Do you find telemarketing calls exceptionally annoying?

There are a few things in the world that get on my nerves. Telemarketers are one of them. From 10 calls I receive on my home phone a good half is from various telemarketers. For a few months it was constant "duct cleaning" calls. Now after several Toronto area duct cleaning companies fined, their place is taken by "a special offer from Marriott Hotel". I am still sufficiently rational thinking that I will continue staying at Marriott Hotel on occasion, but I already have doubts.

So this is my black list:

• Companies and people who either trade our phone numbers for a fee, or fail to keep them safe.
• Companies who believe that an aggressive marketing would instantly bring them more business.
• Engineers and software developers willing to work for telemarketers.
• Companies who believe that cheap overseas telemarketers would bring them more business.
• Overseas telemarketers who first do not care about our regulations, and second hire staff with no manners and poor English (well, for that paycheck who can they hire anyway?).
• Inefficient regulation, slow response from CRTC, and lack of initiative from phone companies (just you wait guys, people will be ditching their land lines en masse).

Questions to telemarketing business owners and reps:

• Do you have fun getting people annoyed?
• Aren't you afraid of bad Karma?
• Do you still think that this your occupation is a temporary one, and soon you will move to doing something real?
• When you receive telemarketing calls yourself, do you always like them?

On YouTube
How to handle a telemarketer call

My next rant will probably be about guys testing their car's sub-woofers on driveways. ARRRGH!!!

Just finished a meeting online, the audio quality was awful, thought of a possible solution

The remote part of the audience was sitting around a table with a single mike in the middle, and the boardroom's acoustic was terrible. I clearly lost a part of the conversation, and several times had to ask a speaker to repeat.

Could the following be a solution that we'll see in a not so distant future?

Spoken words can be converted to text locally, with a text, not a digitized audio, being sent across a network. On a receiving side such text can be converted back to speech.

Speaker's voice pitch will probably be sacrificed to large extent. Intonations, and some subtle parts of speech will be lost, including 'um', 'er', or 'ah'. Some additional data, e.g. voice pitch and tempo, need to be transferred along with a plain text. Everyone will sound a bit as Stephen Hawking.

While this approach will hardly go well with medium to high fidelity conversations, it will still suit a large pool of situations. Also this will allow a language translation facility to be placed anywhere along the conversation path: at sender, at receiver, or at carrier.

Skype Translator
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-skype-is-becoming-like-star-trek/

Creating copies of DLL files in ASP.NET BIN folder

I often (though not always) create backups of DLL files before replacing them with a newer version. This is usually done with a purpose of storing a trail, and to be able to rollback to the most recent working version in case of any emergency.

Based on my recent experience, I can give an advice: when creating a reserve copy, change its *.dll extension to something else, for example to "*dll.copy.20150316". 

What I did: I created a copy of a dll that looked like "mycompany.mylibrary.myservice - Copy.dll", and then replaced the original "mycompany.mylibrary.myservice.dll" file with a newer version.

Somehow after that, the application had created (or retained?) a link to the copy instead of the main dll file. It started throwing an error "Could not load file or assembly 'mycompany.mylibrary.myservice - Copy.dll' or one of its dependencies. The located assembly's manifest does not match the assembly reference. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131040)".

Excel DbfMate add-in available on Softpedia, CNET, and Softonic

Softpedia
http://www.softpedia.com/get/Internet/Servers/Database-Utils/Excel-DbfMate.shtml

CNET
http://download.cnet.com/Excel-DbfMate/3000-18483_4-76292791.html

Softonic
http://excel-dbfmate.en.softonic.com/

In my humble opinion, Softpedia made the best effort presenting this software.