IT Skills Unfit for the Home

Never try to install and maintain redundant girlfriends......

Where else in life do we buy things that need daily maintenance, and need patched on a monthly basis. Your car?

GREGORY MAMAYEK

Telling your boss that they should max out their memory

Robert Clark

Using your flow charting skills to increase the speed at which you spouse prepares for that rare night out on the town.Ken Ritchie

Never patch a roof as many times as MicroSoft before you replace the roof.

Pete Cunningham

Establishing a pattern of naming all of your descendants after the moons in this solar system

Chuck Huffman

performing unattended backups in your drive

Erik Dauplaise
1. Trying to restart/reset your spouse with three fingers.
2. Defragmenting the rocks in your fish's bowl.
3. Picking your baby's name because it looks cool using the Symbol font.
4. Anything SCSI.

5. Using WYSIWYG in a personal ad.
6. Having a relationship database instead of a little black book.
7. Sex over IP (SoIP?).
8. Scheduling your bathroom breaks with Kronos.
9. Building a web-interface to communicate with your children.
10. Refering to your past as an archive.
11. Try to create a perfect mate by cutting & pasting.

Ray Gauthier

Mention that you do WindowsJohn Martin

Creating a secure tunnel directly from the beer tap to the stomach with a rubber tube (especially while load balacing between taps...).

Chuck Huffman

never tell your wife she needs todo a FAT format

Robert CoteL

Chastizing your wife for not backing up before crashing the car.

Refering to her new hairdoo as an upgrade.

Ed Palmateer

Constant defragmentation of dinner plate after every few 'bites'.

Asking local mechanic for cost of consolidating parts from older family cars and engine upgrade.

Bob Ratay

Employ Hot Standby protocol in your relationship with your spouse.

Carol Hammond

Telling one's spouse that he needs to reboot (in the middle of a heated discussion).

Michael Reed

Upon arriving late to work, don't say you were delayed because you couldn't "grep" your keys. Someone might answer, however, that you should have used "egrep".

Jason Hicks

Firmware upgrade your toaster.Kyle King

Name your children with 'Strong' usernames like Fr3d to prevent identity theft in the future.

Tell the woman at Walmart that you discovered a bug in your wardrobe, and would like a patch to fix it.

Seth Cromley

Tell the barkeep(s) that they need to multi-thread their opperation

Seth Cromley

Build layer-3 switching into every freeway interchange

Seth Cromley

Failing to employ Collision Avoidance on the REAL highwayRic Werme

String Christmas lights the same way you string Ethernet cable.

Greg Lara

Ok, so you keep your girlfriends on a grandfather-father-son rotation, that's your business; whatever you do, DON'T leave the logs around where they can see them!

Vishwanath Rao

Mentioning to a cardiologist that RAID 5 could be performed for his patients.

Asking the mailman if he has turned on circular logging.

Dominic Vadakkan

Telling the cop the reason you were speeding was because your car has a higher QoS.

Lynn D. Yoder

Manufacturing anything using the service patch model.Bob Kokinda

Suggesting route optimization to local mail carrier.

Doug Olson

Rebooting users with that hidden button on the back of their heads.

Andrew N. Keller

Only pay for, and accept change in bills with binary denominations ($1, $10, $100)

Freddie A. Garcia

SELECT SALARY FROM PAYROLL WHERE EMPLOYEE_ID = Rebecca Murdock

Connecting your wireless internet applicance to the TV in your SUV in order to have mobile video conferences.

Hector Fernandez

Use binary code when doing your taxes.

Peggy Garberick

Never defrag or re-boot in front of your in-laws - it just isn't a pretty sight.

Greg Tucker

Writing Spyware for the Psychic hotline people

Gregory Pleau

Hacking the power company to turn off your neighbor's loud stereoJaime Villarreal

Spelling skills, example: Please let me talk to your manger.

Tired of seeing big businesses patent the length of time it takes to click twice? You could wait for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org) to litigate some of the worst offenders out of existence. Or you could turn the tables and generate your own pathetically inane and insulting patents. Just grab your favorite text file containing verbiage on some business procedure, like answering e-mail, and run it through the following code:

Add some spice by replacing "using a computer" with any sufficiently patent-friendly phrase, such as "over the Internet" or "in my bathtub." (Thankfully, this process for generating patents has not yet been patented.)

For more insights and information, visit the Web site of B. Jacobs and the kind folks at Findy Services.

Thanks to all who participated in our recent "404 error" contest. We were impressed with the creativity of all the responses. But there could be only one winner: Tom Trottier's submission wowed our judges with its blatent disregard for Web protocol, and--as promised--it's now gracing our site. Check it out here: www.nwc.com/youbetcha. Way to go, Tom!Winning Text: "You have reached Highway 404. In GeekSpeak, this means you have reached the right Web site, but we've obliterated, renamed or moved the page you sought so earnestly. Don't be disappointed. It's just the Web."

Be sure to take a peek at the rest of the entries, including the runners-up, below.

Name: Tim Jackson

404 Text: I don't have a link to send you, but how about a 404 haiku, such as:The web page you seek is drifting through cyberspace and cannot be found

OR

The page once was here now it is not to be found: error 404

Name: Bob Ledford
404 Text: Sorry but the page you are looking for is taking a break. Please try again after the break is over.

Name: Robin McCullough

404 Text: Error 404. Our records indicate that you have failed to pass the pre-requisites: 303, 202 and 101. Please seek help from your guidance counselor.If you believe that you have erroneously reached this error please contact you curriculum administrator.

Name: Dave Baldwin

404 Text: I've never been able to set anything like this up, but...

"Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda...

We COULD have a page with that name...
Had we known you were looking for it, we certainly WOULDA...

Click here if you think maybe we SHOULDA.

("here", of course, is a mailto for your webmaster.)

Name: SCott Alex

404 Text: While somepages get displayed, your's doesn't.

Name: Bob Vandenberg
404 Text: As if we really care that you wanted that inforamtion...we'll get it for you once we reach the 112 level of Gortal and find the magic ring of tobral...or until we get color coordinated clothing..whichever comes first.

Name: tOM Trottier

404 Text: How about a built-in site search that starts out with the field populated with words from the errant URL?

"You have reached Highway 404. In GeekSpeak, this means that you have reached the right website, but we've obliterated or renamed or moved the page you sought so earnestly. Don't be disappointed. Just search here _____________________ for the content you seek."How about using the REFERRER field to automatically send a single email to the webmaster of the page with the wrong link?

Name: Laura

404 Text: Yep...You get this much information floating around and something is bound to get lost. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Name: Eric Brewer

404 Text: Your missing page...the cosmos
what have they in common?
...darkness

Name: Lu Hulbert404 Text: The page you requested is currently at the bank. Its reality check bounced.

Name: Lu Hulbert
404 Text: We're sorry, that page is on hiatus and won't be back until you stand on your head and type with your toes. In the meantime, please press the back button on your browser.

Name: Alex Efron

URL: http://www.cpchtml.com/404

Name: Craig McCue
URL: http://www.mrcranky.com/404.html0