Gavin’s Digital Diner

The failure statistic is often cited, usually with a moan and a wail. It goes like this: 30, 40, or 50 percent of all IT projects go bad. The rest — the ones that actually succeed — well, they go “slightly bad too.” At least some of them do. In the end, nobody’s happy. Jobs [...]

Naming an epoch using the superlative prefix of “post” — as in post-industrial, or post-modern, or the particularly unsatisfying post-millennial — is the one true indicator that we haven’t a clue. When I hear it, I tend to silently grumble the opening lines from A Tale of Two Cities:
It was the best of times, it [...]

I think I was eight when I read my first “real” book — of course, that’s not counting comics, Willy Waddle, or books designed to be chewed. The book was Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons, a proper book; a marvelous story for a boy who spent his days poking at squiggly-wiggly things in the tide [...]

I think it was Alan Kay who once said (and I’m paraphrasing here): the personal computer won’t really be personal until you can wear it on your T-shirt. I think of that quote every time I see an IPod commercial.
I find it phenomenal how much of what defines this connected age actually is actually pretty [...]

You may remember my April adventures with a beta of Microsoft’s “Windows Home Server” (AKA: WHS). WHS is a neat little consumer product. I think it also has some applicability in the NGO-SOHO space. It’s perfect, for example, for a nonprofit with fewer than ten or so people in need of automated backup and some [...]

I’m somebody’s perfect demographic. No doubt about it. I like gadgets. My house is wired top to bottom with CAT5, and I’ve somewhere between four and eight computers, servers, PCs, various other weird devices, along with all sorts of digital appliances in various stages of construction or deconstruction. That’s not counting the two phone systems [...]

Just a couple of updates to my original Blackberry Modem Mash:

After a few experiments on a few different machines, it does appear that you need both the Blackberry Device Manager and the Blackberry Desktop, and they both have to be running.
In a field test (I was in a hotel), it took both. It [...]

It’s a cold, windy Saturday so I decided to check out the rumor that one could blog directly from the new version of Word (Office 2007). Since I’ve been putting stuff up on the Digital Diner, I’ve discovered the following:

Typing these things online is a drag.
Cutting and pasting them from Word seems to [...]

I was recently doing some background research on the costs and affordability of using 3G for internet connectivity in South Africa.  Well, as these things tend to happen, that research got me thinking about similar options in the U.S. And, that reminded me that I’ve always meant to try using EDGE now that I have [...]

Every once in a while I stumble across useful tools, things I want in my bag of tricks.  Hamachi is one of those tools.  (Why is it called Hamachi?  Hamachi = Tuna = which sounds like tunnel? That’s a guess.)
With Hamachi, at first blush, you’re left with the question: what do I do with it.  [...]