Friends rule! I have been having a heck of a week.. hardware failures, pissy users, dead batteries in my noise cancling headphones. Then I had these two machines I made the mistake of letting the gateway restore CD rebuild, rather than doing it by hand. I figured hey what could it hurt? BIG mistake. First no sound, drivers load, things look good, windows has no clue what sound is. Then no login screens. I will never remember that technet is avaliable on the web, I used it off CD for too long I guess. Anyhow I am finding NO solution, so I wander off to l-space a BBS run by some friends of mine, and gripe about my mystery problem. Less than 20 minutes later someone has posted the answer, a handy technet article. Zip over to the boxes delete the offending registry key reboot and yippee! problem solved. Now if only I could get Compaq's Smart Start to run on that dang Proliant 1200.

Well lets see. I was shocked to learn it was thursday just now. I thought it was still wednesday. my week at work has been something akin to hell. hardware breaking left and right. things that just don't break like hard drive failures, exploding monitors. Those once in a while things all seem to coalesce into one week. Oh yeah and I have a web server I need to get up, I can't get it to work. Well more importantly the Compaq Smart Start stuff isn't working. I am sure I can get an OS on it without it, but then I have the problems of having a flakey compaq proliant 1200 without the neato stuff on it. I wanna nap.. about 6 week long nap.

I can't believe it, last night, after I was celebrating the return of FTP, the dorks at crosspaths, my isp, managed to loose their server for dialup. Apparently tonight they are replacing it with two servers including some sort of redundancy scheme. Gee what an idea. Oh and FTP really isn't working for everyone just for people who complained. I got added manually to the FTP server. What idiots. If I had a better choice I think I would go elsewhere, but my previous ISP went under without a trace, and my other choices are big national ISPs like AOL and earthlink. I wonder if they are reading this since they had to hook me up manually to FTP. Maybe Qwest can finally get me DSL. I might go that route even if it means MSN. Which is evil and stupid, since they allow you one email address and as many hotmail accouts as you want. Well GEE Mr. MSN I can have as many hotmail accounts as I want now. How is this a service?

test

woohoo it works, after only a week offline it works.

once again talked to support goons, they passed me back to the main office. who didn't answer the phone. I left a message, then they left a message saying it should work. apparently it might.

Hmm. I talked to the support goons at ye olde isp. They knew nothing and sent me to talk to the main office, who unabashedly told me FTP would be down until Monday. Hmm taking FTP service offline for a week without so much as an email. rude.

I wonder if my ISP has fixed its FTP problems. I have made several updates and none have gone through.

regular readers, both of you, probably remember me railing on how not all employee motivation tactics are a good idea, especially progress charts, where you never once in a year hit the minimum goal on the chart right? Well we have had this hours produced chart hanging in the front hall right by the employee of the month plaques all year. And never once have we gone over the bottom line for any month right? and we are supposed to get some super whoopie bonus if we hit one of the 4 numbers listed for december but nobody remembers which one, and the bonus is as of yet unspecified. Well it finally happened, when they updated the numbers for October on the chart this week, we went over one of the goal lines. Guess we might hit some of these things in the end yet.

just when I thought it couldn't get weirder. I just spent 2 hours at the VPs house waiting for the cable guy to show up. Yep.. on the clock. Waiting for the guy to come install a cable modem. He never showed. Eventually the VP sent me home.

a script of one of my many conversations regarding work

*Sad little HP LaserJet 4Si dumping out hundreds of pages in my closet*
In walks the co-worker responsible for this.
Me: You know the front printer is much faster (30ppm instead of 6ppm).
Co-worker: Yeah but the front printer is broken. Megan told me to use this one.
Me: Did anybody tell me this?
Co-worker: No I don't think so it happened yesterday.
Me: Hmm let me take a look...(examines print queue where 50 jobs are bound up) Yep printer looks broken, it is throwing an error code.
I delete all the obviously duplicate jobs

So I go check out the printer... sure enough.. the copier functions work..but no printing...Oh look all the settings are gone. I start working on it.

