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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Category: Geekery

  • After a while, you stop counting the hours or risk going mad.

    Here it is, one o’clock in the fine, fine morning. I just got home, and am working on the dinner I bought some seven hours ago. Once I crank out this entry and decompress a bit more from the evening’s fun-and-frolic, I’m going right to bed.

    I, along with the other two-thirds of the “engineering staff,” put in *mumblemumble* hours today, first doing our normal work and then doing a three-sided server swap on the digital audio system. We took Enco-PDX, the former primary server, and made it the secondary server. Enco-FS1 is the new primary, while poor old Beast is finally retired. (Don’t worry, I’ll find something to do with an 800 GB drive array. Bwahahaha.) We faced a myriad of challenges tonight, including “how to recable the entire Enco networking system without taking any stations off the air.”

    We were thorough, we were organized, and we were careful. I know; I’m just as shocked as you are. There’s even a chance I won’t get called on my day off tomorrow… er, today. At least, if I get called it shouldn’t be about anything we worked on tonight. Heh.

    During my lunch break (oh, let’s not think about how many hours ago that was) I installed Spam Karma 2 on both this site and the anime site, ’cause I’m tired of “moderating” annoying spam comments that WordPress 1.5’s built-in system can’t quite prevent me from seeing. Oh, and don’t go trying to sell me on that Akismet thing of theirs… anything that has to “phone home” every time someone posts a comment is something I want to avoid. Hell, I eventually gave up using Blogrolling.com because I don’t like being reliant on anyone else’s servers to keep my content running.

    Anyway. I need to get some sleep tonight. And clean up the place a bit in the morning. And meet my beloved at the train station on time. And… well, you get the picture…

  • The Simpsomaker

    This is all Sarah’s fault.

    There aren’t really very many options to choose from, so this is the best I could do. You’re welcome to make your own, of course. And how amusing is it that the site is called DevilDucky, eh?

    Bear in mind that there’s no option (that I could find, anyway) to save the image other than printing it, so be prepared to use whatever screen capture method works best for you. (When in doubt, for Windows users: Alt+PrintScrn, then open whatever image editor you have on hand and Ctrl+V to paste. Crop as needed, then save.)

  • My First Compy

    This News.com.com story takes some famous names in the IT biz and asks them each what their first computer was. Then the story invites readers to share their own “first computer” info.

    But… you have to subscribe to their website to do so. Wow, no, thanks, I’ll just… hey! I have my own site!

    Anyway. I must have been about twelve years old, as I’m pretty sure this was during the later stretch of Mom’s marriage to Mike Schomler, and we were living in the (rather nice) double-wide on the hillside above the Westerdahl property. (My stepdad worked for them at the time. I’ll have to tell some more stories about those years, later, won’t I?) I don’t remember how I came into possession of such a thing, but my first computer was a quirky self-contained lump of metal and plastic dubbed the Commodore PET 2001. It sported a built-in (cassette) tape drive and a quaint chiclet-style keyboard. Yes, it was many years later that I learned to touch-type, as it’s nigh-impossible to do so on a purely rectangular layout. Almost all of the actual programming (from scratch) that I’ve ever done in my life was on that machine, though. Hell, I even still have some of the tapes… though I’m pretty sure they’re degraded beyond all use, now, if not entirely copied over with music I recorded from the radio. (My other favorite toy during those years was my portable cassette/radio deck, after all.)

    While I made use of a variety of other machines (those of friends and classrooms) in the years since I gave up on the PET, it wasn’t until the mid-’90s that I owned a computer of my own again. Ah, back when a 486 was a wonder to behold…

  • ED: It’s not just for heroes anymore.

    As I scrolled through the collection of work email messages I knew I’d be deleting momentarily, one subject line caught my eye. It assured me that ED is a problem for many people, and promised me a way to take care of it. I thought, “Wow, that’s some really well-targeted spam. How did they know I’m a City of Heroes/Villains player? Why yes, Enhancement Diversity is a sham and a pox upon the playerbase.”

    Then I thought some more and… laughed. No, sorry, I don’t have that problem. Thank goodness.

  • Craigrom who?

    This morning I deleted the third in a series of attempted comment spams, all pointing to one or another subdomain of craigrom.com. (No, I’m not linking them. That’d sort of defeat the purpose of deleting the spam comments, wouldn’t it? Don’t worry. I’ve looked and there’s nothing of note to be found there.) The comments all take the rather odd form of an inquiry as to how one can best access my site’s feed. Uh, if you can’t figure out how to find the (well-linked and automation-friendly) feed link on this site, you don’t deserve to use the feed. Thanks for playing, buh-bye.

    You’d think that after all this time, other industries would look at the backlash against comment spam and think, “Hmm, maybe attempting to artificially inflate our Google PageRank in this fashion might not work out as well as we might have hoped.” But hey, never underestimate greedy bastards with more money than sense, eh?

    If this keeps up I’m going to need a “Spamhatred” subcategory. Granted, I didn’t have to deal with as much of this in years past, but I’m still glad I made the switch. Deleting the spam manually took far more effort; at least WordPress makes it dead easy, and rarely does a spammer actually get their message onto my site.

  • Etymology for fun and… fun.

    I’m something of an armchair etymologist. No, that’s not the guy who’s into bugs. Anyway. Today’s Dictionary.com Word of the Day isn’t actually a word but is instead a phrase. I’ve misused this particular term often enough that seeing the proper definition caught my eye, and upon further investigation I read the following:

    deus ex machina \DAY-uhs-eks-MAH-kuh-nuh; -nah; -MAK-uh-nuh\, noun:
    1. In ancient Greek and Roman drama, a god introduced by means of a crane to unravel and resolve the plot.
    2. Any active agent who appears unexpectedly to solve an apparently insoluble difficulty.

    The emphasis in Definition Number One is mine, and highlights what I found most amusing. “Deus ex machina” translates to “god from machine,” and it turns out that it’s a more literal meaning than I originally expected. This is the sort of stuff that puts a smile on my face. I love learning where things came from, especially when it includes colorful, fanciful details such as ancient wire-fu antics.

    Of course, because I’m a weirdo, the first joke that popped into my head goes something like, “If it was an old-looking goddess, could you say it was a crone on a crane?”

    (As an aside, does it creep anyone else out that my search for “Gil Grissom” on Google turned up at least one slashfic link on the first page of results? Ewww.)

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