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Thursday, November 18, 2004

Alice and Bill's Startling Technical Confessions, Vol 1
What is This? The main job of a good technology columnist is to detect hype from reality and useful products and technologies from the never will-happens. That what Bill and I have been doing for years and years. But we're mere mortals after all, so I thought this week we could reveal to loyal A&B readers our own technical confessions. And since I came up with the idea, I guess I should +gulp+ go first.

Here goes....

Alice's Confession: I have no idea why, but I really do believe that Febreeze has odor-killing molecules. Sure, it's just a scented deodorizing spray like people have been using since the 1950's, but for some reason I really believe that something chemical is going on when I spray Febreeze on my rug and drapes.

Is that lame or what???!! Share your own confessions in the comments section if you dare.

Bill, Interns, you're next!

Bill: Well, painful as it is, I too have confession. I once thought I was incapable of making a mistake. Soon after, it occurred to me that I might not really know more than most other people. It was immediately painful to then realize that my first observation was correct...

# Permalink Posted at 2:09 PM 17 comments Email this Link

Comments on this Item:

My confession? I love books. How low tech is that? You just can´t connect to a moniter, or an LCD TV. They don´t give you a whole new world like a book (although Halo on that LCD TV does come dang close). I just love the fact that I can sit back and read, and not get a headache from the constantly refreshing screen. Or that when you read a book, its quiet, without the buzz of 3 80mm fans buzzing in your ear. I love my new technology, and the world surrounding it (look where I "work"), but still, nothing gives me much more pleasure than a good, old-fashioned book.

P.S. I have been trying this Ebook thing (I live in Mexico, you try reading in a foreign language) and no, sorry, it just isn´t the same.

# posted by Cyrus 4:37 PM

Once I thought I was wrong, but I was mistaken.

# posted by Anonymous 8:11 PM

I guess one thing to confess is I like shoveling snow with a shovel. I guess I can admit to that now that I will probably never see snow here in Florida. I kinda like it when it was refreshingly cold, fresh snow, all alone nobody to bother you or ask you to do anything else. Well I guess it helped I lived in a rural area of Northeast Wisconsin when I did shovel

# posted by jtintle 11:07 PM

I used to work with this guy, Dr. Steve Van Toller, and if it counts towards validating your beliefs, he reckons Febreze works pretty much as they say it does. And he should know.

# posted by Anonymous 2:47 AM

I thought that Febreeze was the biggest load of crap EVER when it first came out. Puh-LEASE. But man, my sister wouldn't shut up about it. So now I have a bottle. Hey, if it works, who cares if it's magic.
Or something.

I'm trying to come up with some way in which I've been recently duped, and I got nothing. I thought Yahoo was the best thing going for a while, but now I hate it. Well, turns out it WAS the best thing going, but better stuff has emerged.

Let me think on it, I'm sure I'll come up with something. I mean, I'm not flawless, am I?

Am I?

# posted by Terry 6:38 AM

I like my rocking chair. I'm only 56 but I can spend hours on the back porch rocking and listening to the birds and other critters. And do I bring out my laptop with me? NO! I read a good book.

Will, from Lafayette, CO

# posted by Anonymous 7:30 AM

Hey, I like Disco.

# posted by Phillip 9:15 AM

I thought windows xp pro could run sql server faster than 2000. Not!

# posted by metermax 11:22 AM

on the heels of a prevsiou poster....

I like soft rock (or adult contemporary, as it's sometimes called), and have since my teens. Actually, I've always preferred it.

# posted by Anonymous 11:55 AM

Can we declare musical confessions to fall under the "too much information" category? I suppose admitting you have Barry Manilow in your iPod might count since there's an oblique tech angle there... but really folks, they're supposed to be tech confessions, not poor-taste confessions....

# posted by Anonymous 12:05 PM

Ok, ok. I have an illegally downloaded concert video of Barry Manilow on my MythTV box.

But I never really watch it. No, really!

# posted by Anonymous 12:16 PM

I have a wireless lan, I build server, I code in php & mysql. But all my billed time is recorded in an A4 size diary. Nothing look more satisfying than to see the last 7 years of my working life lined up in its own dead tree.

# posted by fragbait 12:17 PM

These are great!!

Ok, here's another one from me:

I liked Lotus better than Excel.

# posted by Alice 12:44 PM

Is saying you liked the non-Microsquish product better really a "confession?" I would have put it as "signs of intelligent life" :-)

Along the same lines, I liked Word-Pro way better than Word....

# posted by Anonymous 1:01 PM

heck, I like Microsoft Works better than either of those spreadsheet programs. Try convincing an organization to use it though! The word processing, spreadsheet, and yes database are usable for at least 75% of our users out there even if they DO want their list of to-do items to be italicized in Boldoni 24-point type, and it comes installed for free on a lot of PCs (well it used to, not sure about now). "but noooooooooo!" as a certain comic actor from around the time of Bill's Camaro used to say - we've got to buy an expensive and complicated Office Suite!

# posted by Tim 1:24 PM

Well, if you were a big corprate exekative, would you want "the Woiks" or would you want "a suite?"

Marketing.... We make you buy what you don't need.

# posted by Bill 7:40 AM

A customer once complained that the computer systems we delivered with an industrial control system were too slow. The believed this because they saw the Windows "working in background" pointer (arrow+hourglass) when running certain tasks.

One night after the customer left, we logged into the machines and changed the working-in-background pointer to show just the pointer arrow instead of pointer arrow+hourglass. The next day, the customer raved that we must have given them new computers as the machines seemed to be twice as fast as the old ones.

# posted by Anonymous 11:48 AM

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