the foobar zone

I mean, what are these goddamn news agencies talking about in their stories about a fire in a bus depot, that makes it necessary to bring in the terrorist aspect?

I'm a firm believer that it being 2007, it should be possible - nay, easy - to pay bills on-line using a credit card. So it's a little surprising to come across systems which don't yet accept credit cards on-line.

For us europistanis, it's mightly irritating that by default, Macs come with a US style keyboard attached to them. It's irritating that there are pathological differences between latin-1 style keyboards in the first place, but who made the decision to swap keys like @ and "? What misery you have wreaked on the world?

[this article originally written in 2000, before the widescale implementation of dsl and other broadband technologies]

Lots of people ask why I regularly let off steam about dialup SMTP as a method for downloading email from their ISP. Here's a quick outline of my main gripes about it.