……. I’m in history mode again, here’s another nice Tech Commercial.

……..where you couldn’t just download forgotten or lost installation media from the internet or your company portal.

Go to the Where is the ANY KEY website and read tails on IT fails, Have fun.

Troubleshooting a printer problem:
Me: sorry your printer doesn’t work I need to get a driver from the internet
User: Is it far this internet?
Me: mmm?
User: I can drive you there
Me: ……………yea would be great

Source: tayduck

I recently got some scripts that were nicely written, meaning well formatted, documented and structured. What I liked most was the clearly visible separation of the main code and the subroutines. The code blocks were separated by ASCII Code based letters as shown on the picture below.

If you go to http://www.network-science.de/ascii/ you can create your own text using the ASCII Generator.

Now that we speak about ASCII, during my little search on the web for the above, I also came across another fancy tool called ASCII Generator .NET. The tool allows converting pictures into ASCII Code.

Converted Windows 7 Logo

Converted John Lennon Picture

UPDATE (Thanks Steve)
Here is another resource for ASCII Text. http://www.figlet.org/

The inspiration for this post came from a tweet which had the link below included which is a nice comic explaining why you should pretend you don’t know anything about computers.

If you are an IT Pro, you probably know that scenario where you are at someone’s place and you are being asked what you do for for a living. Usually I just reply with “I work in the IT sector” where then usually the other person replies with “oh so you repair PCs?”. Because explaining my job (Technology Consultant)  to someone who is not working in the IT sector isn’t that easy anyway I try to keep the answer as simple as possible by saying “I support companies to run their IT”. But usually that doesn’t help much, so if possible I try to switch topic or ask them what they do.

But sometimes, it’s better you don’t mention that you work with computers at all. Why ? well read this comic “Why it’s better to pretend you don’t know anything about computers” and you know why. I’m sure it has happened to you before.

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What Do You Do For a Living Again?
Alternative responses to "So, what do you do for a living?"
How do you explain your job to your spouse?
What Exactly Do You Do for a Living?

Watch this video performed by Wes Borg. Enjoy !

Watch the GUI Timeline from 1973 until 2007 here

Here’s a video that explains how to embed a YouTube video into a PowerPoint slide.

Just came across this video where people are being asked to explain what a Browser is. Its funny most people use it every day, but obviously don’t pay much attention how they get on to the internet. It’s just a matter of clicking that blue E.

Interesting concept from Cullen Dudas. An Interview with Cullen can be found here

My only comment on this one “It’s huge !”

The Information Architects have published an updated trend map of today’s internet.

Last week-end I was sitting in an airplane and read a magazine that was provided for free to travelers at the airport (of course i had chosen an IT related one ). The magazine contained an article talking about the top 10 data loss disasters collected by Ontrack.

The Top 10 list of data loss disasters 2008 can be found here.

Yesterday evening I was helping out my wife with creating some invitation cards for a children event that takes place during spring vacation. For the juniors there was a picture on the front side of the invitation that was okay, but we both decided that for the teen-agers we must use a different theme.

Finding the right picture wasn’t easy, so we decided to just write text, but to use a cool font. Although Office 2007 already comes with a large number of fonts, we were just looking for something different.

We have found a lot of free cool fonts on dafont.com. The site is well organized and all fonts are categorized. Have a look, it’s amazing what fonts are being used for, not just letters and numbers.

I just checked the Microsoft download site to see if there is anything new. On the top of the list (sorted by release date) I found the Windows 2000 Service Pack 4. Something must have got mixed up there.