In walks co-worker 2.
Co-worker2: You fixing the printer?
Me: Yep
Co-worker2: What's wrong with it?
Me: Doesn't seem to be talking to the network.
Co-worker2: Well the repair guy came and looked at it yesterday I think we should call him back.
Me: Yep if this doesn't do it.
Co-worker2: There is a big power switch here I thought about hitting it.
Me: Yep thought about that too.. first I am going to see about the embedded diagnostics.
Co-worker2: It has that?
Me: Yep that's what all these buttons and this little touch screen are all about.
Co-worker2: I think we should get the repair guy out again.
Me: Could be.

After waiting for the printer menu to come up (which nobody apparently had the time to do before) I choose "reboot server" The wait screen comes up.. and what do you know in 15 seconds it is printing again. By the time I get back to my chair the jobs piled up in the print queue are gone.

Gee why don't they ever ask me?

Vanity Sites
This is one. It isn't my first, it probably won't be my last. It is funny though how they go through fads. Everybody and their dog seems to have a website, actually my dog has had two. Making me a contributor to the clutter of the internet extroidnare! I have experience at it now even. I have no useful content. There isn't really anything that interesting rattling around in my head. Well sometimes there is but rarely does it need to get out. I would probably be far better served if I made my website into a big HIRE ME this is my resume page. But like resumes (see my blog from Sept 25, 2001 for my opinion on resumes) web pages are very faddish.

First somebody gets a good idea, (the personal web page) and a few geeks learn enough html to put together a list of handy links, funny links, etc along with maybe a picture of themselves. Then that gets to be easy, and every body has them... so the bar is raised, now personal webpages have become personal websites, with multiple pages and pictures and little animated gifts, and too noisy backgrounds. Then geocities comes along with site builder and other similar things and now everybody has sites dedicated to everything from their pets to cross stitching to how Wil Wheaton is the anti-christ. Then add music! Then webcams! Everybody had to have one of those too... so you could see them sitting at their computers, or the view of their living room etc.

Then the quest for simplicity and content rears its head, enter the weblog, a personal web page that actually gets changed, occasionally, frequently even. Still it is difficult you have to edit that html every day it is a pain. Along comes somebody wanting to make his life easy, he writes weblogger software, now everybody (even me) has one. From the technically inept right on up to web gods, and Wil Wheaton and me. My dog doesn't have a weblog because he is a terrible typist. Now we all get the opportunity to read each others diaries, like sneaking around your friends rooms in middle school except they really taped their diary to their locker. Still sometimes it has that feeling of prying into a complete strangers life.

Oh and hit counters, there is another tribute to vanity (note I have one at least I admit that I am vain, or a pathetic sheep). Not only do I air my half baked thoughts to the world on this page, co-located with my resume, so it probably isn't a good idea, after all we are talking MAJOR personality leakage which may not be good on the job hunt, since we all know individuals don't get hired, sheep get hired. At least webwise I am a sheep. But hit counters...they give me some feeling that hey somebody really is reading this stuff I write. I know at least one or two of my friends do. Sometimes they even leave comments, another recent nod to vanity on this site (added just in the last week) so not only can people read this tripe, but respond to it. Yeah... who would want to do that. Mark obviously, but I think he was just being nice. I did get one response from somebody I didn't know. So I guess there are people out their drifting across my weblog the way I drift across theirs.

Hmm...fragmentation. Ever wonder if defragmenting really improves performance on a RAID array? I can't see any sign that it does. I love weird requests like can we change everybody in the office's email address? Why does my boss ask me these things? Why oh why can't I work for somewhere normal?

Microsoft XP adbust in Shoreditch, London Whoever did this had nerve, and a sense of humor. I really needed a laugh this afternoon and this is priceless.

