Sean’s Obsessions

We recently dumped the Winnipeg Free Press for the National Post. What a welcome change! Anyway, an article today caught my eye: Reasonable Terms of Agreement. Alas, the article doesn’t seem to be available for non subscribers. Summary below.
Basically, a salesman changed companies on the promise of higher commission (among other [...]

It’s another year. I’m not going to make any predictions because I don’t see the point. But here’s what’s happening with me over the next year.
First is I’ll hopefully be getting into VoIP at work, especially in the call centre area. I’m looking forward to this, and depending on which way we [...]

Every so often, I’ll respond to a scammer’s email just to waste his time. Usually they’re pretty boring, but the latest one was a lot of fun.
It all started with this message…

Dear Sir/Madam,
I am Dr. Liu Peijin, managing director of China National Arts & [...]

I found this at Searchenginewatch. I should prefix the list with a favourite phrase: “Arguing on the Internet is like running in the special olympics. Even if you win, you’re still a retard.”
“IN THIS FANTASY WORLD OF YOURS, DO YOU HAVE ANY MAGICAL POWERS?”
“What Color is the sky in your world ”
“I [...]

About 8 months ago a vendor referred to me as a Cisco bigot in an email that went to his SE, who mistakenly forwarded it to me as part of a reply to something else. I got a good laugh out of it, though the vendor was very apologetic. As the company I [...]

Recently seen on PICLIST:
Author: Dennis Crawley
Date: 2004-09-17 12:56 -500
To: Microcontroller discussion list - Public.
Subject: [EE] Finding a chip…
A week or two ago, a huge lightning strike over Buenos Aires, and one chip
of a telephone switcher just almost disappears. I’ve look for it, but I’ve
failed.
Perhaps somebody is in [...]

Part of a letter I received from IBM…

Since the CRTC doesn’t have an RSS feed (and I asked a while ago), I made one myself.
http://ertw.com/~sean/crtc.xml
It updates every morning at 0830 CST. Due to the nature of their site layout, I pull data from their “What’s new today” page, so it’s possible I may miss a day here and there if I [...]

Dictionary definitions of a word:
define:word
Faster than going to dictionary.com, though not as complete
Search for a string in the URL:
inurl:string
Handy for when you remember part of the url
Specify the file type:
filetype:pdf
(or whatever)
Handy when you want to exclude pdfs (ie -filetype:pdf), or when you’re trying to find something in particular and need to narrow down the [...]

I’m in downtown Toronto next week for some training, not sure of the schedule, but let me know if you want to hook up for a beer.