August 01, 2003
Unclean! Unclean!
Today's Dilbert closes with a comment that so resonates with me. I spend my days debugging both. When a customer reports an issue, I have to ascertain whether it's real or just customer error. If it is real, things break down into being a software error or a hardware error (a logic bug). I'm glad I spent my graduate studies in computer engineering because it's a balance between software and hardware.
Comictastic review - I've been reading comics for over a month with a program called Comictastic. I registered it within days of downloading it. It takes a little bit to configure it because you need to know where your favorite comics exist on the web. From there you point it at those websites and it can automatically grab and download the comics for you whenever you press the refresh button. From there you browse them in a familiar three panel interface (see their website for a screenshot). One panel has the list of comics you "subscribe" to, another has a calendar showing which day is selected, and the third panel shows the comic strip. It archives the comics so that you can look back in time -- useful for those comics that doing a running theme for days in a row. You simply click on the dates on the calendar to see the older archives of the comic. Combined with NetNewsWire, it's one of the few pieces of shareware priced software that I've purchased and use daily.
Prints going in the mail - I got the photos from yesterday's album back from the photo lab yesterday. They turned out great! It was a big bill because there was a mixture of 5x7s and 4x6s. I'll be sending a bunch of the family pictures to mom and dad next week and from there they can distribute them Alyssa, Chris, and Suzy.