Today's rant is on the 'After-Greeting Message' that cell phone carriers insist on forcing all of your callers to listen to whenever they get your voice mail.

I took a nerd test and apparently I am a Nerd King.

If you bother to take the test, then rest assured, you are a nerd.

I recently downloaded and installed the trial version of JetBrains ReSharper and I am so happy with it I can't see straight. This is by far the best developer plugin for Visual Studio that I have ever come across. I haven't paid for it yet ($149 for the C# edition, $50 more for the full version that covers VB as well), but I plan to. I have a license for CodeRush, but

FYI: After receiving the latest iPhone update (to revision 1.1.4), my phone wouldn't connect with my bluetooth headset anymore (a Plantronics Voyager 510). The phone's bluetooth settings showed it was still paired, but it refused to *hook up*.

I un-paired it and re-paired it and is solled the prolen.

XKCD

I ordered a customized HP dv9700t laptop on January 27, 2008.

<Click to full story for the details>

Great price for such a beefy machine, eh?

The problem is that, even though I paid an extra $50.99 for expedited shipping, at the completion of the order I was informed that the build date will be February 22, 2008! Almost a FULL MONTH after placing the order; BEFORE IT EVEN SHIPS!!!

In preparation for the big game this Sunday, I was reviewing old Super Bowl ads from the past years. I came upon this montage of all of the Budweiser Frog and Lizard ads from 1995. Only the first one was shown on the Super Bowl. The rest of them came out over the course of the next year.

Enjoy...

Reading through my posts, I notice a decidedly negative streak of late. I am not normally a negative person, so I can't explain how this has happened. Maybe bad things have just happened to this good person.

I am going to strive to be positive from now on.

By the way, the Konica Minolta Magicolor 2400 W prints beautiful, full color pages. it doesn't do too bad with photos either, as long as you are using good photo paper; but if you want good, archival quality photo prints, you have to use dye sublimation.

Additionally, Netgear makes great products. Get some.

WebHostAutomation's "Helm" server control panel is buggy and quirky. If you have a hosting business and can afford a staff of developers, you might want to write your own. If you can only afford one guy and he is good at troubleshooting, then Helm is pretty cheap.

I won't say anything nice about Windows Mobile or spammers though; and you can't make me. Nyah!

If you have been reading below, you see that I tried to install a Netgear print server only to run in to sever problems with the installation. If I wasn't a professional computer guy, I'd have given up and returned the stupid thing to the store. That's why there are so many of these refurbished devices on the market. That should have been a clue.

Once I finally found a website where the user was kind enough to share his experience getting the stupid thing set up, I connected my Konica-Minolta Magicolor 2400W to it and discovered that the manufacturer had crippled the printer such that it just plain won't work with a print server device.

How can regular computer users ever be expected to accomplish something so mundane as to connect a simple network print server to a simple printer and share it with other users? These manufacturers have a LOOOONG way to go before the computer and its associated peripherals can be easily used by people who don't earn a living solving computer problems.

... or maybe they are all in collusion with the Geek Squad?

I bought a Konica-Minolta Magicolor 2400W from Sam's Club for about $250 because it was a pretty fast color laser with relatively inexpensive, individual cartridges for each color. It also has a very good print quality. However, since I have had it, I have decided that it isn't worth the many and unrealistic cons.

Cons:

• Windows only. (Drivers page)
  There are no Mac or Linux drivers available for this printer and there never will be. if you decide to get a Mac or maybe try Linux ... tough.
  
  
• Terribly network unfriendly.
  The driver for this printer WILL NOT properly deploy to networked machines. In order to connect to the printer over a network, you must download and install the driver, then manually connect to the printer. If you want to share the printer with your peers, then you should've spent more money, as Konica-Minolta has purposefully crippled basic networking functionality in their driver in order to force the printer into the "consumer" category. Nevermind the fact that most consumers like to share printers with each other.
  
  Come on KM! It isn't like we're sharing needles!
  
  
• Will NOT work with a standard print server device.
  I purchased a Netgear WGPS606 wireless print server, but the Magicolor immediately throws an error when connected to it. Konica-Minolta is unrepentant and unhelpful; actually just plain silent with regard to questions about the issue. Like the driver problem, their attitude seems to be, "tough noogies. If you want a printer to share, we want more of your money".

If you want a color laser printer, are planning to connect it directly to your PC and will never share it with anyone, then the Magicolor 2400W may be an ok choice. But for a modern home or small business network used by people who want to share their printer with others, the Konica-Minolta Magicolor 2400W will be quite a disappointment. Other printers are far friendlier and more capable. You may spend a little more for toner, but that is a small price to pay for an uncrippled device.

Shame on you Konica-Minolta and your slimy marketing department! Your engineers should also be ashamed of themselves for not defying your demands to cripple an otherwise finely crafted piece of hardware.

I just got a Netgear WGPS606 wireless print server / 4-port switch. Seems nice, but the box was supposed to come with a CD in it. It did not. Unfortunately Netgear expects you to use the wizard on the CD in order to configure the device and doesn't include any documentation on manually connecting to a printer on the device. They also don't provide a download for the missing wizard application in case you lose the disk, get a defective package like I did, or want to print from a Mac, Linux or other OS.

A lot of Googling led me to this fine resource ...

http://www.sapphyre.org/documents/netgear-wgps606.html

He does a great job explaining how to get the item up and running without the stupid wizard CD. Shame on you Netgear. Your total lack of concern for your users is shameful.

By the way, Greg Nesbitt was kind enough to not restrictively copyright the document, so I made a text file backup here, just in case his page goes away someday.