble confirming the 4.4% rate...
Some thoughts on flex-time popped up after seeing a this clip on Videosift with a bunch of American politicians walking out after a grandstanding speech making some spurious claims of support for disgraced Bush administration officials. What amused me about the video was thinking, well, actually, I can do that too. Not so much defend disgraced officials, but make my own hours. Of course, I leave for home either because I'm done work for the day or because I can finish it at home if I need to, and it does eventually gets done - on time. That's the nice thing about working "flexibly", from management's point of view - I get stuff done well and on time. The upside to me is that if we have 30 cm of snow on the way, I can just go home, or stay home for the whole day, spending some time shoveling the snow, and the rest with my laptop getting work done. I've seen things done the wrong way - at least the way I've read Cordie present her situation at PWC: I would argue...
And what is that wonderful creation courtesy of Dell, you ask? A laptop you desperately need for the winter. One that generates massive amounts of heat. Well, it's nothing that's especially unique to Dell, but you will never appreciate a scorching hot laptop more than when you've boarded a streetcar after spending any time being buffetted by December winds in downtown Toronto. It's a sweet relief to feel the Dual Core processors churn so hard that the computers fans are forced to work overtime shunting the warmth onto your legs. Especially true when some bloated walrus of a TTC patron decides to leave a window open. Gah.
Easy answer. This one. My first response to his associated related "Recruit Genie" site was "BWA-HA-HA-HA-HA" coupled with, "was this designed by a 12 year old with too much time on his hands?" "Strange as it may seem, employees don't have many free speech rights, especially when it comes to making negative, public comments about their current employer. That's just fine with us..." No. No. Stop. Which former Soviet Republic did you grow up in? How many cold winters did you experience in Siberia? Yes, badmouthing your boss is not something that's a Good Idea, but coming out like the all-knowing Oracle with your own commentary is worse than amateur. It looks like the sit is really a Borat DVD easter egg or something similar. It gets funnier, though. This is worse than the sales pitches I attempted for my college newspaper back in the day: Job posts are always free, but you can enhance your presence and your recruitment brand with an inexpensive...
As much as I like the suggestion to try washing more things to see if they survive , the charm in my recent experiment was to see if my mistake would end up not costing me too much. And, fortunately, it did - my earbuds have served me well all week, keeping my bopping my head as I write up various audit papers. One unfortunate development, though, is the fact Firefox is acting strange. I love it and its AdBlocking ways, but it's not acting the way it should on my home computer. My work laptop is running it great, but I don't take it home and shouldn't need to. I could re-install the program and everything would probably fix itself. But why do the boring solution when you can do something marginally more interesting? I've downloaded the Alpha Test (meaning it's still a 'rough draft', in software terms) of Firefox 3, code named Gran Paradiso. Should be interesting to see how it works. Download is available here - funny how tricky it was to find the link - since...
When computers don't behave, I get rather annoyed. The electronic demons are a form of torment that makes me start to understand how much it must suck to have to fight poltergeists and the like. So I think it's rather ironic that I'm an IT auditor. Or perhaps not ironic, but a "great fit". My biggest headache recently has been the fact that for the past few days I've had a horrible time with Gmail and Firefox on my home computer. Fortunately I can access it with my laptop from work, which is what I found myself doing because Gmail would suddenly stop working every now and then. I could also use Internet Explorer , of course, but then, I could also hug and kiss some poisonous snakes . I would've tried to fix this sooner, but I'm spoiled by Firefox's excellent crash recovery schemes - if the program shuts down unexpectedly, when you reload it auto-magically loads up all the windows you had open. Tonight I finally got so tired of the Gmail crashes - I...
One of the new things about tracking blogs through Google Reader is that you notice when people have made a posting that they subsequently delete. For example, there are two entries on Greg Mankiw's blog. And they have both since been deleted. The first link is to an article entitled "Mission Accomplished." The second link is to an article entitled "Making Milton Proud." Google Reader preserved not only the headlines, but the content of those articles too. First article: Mission Accomplished from Greg Mankiw's Blog by Greg Mankiw A reader emails me: After nearly two years as your reader, you've pretty much singlehandedly made me a fiscal libertarian out of a former democratic socialist. Second article: Making Milton Proud from Greg Mankiw's Blog by Greg Mankiw From an email this morning: After nearly two years as your reader, you've pretty much singlehandedly made me a fiscal libertarian out of a former democratic socialist. Wow, I did not just see...
When you get your first digital SLR camera , two things happen: You end up taking more photos, because the camera is so much faster. Each individual photos is generally also larger, because a typical dSLR will be higher rez (more megapixels) than a plain compact digital camera. I've been busy lately, which has cut back on the amount of time I have to delete the "b-class" photos or to just burn extra photos onto DVDs, 'just in case' I decide I want to keep more of them. If I shoot my entire memory card full, that's another 2 GB tossed into the hard drive. At this rate, I'm going to run out of room before the end of 2008, assuming I don't increase the frequency of my photo sprees. The nice thing, at least, is that I've been given my own personal photo storage folder on the network at work for the pictures I take that are work-related. I should really do some quick math to compare the number of photos I take just 'for myself' versus the amount...
This summer saw a rash of phishing attacks on customers of TD Canada Trust. Opportunistic crackers suckered people unfamiliar with the Internet into giving away their banking information. The gist of the scam is like this: "Someone is attacking your bank account." "Please go to our website to confirm your information." "Then you'll be safe." The scam is as brilliant as it is insidious: Yes, someone is trying to attack you. It's the person who just sent you that e-mail. The website they're sending you to will look identical to your bank's site. They'll take all the money out of your account as soon as they can or they'll extract all the information you give to commit identity theft, opening new credit cards accounts and other financial instruments in your name, ruining your credit card record. There are at least three things anyone going online should know: Your bank will never contact you by e-mail and ask you to share information or...
The team behind Bioshock caught a lot of flack for releasing a sub-par disc masquerading as a soundtrack for buyers of the game's Limited Edition in the UK. It was a mere three tracks, all remixes by Moby. What a disappointment if you paid extra for that. Fortunately, I never did. In a doubly awesome twist, 2K made up for it by releasing the entire soundtrack to the game's original in-game audio . Click here for a direct download . There's a cool story with the soundtrack composer at Music 4 Games . The game is set in the 60's and as such, includes a slew of licensed songs which - there's a discussion on the developer forums where some hardcore fans have figured out how to extract said songs. Yay again to Rock, Paper, Shotgun for tipping me off to the existence of all these goodies - it's one of my new favourite sites.
I think I just opened Windows Vista's "Mixer" for the first time. Doing this in all older versions of Windows gave you a chance to mute or unmute your inputs - microphone, MIDI, wave files and CD audio. And that was it. Well how's this for something long overdue? You can now mix the sound among your various programs. Do you want Windows sound cues at one volume level, videos playing out of Firefox at a lower level, and Winamp drowning both out? Now you can do it. Sweet.
Next page »