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Monday, November 12, 2001
Deep, profound thoughts just aren't happening here today. Nope. Complete and total brain drain today started with getting Rhiannon to school. This is the second Monday that we've done the "Dad takes her" thing, and today, I needed to get to work early. So I figured I'd get the kid to our friend's house to hit the bus - since the bus picks up at 7:05, and school doesn't open until 7:30, I figure I bought myself a whopping twenty-five minutes. Wrong.
Said friends went deer hunting en familie last weekend, and apparently still suffered from sleep deprivation. They didn't make the bus. Since Rhiannon wouldn't ride the bus without her friend (and since we were cheating the whole operation a wee bit anyway), I took her to school. Then toddled off to work, where the two hubs which worked perfectly late Friday afternoon failed miserably come show-time. Since I had a half-dozen things to get done this morning, of course, nothing worked right when I got there. Two hubs died, one computer passed away, the local fellow with the fully configured computer arrived with an operating system. Gee, do you know how long it takes to install Visual Studio, VSSP 5, SQL Server 2000, and the software we need? Something like an hour and twenty minutes. And there's absolutely no truth at all to the rumor that it goes faster if you've got two at once. Takes four times as long.
With all of that raining about my head and shoulders, I finally got things all set up and ready to go by 10 AM. Just an hour late. And of course, it was just in time to hear about the latest plane crash from New York. And then I hear that bin Laden finally admitted that he did have something to do with the September 11th attacks. Wonderful. Mental note - next time you're looking for "things not likely to happen" don't bet on crazy people. I'd probably have been just as likely to have hit the jackpot on "Charles Manson claims ..." No. Not going to do it. Apparently I've got some sort of power here, and it's the equivalent of ... well, it's dangerous.
Sorry, just flashing through my head was number seven on the "fun in
the bathroom" games - head into a men's room stall with a super soaker all
pumped up, then press the trigger, wave it around, and yell "whoa, big
fella, WHOA!" But that's thoroughly tasteless. 
Anyway, I got through the morning, and just before we were to leave for lunch, we had a computer "issue" - a couple of workstations were apparently sharing files. I went to check it out from the server end, and by the time I came back out (three minutes later) they'd gone to lunch without me. Figures.
So this afternoon went by in a blur - most notably because I am totally clueless in what we're doing. But that's OK. I'm not a programmer.
So I figure it's time to check out the rest of the web. And there we were... Mrs. Beland blames me for her sudden burst of activity, Mr. Thompson blames me for his sock and underwear organization (we actually use the same system, which is very odd, since my father used the same excuse. When he got tired about people asking him what he was going to do with his retirement, he said "organize the top of my dresser, my socks, and underwear." So as you can tell, this form of insanity most definitely gallops through my family tree (just imagine squirrels the size of horses, and you'll understand why there are few willing to stand near the base of this particular tree - between what's already on the ground and what's likely to fall from the sky, one is well-advised to use caution).
Then there's my daughter, just to really weld my coffin shut. Tonight she says "I have my shoulder guardian angel and my shoulder devil. This morning I really knocked my devil off for a while, but he came back." Figures. I guess that explains a lot. When Jack went through the line he heard "devil? I'll take two!"
Tuesday, November 13, 2001
Same Song, Second Verse...
But first, a Taliban Missile misses the target... Talk about low-tech.
Back to today... I was just peachy this morning. I'd understood it all, knew where I was going and what I was doing. Then, within 90 minutes of starting training, my computer went "wonky" - this would be the technical term for "failure to recognize keyboard input". On Windows 2000, no less. I checked the keyboard plug - it wasn't loose. I tried the capslock and numlock - no change in the light status. Reboot time.
After I rebooted, I was totally, thoroughly lost. Utterly.
So that was how the day started. Then, at lunch, I looked at the calendar. Over the next 16 days I've got exactly FOUR that haven't been partially or totally planned - as in evening activities plus a full work day, or a full day of activities. Yikes. And out of those four days, two are Mondays. Isn't that sad?
No great wit nor wisdom flows from me today, so I therefore refer you to the newest Daynoter, Mr. Dave Markowitz, who is another one of those really, really smart people we as a human race tend to produce on occasion. And he has the unfortunate experience of following that Lemmings fellow in the lineup. Oh, dear. That's one of the drawbacks of joining such a group.
Oh well. I'm nearly done, but before I go...
<Warning - Cute Kid Story Ahead>
Tonight, as every night, Jack comes out of the bedroom and asks to go potty. Now, tonight was bath night (yes, where does a year go, I know - no, that's my bath, never mind) - and we found yet another bottle of sham-shampoo - that's the kind of bottle where Jack uses it as a squirt gun - typically by sucking water into and spraying it out of the bottle. Which has the added benefit of diluting the shampoo - thus sham-shampoo (oddly enough, most of them are still running on the over-$200 worth of stuff I brought home last year when I left Great Clips).
