Matt's Blog

I periodically have people ask me what type of camera I have. And I’m never sure how to answer. Do I go for matter-of-fact? I have a Rebel T1i. But that’s meaningless to people who aren’t camera buffs. (And Canon enthusiasts at that.) So today, my conversation with the cashier with the Apple Store went [...]

I know that I’ve ranted here before about how I think much of my time spent in school was really a disservice. People who really understood their subject matter had an amazing opportunity to take my blank canvas of a mind, full of imagination and energy, and impart a fascination for arts, science, math, and [...]

Some people object to the phrase “Happy Holidays,” so I did this instead. wishes = [] # If someone celebrates no holidays, we need to # make sure we have a blank array and not nil reader.holidays_celebrated ||= [] # We can’t lump these together because some people celebrate more than one holiday. if reader.holidays_celebrated.include?(Christmas) [...]

It drives me crazy to see how small businesses advertise themselves. Consider that you run John Doe Construction. You might get johndoeconstruction.com as a domain. But instead, people are registering terrible domains, like j-dcon.net. Shorter is better in some things, but this is really not one of them. “John Doe Construction dot com” is easy [...]

We’re talking to an SEO consultant. The thing that bugs me is that it’s a legitimate discipline, but filled with a combination of people who give contradictory advice and people who make used car salesman with bad hairdos look like charming people. It reminds me of something I find fascinating, though: the spread of completely [...]

I’m always bothered by how people put prices. For example, I just read the sentence, “Tickets are $20, plus a $1 theater restoration fee.” Doesn’t that mean that the price is $21, then? My cell phone bill is another pet peeve. It’s for the amount I signed at, plus taxes, regulatory fees, 911 fees, and [...]

Most of you have probably heard about it by now, but Google decided to offer a public DNS server. While some are suspicious (it is a good way to get some neat information), their reasoning appears to be, “We’re crawling pretty much the whole Internet and thus have looked up records for pretty much everybody, [...]

How do I tell a non-tech-savvy person how to take a screenshot? “Press the Print Screen button” is easy, and I can walk them through uploading it. But what about the in-between step of moving it from your hard drive to a file? Is mspaint recommended because it’s installed? I want these directions for novice [...]

I’m always watching disk space. I don’t think I’ll have to worry about that for a long time.

I tend to get annoyed most of the time people talk about SSDs. There are two main arguments against them: They don’t last long*, and They’re expensive. On the first point, this is more or less wrong. Everyone sees that they have a finite life and flips out, not realizing that the MBTF is usually [...]