Father’s Day

Mom & DadToday was Father’s Day in the USA and that white-haired guy in the picture was my father. It’s the last picture I have of him, taken a few months before he died, ironically on my birthday. I was expecting a call, just not that call. That was in 1991. I had an InfoWorld column due that day and I wrote it, as I recall, about him. They indulged me.

We men spend our lives alternately emulating our fathers and rebelling against them, a process I was surprised to see lasts long after death. They give us their faces: certainly you can see a lot of him in me, though his face is mooshed a bit from landing a […]

By |June 17th, 2013|2013, Family|14 Comments
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Better late than never

exhaustionI’m back!

The process of switching I, Cringely from Media Temple to WP Engine, which was supposed to take a few hours, ended up taking more than a week!

Poor Jennie had to do the hard work, schlepping over thousands of files from a server that continually crashed. There may be an easier way to do it but we don’t know that way. Then WP Engine ran a security upgrade in the middle of our transition, freezing us out of the system because we were neither here nor there. My nemesis CloudFlare didn’t want to give up the DNS and when we finally got it switched it for some reason took two days to propagate.

But enough of […]

By |June 17th, 2013|2013, Internet|14 Comments
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Where’s Bob? Changing WordPress hosts.

WomenAtWorkIn case you’ve been wondering what’s up with this blog, we’re in the midst of moving it from one host to another. Truth be told, Jennie is in the midst of moving it. This will be my last post from Media Temple. My next post (a real one — it’s already written) should come later tonight from WP Engine.

When I left PBS at the end of 2008, Media Temple was state of the art, but that was then. After five years on essentially the same server platform with only a couple memory increases along the way, things were getting a little brittle as many of you have noticed. The hardware is old, some of the software […]

By |June 6th, 2013|2013, Internet|41 Comments
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What Intel and AMD clean rooms could teach hospitals

buttonIn 19th century Europe (and probably in America, too) women were less likely to die in childbirth if their babies were born at home or even on the street rather than in hospitals. The reason was simple: street and home births almost always involved the doctor or midwife washing their hands, thus minimizing the risk of infection. Doctors of the time rarely bothered to wash between hospital patients. Yum. Ignaz Semmelweiss first noticed this in Austria before 1850. Then Louis Pasteur came up with his germ theory of disease in 1864. Finally Joseph Lister in England (he of Listerine fame) pioneered the use of carbolic acid (phenol) antiseptics and the fight against germs took off […]

By |May 27th, 2013|2013, Government, Health, Science|64 Comments
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The nose knows

pew!We call it The Red Devil — a 1994 Jeep Grand Cherokee V-8 I bought online earlier this year mainly to pull a trailer filled with airplane parts. But perhaps we should have named it Stinky, because that’s what this column is all about. When buying something on the Internet, how can you make sure it doesn’t smell terrible?

You can’t.

I should have known. The price was too low, the pictures too good, but the seller had sold hundreds of cars online and boasted a 100 percent satisfaction rating. So did I, but my 82 transactions had taken 13 years to accumulate.

When the car arrived it looked great but it smalled like a thousand mice had been camping […]

By |May 24th, 2013|2013, Family, Internet, Science|55 Comments
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