Chicago Tribune: Girl died after parents hit her 160 times This is really creepy. How in the heck can a supposedly loving father do that to his child? Over a jacket that the mother lost. So the kid was guilty of what? not keeping the laundry picked up? Well gee If Mom had hung her coat up in the closet it wouldn't be lost now would it? Beating a child with an electrical cable... hmmm seems like a bad idea to me. Not to mention the fury it must take to do it for a prolonged period. And what is the significance of hitting her in sets of 39? And gagging her with a towel? really.. hmm.. if you are hitting your kid that hard and that often maybe you should stop and think a bit. Kid dead cause mom lost her jacket. Seems wildly unfair.

I guess this is really the end of my companies super trendy name. At one point Unitech wanted to spin off and IPO a branch of it self..hopefully to take advantage of that big dot com thing right. So they named the branch they wanted to spin off e-worldtrain.com (try and get more trendy than that). Well today I just put a redirect on the e-worldtrain site that sends it to www.unitech1.com. I guess its official even these dorks have figured it out the whole dot com thing is over.

We have reserved the Comfort Suites on Hickman Road for our Holiday Party. (Same Place as last year) The date we have been able to secure is Friday December, 14th. You and your significant other are cordially invited to attend. There will be a $10.00 surcharge for all employees who attend. We will need a list of how many are attending as soon as possible in order to order food. Please contact Megan by close of business on Wednesday November, 28th and let her know if you will be attending and if you are bringing a guest.

Please tell me somebody is kidding they aren't really charging for the pleasure of attending a holiday party. Mind you last year I did leave with $50 worth of gift certificates but still! CHARGING for catered dinner, probably a dippy comedian and door prizes?!?!? Are we buying or own door prizes? Thanks I'll gamble on the safe side and keep my $10.

I am sitting here eating my lunch...leftover mexican and a little tub of yogurt. When I start wondering who was the first person to eat yogurt. I mean really surely somebody had milk go bad in just the right way and congeal and they sniffed it, and said "this doesn't smell so bad" then they ate it. Anybody who has had milk go bad in the normal fashion wouldn't even touch the stuff right? Right so the milk must have gone bad somewhere warm, cooked almost. These things mystify me. Other food products less so... after all if racoons eat eggs, and a person say them...they might try eggs, especially since racoons eat other good things. But...I don't know of any animal that eats bad milk, at least not in the wild. Domesitcated animals will eat almost anything you stick in front of them, within reason of their digestive sytems.

A real-life "G.I. Jane"

More about Senior Arman Donaldson and status as the first woman to finish a US military sniper school.

First Woman Sniper

Well counter sniper actually... About time.

I feel more creepy and dirty today, I figured out why our "Power Marketing" meetings aren't happening. The VP is in the office. What this tells me is that this initiative which is supposed to be taking 1/4 of my time does not have aproval from levels above my boss, the production manager. I didn't think much of it when I was first told that the VP didn't know about the "Power Marketing" plan, but now that I look back at my notes from the first meeting I have a very clear indication that this is not known above my immedate supervisior (the production manager). This scares me a lot. What happens when this whole thing blows up. It also explains the reaction the production mangager had when one of the people in the meeting kvetched about not having support from corporate. He hit the wall told her to shut up, and that that wasn't our problem. He is playing this like we have support. But we don't. Yet he gave several of the people in the meeting a code to which they should bill their hours. This feels worse by the minute.

I am begining to think I am part of a secret initiative. You know that marketing mess I was railing on last week. Well...now we aren't having a meeting today, in fact no word mentioned at all. The VP is in. I think this is the production manager's secret project. I don't think he has told the VP what we are doing. It would explain a lot about why we seem to be doing this all at the tactical rather than strategic level, even though this should be a strategic level endevor. I am afraid this might be career suicide. Things are looking really rather creepy. I wish I knew what was really going on.

It looks as though it is going to be one of those scattered days. You know the sort where you can't concetrate enough to do anything really though provoking. Where in the time it takes an application to launch you forget why you launched it. Oof I am ready for this weekend.

Salon.com Technology | High score

This article is so cracked. I have friends who are stoners, I have friends who are gamers. Some of them probably even overlap but I have never seen rampant drug use at a LAN party. Sweaty stinky guys with poor hygene habits and foul mouths, and a fair number of girls who meet the same description. But smoking at somebody's LAN party.. that's just rude.