Anyway, Jack went potty, and I made him go back to wash his hands. After about two minutes of little sound, no running water, and the steadily growing aroma of soft soap, I ordered Jack to get into his room right now. And he went, and pushed the door closed. As the door closed, I realized why the smell of the soap was nearly overpowering. Jack had emptied much of the container onto his hands. And I had sent him into his room without washing the soap off.
So, being the cruel parent that I am, I ordered him back out to wash his hands. Then went into near-hysterics as Jack tried, with slippery hands, to open the door. I'm soooooo mean.
And of course, tonight (yet another reboot intervened with the whole "keyboard not responding" issue - If I didn't know any better, I'd swear that I was having problems with a virus or something, but that's a slim possibility), I get the "Screw You" interface option from WinSCP - It tried five times to connect to the outside world, and failed. So, here in the land of the Dial-Up, I have had it and am downloading a new WinSSH client. This, too, shall pass. Sometime this century. Ahem. G'nite.
Wednesday,
November 14, 2001
To start with, we'll blame Al - I don't know where I fit in on the whole thing,
and I'm nearly ... strike that, I am completely certain that the estimation of
this site is completely off. I'm just plain average. Not that it
helps any around here...
Today seems to be my day for standing in front of the fan while that little freak of nature sits behind it, defecating like a diahretic bovine. In other words, ca-ca hitting the rotary oscillator. For the little people, that's shit hitting the fan. And me in front of it, without my raincoat.
I got there this morning and admitted to the instructor that I was reasonably confident that my rear end was still attached, and I was still sitting on it. Beyond that, all bets were off. The instructor grinned, and proceeded to roar into the final half-day of training. I nodded, dumbly, and smiled, happy to know that soon I'd be able to get back to the primary duty on my plate - CRM testing.
Just before lunch, we were finally connected to the network server for Visual Source Safe. Of all of the abominations unto God which I have seen produced by Microsoft, this little pile has got to be the ultimate in shite. Despite Microsoft's insistence that it would be more than adequate over a WAN, I can tell you now that it just ain't happening.
I next found that I had no forms. But, before rejoicing, I made the mistake of talking to some of the other programmers. One of them had two. And that one graciously assigned the second form to me. Ugh.
After that my assigned form became a trap I was never going to get out of. I started working on simple stuff - things like "pull up the employee number and the name should auto-fill". That was the simple thing - which took me all afternoon and the damned thing STILL didn't work.
Then, after a diversion to the grocery store to pick up treats for Jack's daycare, we came home. And here's where I beg for help - does anyone know of any non-toxic method to rid one's house of fruit flies? The little bastards managed to come in on some apples we had from a while back, and they just aren't leaving. I tried the old "dirty sponge in a jar" trick - I'd kill a hundred, and the remaining two hundred would breed. I've been taking the garbage out nightly, doing the dishes, leaving no food (other than cat) uncovered and available, and the little bastards are STILL hanging around. Sheesh. Anyone have any pointers, let me know, please, 'kay?
Did have one piece of good news. The new boss stopped in this afternoon and asked if I knew about the new problem with Microsoft Internet Explorer. Well, uh, yeah. Did he know, I asked, that there was a new patch available? He didn't? That's OK. It was only announced a few hours earlier. He left, shaking his head. Guess I still have a job...
Now, I don't know about the rest of you, but this little story has me quite, quite happy to be an American. You will note that the details of the story are thin, at best, but the bottom line is that there were three US helicopters which picked up the eight aid workers. I had some doubts that the Taliban were holding as solidly as they seemed, but I didn't think they were that cheap a house of cards. Too bad we didn't push earlier. Oh well.
Now, when it comes to the caves of Afghanistan, I'd get some little carts. I'd roll 2000-5000 pound bombs along to those caves, and set the timer on them to go off in thirty minutes. Then roll the bomb into the cave. Then roll a couple of sticks of dynamite just inside the opening and close the cave. Then clear out. Anyone in the cave should know that it's a dangerous place - anyone left alive in the cave after the second explosion is a living miracle - for a few minutes, anyway... But that's just my $0.02.
And my wife reminded me tonight of what we were up to five years ago this very evening... My, how time flies when you're having fun. Or delirious.
Thursday, November 15, 2001
Rhiannon and I this morning were discussing how lucky we were never to have had to rely on food shelf or go hungry; especially given last year's out-of-work episode. The topic arose because Rhiannon was taking some food to school for her class's food shelf drive.
I remind myself of this because later this morning (after disassembling the training setup we used for the past three days) I get the "hey, what's up with the phones?" question. As "gee, I dunno" has not once yet served to send the querrant away happy, I added "but I'll find out." Tried dialing locally - no problem. Tried dialing between local area codes. No problem. Tried dialing the home office. Big problem. Tried dialing other long-distance numbers. Big problem. Big, BIG problem.
