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Update At 2245 Of course, that was the high point of the day. Sunday evening brought forth The Demon In The Stove again - the bastard refused to light. Now, mind you, this week is Thanksgiving, which in many years past was used as a pause for all of us to give thanks for everything we had given, or earned. Now it seems a mighty excuse to gorge past the point of puking (a'la Meaning Of Life) and then peruse the sale ads for the great orgiastic excess of The Day After Thanksgiving. Personally, I would be quite happy if some terrorists managed to set off some sort of completely isolated device which would kill every single humanoid in a mall come, say, 10 am Friday morning. Civilized and decent? No, not really, no - but I should point out that I've only been out of retail for thirteen years now, and was in for almost ten - so "The Day After" still gives shudders (even if it doesn't involve a Santa Suit - and yeah, been there, done that, fortunately the shit stains came out of the suit, or someone else would have had to buy it). But I digress. Sunday night, when Ann started the stove to do something about dinner (I know not what), the gas whooshed into the oven, and the "whuff-whuff-WHUFF" didn't happen. I know for a fact because the three-way alarm we keep on the main floor about fifteen feet from the stove suddenly whooped a royal "BLEEP" - well, I say something that should be "BLEEP"ed when the damned thing goes off - they really should set those things up so that they have a four second build-up or something. Start at, say, 50 db and build up to a full shriek, rather than start out with the full-blast, convulsion-inducing screech). So I opened the front window, put a fan in it blowing out. Opened the kitchen window, all this AFTER turning off the stove, then experimented. Seems the stove TOP was functional - sorta - and the oven, not so much. This is why I chuck $15 a month down the bill-hole in the form of an offering to the Mighty Minnegasco Service Plus folks - who answer the phone with live people on a Sunday night. And after the first call and the arrangements for hiding a key, I remembered - I've got an eighty-pound Belgian Turveren who thinks she's underfed, concerned about her role guarding the children, cats, and home (not necessarily in that order), and would at the very least cause any sort of repair man who entered our home without us here to say ungentlemanly things (and soil himself to boot). So I called back and "advised" them to reschedule for a time when non-guarding warm bodies would be here to restrain the killer attack dog - and the lady thanked me for the warning. Frankly, the very last thing I wanted was to come home to a front yard with a Minnegasco fellow scattered about it - it would certainly make getting the stove fixed that much more problematic. So Monday passed in a mostly-foggy haze as I worked to get stuff done - and done I did - my VBScript I put together dropped my "discovery" time per user account from around 4 minutes each to under a minute - more on that in a minute... Monday night the fellow from Service Plus came out, managed to resurrect the stove, and then said "you're my witness - I got it to start four times in a row". Confidence, thy address ain't this house, I see. So yeah, we'll be looking for a good deal on a stove soon. Though I hope some day to go shopping for appliances and vehicles both BEFORE the "extreme emergency" stage. But that's for another time and place. I did hear from Mr. Beland, who assures me that you good folks hadn't gone mad - the underfed squirrels who worship at the altar of the Web Server went on strike over the weekend, and Matt, being on a drinking jag (yes, he's young, and yes, he deserves it) was blissfully unawares of the issues until Monday morning. It's all right now - or you wouldn't be reading this. What? Well, Matt's technical description was right along the lines of "The web server shat itself." Now, being as I know that the past form of "shit" is "oh, shit" I'm not quite sure what "shat" means - but I think it sounds sufficiently kinky so as to get me in trouble with someone, somewhere - or so I really do hope. After that was a quick dash to the craft store for leather laces, a stop at the lumber yard for the year's last load of 2x4s (10, this time), and back home, where I used the leather laces to make "story beads" for the boys in my Tiger Den - each bead represents an event or accomplishment (such as good behavior), and they're laced on the leather laces - which I thought were pretty strong. That finishes yesterday, and brings us to today. At work, I was able to get my "discovery" time down to 35 seconds each account, on average - counting the "non-automated" accounts. I blew away the other fellow in my team (who has been doing this for several months). We started discussing the "next step" - login scripts. Imagine, if you will, over four hundred NT domains, almost twice that number of Novell "contexts", about three times that number of administrators, and at least a few knuckleheads who will write login scripts which call VBS scripts which call OTHER VBS scripts - all to map a drive which could have been done in the original login script. Sheesh. Oh, wait, that's the "Consultant's Law of Job Security" - make it so complicated no one in their right mind would possibly want to maintain it - then it becomes your job. Um, no. I think my job is to make it possible TO maintain - so that it all works for the benefit of the owners. But that's just my humble opinion. Anyway, we tossed a few ideas around, and that's how I came to be analyzing login scripts, profiles, and group and share permissions. Alcohol, anyone? I know I needs it bad... After that, we came home - briefly - and back out to get my Den Chief, and back to school for the Pack Meeting - wherein the boys who sold lots of wreaths in our only annual fundraiser got prizes. Top prize was won by a family of three boys who sold 211 units - and picked up a PlayStation/2. Okay... During the meeting, I had two - yes, TWO - boys who tore their laces and spread beads all over the floor. Methinks I need to RETHINK the whole lacing idea. Perhaps piano wire, doubled around each bead? After the meeting, we headed home by way of my Den Chief's house. And an innocuous comment by me ("I don't really think combining sales is fair...") unleashed the fury of the Redhead I Live With. She Who Must Be Obeyed saw an injustice in the world (and to an extent, she's right), and she's working to right it. Does she stand a chance? No, not really - teaming by brothers will always be done, whether sanctioned or otherwise, and there's not a damned thing anyone can do about it. But she will try. And I will cringe - not because she'll lay waste to the land - she won't. Not the nearby lands, that is - unless they were the folk who set the policy. I suspect this is more in the realm of "this is how we've always done it" and changing it is not impossible, but un-possible - there's no way to re-can these worms - for one, we've got about eighty million more than we started with...
