I took my new iPad to a meeting yesterday. An issue came up that made me want to look at an attachment to an old email. I whipped out the iPad and found the right folder, but the e-mail wasn’t there. In fact, I could find none of my old emails. When I got home,… [Read More]

Years ago, when I was at Echelon, we worked with several PC manufacturers who had an acronym for the experience that the user had when setting up a computer for the first time: OOBE, pronounced to rhyme with “scoobie” (or, if you are an aging hippie, “doobie”). It stood for Out Of Box Experience. I… [Read More]

In 1996 or 1997, when I was running engineering at Echelon, Intel sent us a computer to test. It was equipped with special hardware to allow it to go into a low power mode. We called the computer “Dozer.” Dozer occasionally had a hard time waking up. There were jokes about Rip Van Winkle. Around… [Read More]

Last week, I swapped a new set of four 2-terabyte drives into one of the Drobo arrays. I formatted the drive as an 8 GB single partition, created the top level directories, and set Vice Versa to work backing up the server on line files. After about two days, all the data had been transferred,… [Read More]

A few days ago, I came home and turned on my iPod Touch to check email. It said it couldn’t connect to the Exchange server. I went to a computer running Outlook and tried to log on. No dice. I pulled up a remote console window to see what was going on with the Exchange… [Read More]