While searching for a job, at some point, you will receive a rejection letter. It is no big deal. It happens to all of us. The letter gets filed with the others and you move on. However today, after receiving yet another rejection letter for a position I was not even interviewed for, containing a familiar blurb about my "impressive qualifications", I decided to search my archive for the word impress. Continue reading…
Articles
September 2025
Perhaps the strangest aspect of working at Big Package is the blatant contradictions regarding rules. You are expected to follow the rules, but following the rules leads to long frustrating days. When you get back to the station, you will then be greeted with the inquiry as to why your shift went so long.
The work amounts to a slow death by a thousand literal paper cuts.
July 2025
Operating Systems have many similarities and differences. Below is a list of computer Operating Systems I have used, listed in alphabetical order. Depending on how and whether you count specific versions, I have used over a dozen different Operating Systems.
June 2025
Experiencing a device failure can range from a mild annoyance to catastrophic. Through the years, I have heard many people speculate whether failures are due to a component costing a nickel or some other seemingly infinitesimal amount. In the case of a television which recently failed, I can confirm that suspicion was correct. A failed capacitor costing the manufacturer a nickel was the source of the failure. Continue reading…
TLDR
HTML is a mark up language and the last two letters, the M and the L literally stand for Markup Language!
The Longer Version…
Like many people of a certain age, HTML was among the first computing languages learned. The first paragraph from almost every teaching resource related to HTML explains the letters as an acronym for HyperText Markup Language. It is likely nearly everyone reading this knew that already. Why state what everyone seemingly already knows? The reality, at least reflected by job postings is, not everyone knows this. Continue reading…
March 2024
Students of the English language, are taught when expressing a specific number of items through the written word, you write the word for the number if it is less than ten or twenty or sometimes one hundred. As an example, one would write, The horse ate four apples
rather than The horse ate 4 apples
.
When it comes to job postings, exceptions to the rules are frequent and sometimes with puzzling implications. Continue reading…
January 2024
Using GPIO pins with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, Manjaro Arm, Ubuntu for Arm and Linux distributions other than Raspbian is challenging but not difficult. The challenge arises primarily from documentation gaps which lead most people to simply give up and go back to using Raspbian. While Raspbian is suitable and gets the job done for many, one should not feel compelled to give up on their Linux distribution of choice due to documentation gaps. Continue reading…