Anyway - now that I've rambled on long enough, I must go. There's a car to wedge into the garage, and with last night's temperatures dropping to nearly 10 They tell me life is eventually fatal - no one gets out alive... Which, sadly, reminds me that I missed by several months the commemoration of one of the first executions in "The Colonies". While I'm sure this fellow's relatives (not descendents, thank God) aren't thrilled with this, I should note for the record that in 1642 the Plymouth colony in Massachusetts was beset by a crime wave which was ... created if you will by the now-quite-late Thomas Granger. Young Granger, being a servant to "an honest man of Duxbery" was observed ... well, I suppose "attempting to service" a mare would be a rather feeble way of putting it. Young Granger was sentenced to death, and the sentence was carried out on September 8, 1642. This sentence took quite some time to carry out because, due to the law of the time, Granger's victims were sent before him to the gallows. Why did this take so long? Well, Granger's "accomplices" numbered "a mare, a cowe, tow goats, five sheep, 2 calves, and a TURKEY." Good Lord - even when I was seventeen, I never contemplated fornicating with fowl. Goes to show Mencken was right. Puritanism is that haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. Though I suspect the mare, calves, cow, goats, and sheep were a little bored - and the Turkey was ... No, not gonna do it. I'm not making stuffing jokes this close to Thanksgiving... |
Update At 2300 So we got out early, did our running about, and tonight when I came home, I discovered an e-mail from my boss - not my full-time at work boss but the fellow from the consulting company who hired me on - and of course, all that towering self-confidence (all two inches of it) is back into a bowl of jello. I know I've been better on the job than some of the other consultants I work with - I show up for all of the "core hours" - but for two days - which is more than some of my co-workers could say. But my yardstick is zero absences - and I blew that. I'm not the fastest gun in the west - but then again, I have figured more than a few "doh"s out, and sure, here I am now worrying about "will I be extended? Will I continue getting paid? Do they need me?" I really, REALLY hate this...
And Another Thing Many thousands of years ago in computer time (about ten years), I had a little DOS utility called "Drives". Type it in, it regurgitated valid drive letters. In the Novell/NT/AS-400/UNIX world I worked in back then, I'd be mapping and unmapping drives regularly - and I needed to know what was valid. At the time I'd written a bloated, overloaded Turbo Pascal program to dump the actual mapping - not just K: but K: [HAL.DATA01]\USERS\JDOMINIK - or whatever it was that the old Novell mappings worked out to. So zip ahead ten years, and today we were discussing how to determine how people logged in, and what their settings were - because we may well have to "inventory" right down to the user level and have them dump a fair load of information. Suddenly, my Drives program was rather ... necessary. I stole a bit from here, cribbed a bit out of the book, and could not, for the life of me, figure out why it didn't work. I started with a script that would barf up a window showing all of the details on a particular disk. I dropped all the necessary data but for the drive letter, root letter, and mapping - and wanted it to be directed to a file. The code in the first column doesn't work - the code - cobbled together from another utility, and very little changed from there to here, does work. And I don't know why...
I'm no freaking VB Genius - but I cannot understand why the "Fails" example does, and the works example does. Anyone?
