Day: July 17, 2006

  • My OCD is showing, twenty-four-seven

    One of those “buzzwords” we’ve learned to live with over the years is “24×7” (aka 24/7) which, of course, indicates twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. I’ve never really liked this term, but that’s just a personal quirk. There’s nothing inherently wrong with it.

    I’ve bumped into an expansion of that term that bothers me a fair bit, though. It’s cheesy, and what’s worse is that it doesn’t even make sense. If 24 is the number of hours in the day, and 7 is the number of days in the week, if you want to expand that logic then you’d have to use the number of weeks in the year, right? So where does “24×7×365” come from? Last time I checked, there aren’t over three hundred weeks in a given year. By all rights it should be “24×7×52,” and even then I wouldn’t exactly be happy with it… but it wouldn’t make me quite so actively unhappy.

    I can hardly expect any sort of widespread, meaningful change just because some random nutjob on the Internet has pointed out the inherent absurdity in play. Complaining about it provides some amusement value, though.

  • Mouse Identification Training

    The product is called “VMware.” It is, in effect, a server that allows you to host a number of virtual computers on a single machine. The geek value for something like this is through the roof, which makes the following instructions found in the upgrade documentation terribly amusing.

    8. Select your mouse.

    Here are some helpful mouse identification hints:

    • If the connector is round, your mouse is a PS/2 or a Bus mouse.
    • If the connector is trapezoidal with nine holes, it is a serial mouse.
    • If the connector is a flat rectangle with a slot, it is a USB mouse.

    I’ll grant you that their instructions are wholly accurate. However, I question the judgement of the person who thinks (s)he has any business at all installing or upgrading a sophisticated piece of software but doesn’t know how to tell one type of pointing device from another!