Rants
Microsoft Office 2007
I have been using Microsoft’s 2007 version of their office suite for a little over six months now and while i have managed to become accustomed to some parts of the “ribbon” there are other parts where it is sheer torture to use for anybody with a good working knowledge of the older version.
One example [...]
IBM ThinkPad T60 by Lenovo
I recently bought an IBM (Lenovo) ThinkPad T60 to replace my four year old Dell Precision laptop. You would think that moving from a 2.0 GHz Pentium M to the latest dual core 2.15 GHz processor and going up in RAM from 1 GB to 2 GB there would be a major difference in performance [...]
Partial News Reporting or PC Bias?
I was on a crew in Ethiopia’s southern Ogaden region in April. I left the crew just three days before an attack by ONLF (Ogaden National Liberation Front) rebels, a muslim based group from the pictures shown. The attack killed sixty-five local employees (the people that the rebels claim to be fighting to liberate) and nine of [...]
Pullout from Iraq
Although I generally tend to disagree with the majority I have to admit that I am in agreement with them one the subject of pulling out of Iraq. I do, however, have a very different reason for thinking this way. Most people want to get the soldiers out of harms way or want to stop [...]
Online Purchasing
I wonder how many of you out there have problems with online purchases while you are on the crew. I just had another payment rejected by one of the big online payments processing groups. My firewall just came up for renewal or, more accurately, informed me that it would soon be up for renewal.
I decided [...]
HSE in Seismic
Once again I am back to the subject of HSE and its insidious effects on the industry. This episode is brought about by a HSE representative who massages the books by saying that people visiting the doctor on the crew and receiving medical treatment do not constitute medical treatment cases.
How on earth does this get [...]
Firewall Performance
I recently uninstalled Outpost Pro’s Firewall from my laptop because of performance issues. Outpost had just announced a full suite of firewall and antivirus and I had been thinking seriously about giving up my old antivirus program and moving to the suite when the performance issues started. I really liked the superb control allowed by [...]
Restaurants guilty of sponsoring "extreme eating" say food police
Here is one of the type of headline that really galls me. What kind of garbage are these people expecting us to swallow now? Are we to believe that, in a world which sells more diet books than ever before and has headlines such as this all too often, there are still people who are not [...]
Banks: It’s their profit, and your loss
I just read an article about the so-called service that banks provide today. In the seismic industry most of us get paid by wire transfer. How long does it take for the banks to credit your account? I live in Indonesia and the central bank there has the first chop at it, followed by my bank, [...]
We want your photos
The picture at the left was uploaded to the gallery by one of our readers on the very first day he registered. I find it hard to believe that with so many new registered users nobody out there has any pictures they would like to share with the rest of us. We add a [...]