Anybody seen it?

feeling chaotic today. vacillating from happy to angry to sad to confused and back again in random orders. I was pretty determined last week not to go to lunch with the bitchy women's group today. It appears I won't have to decline the invite because either they aren't going or they aren't going to ask me to go along. Normally they have left by now. This makes me happy, as I don't have to justify my decision to them...but sad because apparently I don't matter enough to invite anymore. I think I will just be happy about it. I could use a few things to go good today. Got stopped by the same train twice today. Once at 13th and Ridgewood and once down town. It was going really slow. Somebody broke my box over at Dodge. I have to go fix it. I hate that...it isn't like I mess with their computers while they aren't there. Why do they mess with mine? Oh yeah.. it has a writer.. that gives them some sacred rights to it. UGH. I don't want to be here today..but I can't think of much else I would rather be doing. Well maybe having a job I like. I guess this is enough chaotic rambling for now since I am sure this isn't making much sense at all.

How in the heck does it seem like a logical thing to put your network administrator on a marketing team? I don't even really know what we do arround here anymore. I stopped paying attention when it stopped making sense. Apparently this is what happens when you ditch events and they want to make you feel more invovled. My offical function is to research things and make them easy for "everybody" to understand. Like that is really possible. URF. Makes me regret my more litterate leanings if I were the sort of geek who couldn't talk to normal people I wouldn't be having to do this.

Nothing like planning things in reverse. Whyfor is it that it doesn't occur to people to identify customers before making a marketing plan. Or deciding what info you want in an inventory before begining the physical inventory. Oh yeah..proactive thought. Someday I will be free of this reactive place.

I went to a party recently. I was both looking forward to it and dreading it all at once. I there are some folks I know I only see at these parties. They are fun to see and all, but seeing some of the other folks there makes me sad. I used to be close friends, and now we are very distant.

The other thing about this party is that some of the folks drink more than they should. Don't get me wrong, I am not anti-drinking, and these folks are not yacking in the yard falling down drunk. But they are drunk enough to lack discretion. Once again this party, like its spring counterpart and the previous incarnation last year, ended when one individual started talking about inappropriate subject matter and made the whole room very uncomfortable. It was only 5 minutes or so after the first comment about someone else's sex life that people started bailing, as soon as it was clear the conversation wasn't going back to anywhere polite. Then within 45 minutes everyone was gone. I know because I was the last person out the door, who didn't live in the house where the party was being held.

The saddest thing is I don't think she will ever realize what is going on because by the time people start to leave (provide negative reinforcement) she is already too sloshed to notice how uncomfortable she is making them. We all have lessons to learn, I guess this one is hers.

I have a fuel log crisis. I have dutifully logged every tank of fuel in my new car save one. So now in the midst of my here to fore perfect fuel/milage log I have one abberant entry where I got 94mpg. Mind you I would love to be getting that sort of milage... ARRGGHH.. I think toad had the data for it in her PDA, but her batteries died... and now it may be irretrevable. I suppose I can fake an entry...but that is SO wrong! I am sad. I don't know if I will continue logging at all.

OK.. can't do this and not be equal oportunity so..here are a few pics of my nephew.. then I promise no more silly photos.

Ok.. I think this is proof that slackware is the easiest linux distro to install.

Lunch

I just got back from lunch with my some of my coworkers. Lunch with some of these people used to be fun. It isn't anymore. It is more like a concentrated bitch session where people complain about work. Mind you I like to kvetch about my job as much as the next person. But this weekly lunch has become essentially rail on your absent co-workers time. I used to go to lunch with a friend of mine every day then she got smart and left the company. And while we would complain a little about work it wasn't the focus of the discussion, it wasn't mean, and it wasn't the sole intention of our going out. Now I go to lunch with what used to be one of my friend and I's other lunch buddies and the rest of the women in her department. I think I might stop going. It isn't fun and it makes me all stressed and unhappy.