Pre-Paring... This year - maple turkey. Ann found this one somewheres, and it requires maple syrup and maple-flavored bacon - the turkey isn't cooked in a bag like we've done the last several, but is done as normal - but for the last several hours with several strips of bacon across the breast. I'm drooling whilst typing - not a good thing when there's electricity involved.... |
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Update At 2245 Yesterday I didn't post. T'weren't from lack of trying, I should assure you - bits and bobs of an aborted post went into the toilet last night when I was struggling to yank the last bits of 48 images off my now-decrepit digital camera, and the ancient software I use (which only works on Win98) grabbed my computer by the throat and slammed it head-first into the ground. The camera is a Kodak DC-40 - yes, four-zero, I know they're in the thousands now - which has seen many better days. It regularly requires multiple passes to pull the files off the camera, no removable media, fixed focus, limited image adjustments, and all the rest. But it works. For which I'm thankful. I do recall part of my thankfulness yesterday was that I did not live in Los Angeles, where some whirling arsfardel decided that "Master" and "Slave" were offensive terms when applied even unto technology. Well, I'm offended when "Los Angeles" is mentioned as being part of the United States - let's do something about that, shall we? Mind you, not all Los Angelenos are off their nut - but a fair number seem to be. But I am thankful I don't live in a land where, as my father says, "what ain't fruits and nuts is flakes." And that leads me to the part of yesterday's post that I lost that I do miss. Ann did the annual "what are you thankful for" question at dinner yesterday (more later), and I had only one thing - "a job". But what goes with that job is far, far more than the simple paycheck. It's security, of a sort. It's the ability to hold your head up in public. Instead of "unemployed for 400 days" I can say "yeah, I work at ..." And for the record, no, it's not a bank which has recently (Thank God) been in the news. But I'm also thankful for the internet. Aside from quite literally saving my bacon and dinner yesterday (again, see below), it also allows me to call some rather far-flung and wildly divergent people "friend." Some years ago I had to defend this definition of "friend" to a family member - my youngest sister, who said "how can you know someone through the internet?" Well, I said, I know them about as well as you know some of yours. Yes, but, she replied, how much time have you spent with them? Well, about as much as necessary to learn what and sometimes even how they think, their opinions, and the like. I have some friends I've known better than 25 years - and I'm less confident of my ability to predict their actions and opinions today than some of my "internet friends". Fortunately for me, she shortened the argument considerably - by marrying a fellow whom she initially met through the internet. But the internet has allowed me to have reason many days to get out of bed - and while many of you good folks could be doing something else, I would like to thank you for the many minutes of your time you've taken to read these mutterings over the last year. There are many more things I'm thankful for - my health, my family, my life in general - but we'll forgo that and get back to yesterday. As previously alluded to,the internet saved my bacon yesterday - literally. Ann had discovered on the Food Network a recipe for Maple Turkey. Gee, says I, I've always liked the honey turkey and maple turkey sandwich meat at the store - could this be how it's done? The recipe, greatly simplified, consisted basically of cooking the turkey, basting it with maple syrup and other goodies, and leaving a bunch of bacon on the turkey's breast as it finishes cooking. I'll stop while you wipe the drool off. The problem yesterday was that Ann's copy of the recipe was on her desk - at work. Fortunately, it came from the internet. Three minutes later, problem solved. Phew. After that, I spent much of yesterday in my garage. Soon, I will be able to show you the results of my efforts - I'm quite pleased with them, but then again, that's the point, eh? After yesterday's late-mid-afternoon dinner (we ate around 4), I was body-slammed by the L-triptophane demon, and slept - sitting up, on an uncomfortable end of the couch - for about 45 minutes. Then I went back and had more sage sausage and wild rice stuffing. More drooling, I know... I worked a bit in the garage last night, uncrating and finally placing on the table the two major products - then I let the one "run in" for a bit to make certain it was a reliable tool. Yes, foreshadowing - I'll deliver soon enough. I do dearly hope. Following that, of course, I crashed out, got up, and went to work this morning, where I spent much of the day (such as it was) stuck in a holding pattern, unable to make progress because the one fellow who has the information I need is unavailable today (I do dearly hope he hasn't gone off a cliff or anything - much as I'd like to move up in the world, that's not the way I'd like to do it). So I'm tweaking my toolset until about 3:30 pm, after which point I bail and head to Menards to participate in the shopping orgy. I content myself with the following thoughts - First, that Menards is highly unlikely to be suffering "shoppers overload" as so many other stores are today, second, I need bolts and a small miter box, and third, I might browse the cheap lumber - yesterday's very successful efforts in building my rolling table for my new tools required $12.26 in lumber (and yes, I moved off the bottom in terms