William M. Hartnett

Difficult though it might be to believe, BellSouth-is-now-the-new-AT&T (more commonly known as BSINTNAT&T), my home DSL provider, isn’t being all that sympathetic to my need to waste time online without paying ridiculous fees for basic services.
Our new house is comprised of what only someone inclined to incredibly strict technical interpretations of building plans might describe [...]

Put this in your Philosophy 101 pipe and smoke it: If bandwidth at your office is so choked by co-workers watching Possessed Demon Cat on YouTube and bidding on Bob Dylan memorabilia on eBay that normally fast-loading web sites time out or are rendered as unstyled HTML, and even the site that tests your bandwidth [...]

Hartnett completists will recall that the previous phrase in this series was “to be sure.” Surprisingly, given my vast influence in the linguistic community, “to be sure” remains in frequent use by newspaper and magazine writers in search of just the right combination of words to signal to readers that the story they’re reading is [...]

Three things currently burning up the tech, pop culture and media sections of my Google Reader, and which I’m incredibly tired of hearing about:
> UNRELENTING IPHONE INSANITY
It debuts June 29, has only one button and instantly makes my WinMo Moto Q, iPod, Volkswagen, coffee grinder and every computer I’ve ever owned stupidly obsolete. It’s a [...]

Oh, Google Analytics, I love how kooky you are. At the moment, for example, you’re showing me data from today, but nothing for the last nine hours of Thursday. It’s so fun and unpredictable!
What I really love is the way you’ve communicated absolutely nothing to your users throughout this whole week of sketchy performance. Very [...]

Google Analytics hasn’t been reporting any results for more than 20 hours now. Annoyed. Drop by the Analytics Help section of Google Groups to commiserate if you’re similarly devastated by the loss of your statistical heroin drip. This is merely a personal annoyance for me, but I’d be livid if I was using Google Analytics [...]

To be sure, I’m driven to insane, irrational rage every time I see the words “to be sure” in a newspaper story. I have no explanation, it just pisses me off.
Never mind the question of whether anyone, anywhere actually speaks like this. The answer to that question is, obviously, no. But does anyone, anywhere actually [...]

What is it with me and overpriced products with key components made of cheap, brittle plastic?
First there was the glove compartment handle in my Volkswagen, which I’m clearly having trouble getting over. Now, a similarly cheap but important plastic bit has fatally wounded my beloved Bose QuietComfort 2 headphones. Without these headphones to cancel out [...]

Well, not my costume. But US Airways did lose the handmade costumes belonging to this woman and her husband, who take part in historical re-creation groups. Like all good consumers who have been wronged by a company, they registered their complaints via a domain name: usairwayslostmycostume.com.
I love a good homemade web site full of voluminous [...]

Speaking of consumer complaints that get me incredibly worked up, to the point that I begin fantasizing about hunting down all the industrial engineers and software designers whose moronic decisions have inconvenienced me so that I can repeatedly punch them in the neck … behold the picture at right.
That’s the handle to the glove compartment [...]