Fortunately, in these days of woe, we all have fallbacks. Mine was e-mail. A quick e-mail back and forth between corporate was followed up with a phone call (we can accept incoming), and the true culprit was revealed. Seems our local phone company (FirstComm, totally, utterly unmourned, the bastards) went the way of the dodo. Seems that in the conversion, our corporate folk contacted Qwest, who, as their current slogan goes, "ride the light". I doubt it, though if they were sitting on light, it might shine upon their brains, buried so deep up the alimentary canal that we're talking a proctologist would need a hammer, chisel, backhoe, and a team of big burly men to extract the mis-applied cranium from their rectum. Yes, kids, that's a polite way of saying their collective heads are buried so far up their collective butts they're in danger of going the way of Igli (don't get it? Read Glory Road, by Heinlein).
The "ride the light folks" who used to be a "baby bell" are in constant fear of being shown competent in their work, and so take each and every opportunity to hose things up and they manage to regularly invent new ways to do so. Today's was "call AT&T for the long distance? How dare we? We've got our own, just as good, which we'll attach to the ... oops, look, pretty colors. Where was I? Oh yes, toe-cheese inventory."
Corporate apologised all over themselves, but I told them "no worry. You see, we know how Qwest works. Some people use a 'three strikes and yer out' policy. Some people allow for a full inning. When we deal with Qwest, we allow for the full 27 outs. They'll make 25-26 of them before they get it right."
In other words, as I told our head of IT, Qwest put their best monkeys on this one.
So that was the morning's fun. The afternoon had yet more fun in store - a nine-page document denoting thirty-five products, most of which I'm going to be installing on a Pentium 200 MMX with 64 Megs of RAM and a 4 gig hard drive. This, I'm assured, will be much faster than running the same applications on a Quad Pentium III XEON server with 4 gig of RAM - of course, we also add in Terminal Server, the WAN, and 80 other developers hitting the same box at the same time. So there might be some benefit to old "pokey" here (though his real name is MSPSLDREF - if you can figure out what all of that means, I'd best hide more carefully).
After that, I got to sit in on a meeting (no donuts, alas) where we
discussed what was coming down the pike at us. Spiffy. Fun.
Interesting, even. Then, I got to meet with the new manager and
discuss what's coming down the pike. The good news is that he wants me
to learn programming and help where I can. But he also thinks that
keeping on top of the other stuff is important - keeping computers
running and all the rest. So that helps.
When he asked, I told him "so far this meeting's pretty good. Better than the last new boss. He told me I'd be laid off shortly as I wasn't really needed." He laughed and reminded me that one of the goals he has for this year is employee retention. Phew. That helps.
Off to the races this evening. Birthday shopping for Jack, while he plays with his idol Cody, and his mother and Rhiannon do Brownie Cooking. I used to love spending money. Not no more. Of course, after all the running around, I ended up spending a fair chunk of change. Of course, Jack was quite happy. He got a Shrek DVD, two little flannel shirts (I'll get pictures of those in the next couple days), a book about space, a book called "Our World" with the characters from Goodnight, Moon, and the one that got him to do that with his face, a racetrack. Yes, Ma, it's the $10 Target Special, battery powered, four D-cell batteries, and he just loved it.
Before you complain though that we're out of room and we're buying the kid a racetrack, consider that the track itself is set up in something like a two-by-two foot area - any other toy would use much more room, rather than less. And yes, the crown was made at Daycare, and he wore it most of the night. Cute Kid.
For more pictures of the little chimp, check out Ann's site for today...
Friday!, November 16, 2001
Lovely. In my day-ending processing today, I zipped up and sent home some files. One of which was a fairly profound post with multiple rants and the like. Or, at least, I thought I did. Lovely.
And now, my brain, lacking in anything resembling function, refuses to reproduce the efforts here. Ugh. Guess you'll just have to wait for later.
Thought I did get one good piece of news today. A Hennepin County court judge granted an injunction (reports differ as to temporary or permanent) against the Twins, requiring them to play in the Metrodome next year. The Twins are in the strange position of fighting the action to prevent the requirement that they have to play baseball next year. "Uh, your honor? We'd like to be prevented from playing baseball next year, if possible?" Right.
Saturday, November 17, 2001
See Tomorrow...
Sunday, November 18, 2001
Wild weekend, indeed.
Yesterday was long and busy. We started with breakfast, Grocery Shopping, then preparations for an annual Eighties party some friends of ours throw. This one was special. It was our first chance to attend, and it was also a chance to meet a friend of mine's (the one going through a divorce) new significant other.