of 2x4s this time - I kicked out the extra 27 cents for the upgrade in quality), $16 in swivel wheels, and a chunk of countertop salvaged from someone else's kitchen remodel. And it just plain works. And it neatly tucks out of the way of the car when I need to put it in the garage on nights like tonight, where it'll be about 5 above outside. Brrrr... Sadly, all too early I'll be out in it. Tomorrow morning, I arise early, pack some tools into my brother-in-law's van, head to St. Cloud, wherein we will install said ramp - and see how THAT turns out. Best laid plans, and all that... And for the record, yes, THAT St. Cloud. Following that is, thank God, Sunday - when I will likely have to check out and fix all the little lightbulbs in the Holiday lights display. I've saved labor by leaving the damned lights up year-round... Or so I'm trying to convince Ann... |
Update At 1845 Extending this out to the ramp we installed today, the assembled ramp (adding a few pounds for screws and carriage bolts) weighs roughly 600 pounds. Which explains why I'm so exhausted tonight. We got the ramp assembled - the base needs a LOT of work yet, and I forgot the tar/shingle paper to tack on the surface to make it a little less slick - there's time yet for improvements, of course. A few tips for you - if you have to assemble such a ramp, plan for levers - LOTS of levers - and lots of bits of 1/2" plywood to aid in the leveling of said ramp. Ours is - barely - and that will change depending on how the ground below (which was not frozen) reacts. We'll see what we'll see. Other than that - no, doing this with Rhiannon's sleepover the night before was not intelligent. Not in the least little bit. The day didn't start well - I mean, aside from the 6:45 am wakeup call, that is. One of my sisters decided that we needed the uninsulated garage warmed up - and plugged in not one but two space heaters. Me, being somewhat sleep deprived, failed to observe the second heater - however, the garage door's inability to open should have triggered something. It took up until I plugged in the circular saw before I realized that none of the garage outlets worked - and that I would have to travel to the basement of the damned and dig through the piles of stuff to get to the breaker box. Said breaker box was of course the holder of breaker 16 - first one on the second row - and a 15-amp-er, I might add - which had popped out. With the two space heaters unplugged, life was again happy. Or as happy as it could get when I discovered that in the basement of the damned there are old, old, old magazines. Like the February 10, 1967 issue of Time Magazine, the October 1973 issue of National Geographic, or the June 13 issue of Popular Science. Jeez. That place is either a treasure trove or a freaking nightmare. |
Update At 2115 I did have a rather shocking moment a few days ago, and ran across two sites which need, frankly, a good thumping. The first - OpenRelayCheck.com - should probably be on anyone's list of sites to check to see if their own machines end up there. It purports to post a list of open relays. If you pay for membership, you get the newest 2000 servers "regularly". If you do not, you still get several thousand servers. When I checked this morning, the newest Open Relay they listed was found 11/27 - and that may be because they took the weekend off. The "free" open relay list contains servers found on October 17, which is, I suppose, a good sign - it takes them over a month to find 2000 servers. I'd prefer it took them over six, but it's a start. Anyway, <Not_An_Ad> they advertise $199 six-month memberships to their little ... operation, which gets you better access to the database and all the rest. </Not_An_Ad> Seems to me that these people could use a good thumping. I cannot imagine that any place that offers software to "protect your open relay server" can be considered ... acceptable, these days. The second site, however, caused me to think a whole lot more... An outfit called SendFakeMail.com, which frankly could crumble with the amount of traffic (all three regular readers) whom I could send to it, it's that slow - set me wondering. What if you set yourself up a business to send Spam - work with me here. You set up a server, you contract with this outfit to buy their open relay list, you purchase your software for bulk mailing, and contract out your services. One requirement - no cash business, it's all done via check or credit cards only. Do this service for, say, a year. Then start publishing the names and addresses of the people who use your service. And what they're selling. It won't stop spam. The best it will do is scare off a few bastards, and make everyone a bit more careful about which spaming vendors/services they use. Sigh. I had hopes...
Cow Economics
Slow News Day I did forget to mention how we managed to move that massive ramp yesterday. Well over thirty-five years ago, my Uncle Romey (short for Roman) came up to my father's home with a roll of twine. This was apparently what was called "paper" twine. At one point, I'm thinking the total length on the spool had to approach fifty miles. Yes, I'm being serious. This stuff is paper-thin, about 3/8" wide, exceptionally strong (it will not break by tugging at it - and when I was seventeen, I tied a loop and used a 2x4 and my foot - I wrecked a shoe trying to break this stuff), and came on a roll that at one point was at least a foot in diameter and about sixteen inches long. Now down to about nine inches in diameter, it make an excellent "wheel" for the ramp. Just one, yeah, but we used a truck jack to get it up on the roller. Pretty ingenious, I suppose. Sometimes, I scare myself... |
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