Software developer David's question was easy enough on the surface. I mean, it really didn;t seem like the kind of question that would inpsire deep conversations and government and language and politics and locales and so on: I recently found some data for my component that had ‘Microsoft Corporat...

And I am back, after my end of the year "vacation" from blogging. I hope you didn't miss me too much. You may not have even noticed I was gone. This is not a bad thing. I was in a meeting a few weeks ago with a colleague of mine, and we were talking about a particular blog post that had cheesed off ...

As the end of the year approaches, I guess it is a time for reflection. Oh, I suppose resolutions for the new year. For those you can paste in mine from four years ago , as I am still striving on them. 2008 was kind of my worst year for as long as I have been alive. The year Liz died (ref: Burying t...

Not a technical issues but kind of a language one. Feel free to skip... When I was growing up in Beachwood, Ohio, I remember a children's rhyme involving a rabbit that was harassing the local field mice. After ignoring the warnings of Good Fairy (usually three, allusions to the three strikes rule in...

It was recently suggested to me that the terms COLLATION and COLLATE are confusing to people. Not people over here, I'd guess. And probably not so much the people who work in SQL Server or Access or really any database program -- anyone who places so much stock in keywords like ORDER BY is definitel...

The mail I got the other day from Brett was pretty amusing (reposted uncensored with his permission, with no hint as to whether he was Anonymous1 or Anonymous2: Regards this conversation … anonymized for obvious reasons … Anonymous 1 [10:09 AM]:  If you haven't had sex is six months, you're...

So the other day a bunch of people were talking about stuff that was GREEN and stuff that was (RED)â„¢ . The (RED)â„¢ thing you can read about here. They are working to solve big problems -- getting antiretroviral medicine to the people dying of AIDS in Africa. Microsoft is one of the many (RED)â„¢ ...

VB expert and long time compatriot/comrade Bill McCarthy asked over in the Suggestion Box: Hey Michka, Can you tell us why ImmGetDescription seems to return zero length on Vista ?  Is it broken ? Thanks. It's funny how many people still know me as Michka Including me. :-) Questions like this mi...

Now lots of people have already been talking about cool changes to fonts in Windows 7, such as blogs like Long Zheng's Improvements to fonts in Windows 7, which talk about some of the long-awaited updates to the Fonts folder that will make so much of what we do with fonts easier. But as many regular...

Once again, a blog for your reading pleasure that is technical though not on the usual subjects. If iBOT crap bores you, then please skip gracefully! Prior blogs in the series here and here and here and here and here . It was actually in a response to that last one that regular reader and long-time ...