So, of course, there were kinks. Her kids were sick, the schedule was running late, and, more importantly, his ex started screwing with his life again. And that's not good. I firmly believe that there are people who are put on this world to be miserable, and make others miserable through their actions. And she is one of them. There are fates I would wish on this woman, but the fact remains that there are three wonderful, good little kids who call her "mommy" and for that reason, and that reason alone, that I will not. I'll think about it, but I won't wish it.
So we went to the party, won a number of games, came home with a bunch of movies, and then the bummers started.
About 1:30 am, actually, when we were coming home, we noticed the sky had clouded up pretty good. Of course we'd been the victims of severe clear and upper sixties yesterday during the daylight hours, but when we REALLY wanted clear skies? Nada. Zip. Nuthin. Bupkiss. So we bagged the "familial Leonids" we'd planned, and slept right through.
Today was "date with dad" with the brownies. Most of the girls (one couldn't make it) came bowling - one game, pizza, and pop - what a ball.
Then a pass through the library, K-Mart for the last-minute winter clothing updates (gloves and hats for kids, headband for Ann, and away we go, as ready for winter as we're gonna get), and here we are, Sunday night.
And those of you who have been hanging around here for a while might remember this little side-trip, and now you can say you read it here first, instead of CNN... But go quick, as the article is copyright Associated Press, who typically removes the linked text after two weeks or so, go fast...
Oh, no. Dan Bowman occasionally sends me some classic spams, but this one came in from two different directions today, in addition to Dan. I hope most of you aren't embarrassed by adult content, because this one most definitely is. The subject on this one was "Pill to Increase Your Ejaculation By 581%"
SIMPLE PILL CAN INCREASE YOUR EJACULATION By 581%!!!
Oh, REALLY? Is that a problem for some people?
NO Gimmick........REAL SCIENCE!
Right. It's not a gimmick to increase quantity and force in a function that most people are more than satisfied with. Hmmm... Perhaps the inventor's having a problem, and projecting, instead?
Increase Ejaculation by almost 600%!
Oh, great. In three words, bigger wet spots. Boy, what a selling point.
Increase Sex drive
Lovely. As if the people who buy this crap need it. Between chasing livestock, inflate-a-mates, and the rare but elusive "first time with a real live human" do you really think they need more hormonal drive? Right.
Stronger Erections
Now there's a selling point. After this, I'm going to drill out some holes for new bookshelves. Yup.
Longer Lasting orgasms!
What, isn't 30 minutes long enough for ya? Well, that's MY average... (ed - right. In some time warp somewhere.)
More Intense Orgasms
Yup. Blackouts, comas, and the occasional death nonewithstanding, of course.
Shoot up to 13 feet!
Well, isn't THAT special. How far away is the other partner? I mean, really, now. If you think that's the way it's supposed to work, well, we might want to talk.
New Medical break through
Yeah? Break Through What? Oh, I suppose next you're going to say the sound barrier?
has now created a revolutionary herbal pill
Somehow, I figured Herbie the Love Bug would come back around, but not like this...
that is guaranteed to increase your Semen and EJACULATION
Well, now, here's another example of marketing for ya - mention the one thing you're doing, twice, to double the supposed improvements, if any.
by almost 600% in just a few short weeks!
Well, I'm guessing short's also a problem if you need this particular drug.
This amazing new product works
Right. I'm sure it does.
by simply taking 2 pills every day...
Then there's the other half of the equation. What goes in...
Simply try these Amazing pills for 30-days
Amazing? Amazing is that you idiots actually think someone will fall for it.
and if after 30-days you do not experience both
Assuming you can find a willing partner in the animal, vegetable, or man-made-object category. Odds are slim, given you think this stuff's gonna help.
a huge increase in the amount of semen you ejaculate
Again, lovely. Bigger wet spots. When did this become a problem? Do you
really WANT to sleep in a swamp?
along with longer lasting more intense orgasms,
Again, for you maybe. For me, there's only so many hours in the day, you know?
simply send the empty bottle back to us and we'll refund you 100% of the cost including shipping.
Tell ya what... I'll save us all the trouble and not even bother ordering it.
With this guarantee, our product must work for you...
Right. Not on you, or in you, but for you. Right.
or we'll lose money on every sale!
Like money's your only problem - I'm thinking brain cell count and cognative function are probably more critical.
-Winner of the BURDETT RESEARCH "GOLDEN STAR" AWARD-ALL NATURAL HERBAL COMPLEX CAPSULE
Gee. Do you get fries with that?
It's really amazing. It's really, really, pathetically amazing what some people will try to make money. And worse, what some people will try assuming the opposite sex wants it. Gee, honey, let's put down the plastic sheeting and get busy, eh? Puh-leeze.
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P. Dominik. All rights reserved. No reproduction without express
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