Since I needed to remain on-site Monday evening to gracefully power off the traffic server while the electricians rerouted power around the building, I took the opportunity to upgrade Tapscan to the newly-released version 9.3. This is the first release we’ve seen in a year and a half, and remembering previous upgrade experiences led me to worry quite a bit about how it would go over, and what would be broken.

Other than one case, in which the computer wouldn’t launch the installer until a zombie Firefox process was killed, I’ve heard no complaints at all from the sales floor. Not one. At all.

I’m enough of a paranoid cynic to be waiting for the other shoe to drop; I’m also enough of a pragmatist to count my blessings and take advantage of the lack of furor to get other work done.

(Oh, and remember the design flaw thing? That hasn’t changed. Anyone can delete anyone else’s account without even trying. A year and a half goes by since the last release and that still hasn’t been fixed. Color me underwhelmed, Arbitron Software People. Argh.)

The straw that broke the camel’s back this afternoon was a salesperson who came to me inquiring as to whether I’d removed the suspicious software off of the laptop she’d been using a couple of weeks ago and had me do some work on before a major presentation to a major (and difficult) client. I noticed a couple of strange processes launching upon boot, and hadn’t had the time to fully investigate before she absconded with the machine. I extracted a promise from her that the laptop would be returned to me right after her presentation so I could finish dealing with… whatever that odd process might have turned out to be.

“Did you get that virus off of the laptop?”

I stared at her blankly for a full fifteen seconds, then said, “You never brought it back. I don’t know where it is. I never know where those damned things are.”

“Oh, I told [Immediate Supervisor] that you needed it. Do you mean he didn’t bring it to you?”

At that point I just laid my head down on my arm and pounded on the desk with the other in sheer frustration. Shortly afterward I left the building for the day, before I could get up the nerve to really throttle somebody.

Two weeks, and that laptop’s been running around, changing hands, being plugged into gods-know-what, and nobody gives a rat’s ass that there might be a major security problem in the making because of it. Nevermind that I’m the SysAdmin and would, in a normal office environment, be responsible for tracking and checking such equipment. Oh, no, I don’t even know how many laptops there are. I am not making this up.

Let me pose this question: Is it normal for people to promise to do something, then foist that task off on someone else without either telling the original promisee about it, or clearly stressing the importance of the task to the foistee? And if so, what penalty can I reasonably extract from these people, since I”m sure that my initial impulse of taking a clue-by-four to the offenders wouldn’t go over very well with the powers that be…?

I took two calls from random listeners today, and I think I may have missed at least one more. I finally got some more information out of the last guy to call, which led me to a couple of useful pieces of information.

One, the Charlie FM comment line is 503-535-0240, and they’re giving it out on the air.
Two, there’s a good chance that there’s nothing wrong with the promos, hence it’s not a matter of “someone here screwed up” but rather “some people’s hearing is screwed up,” which leads to people mistakenly dialing my number instead of the correct one.

Argh. At least now I can just transfer these losers, but now I get the unenviable task of playing receptionist to people who are listening to a radio station they don’t like and can’t correctly hear the number they’re told to call to complain about it. Yippee, ha ha, whee!

I got another random-listener phone call today. Different listener, this time from a non-blocked number. This time I had the presence of mind to ask, “Where did you get this number?” She said, “I, uh, heard it on the radio.”

So either she misdialed the number, misheard the number… or I need to break some kneecaps somewhere. Either way, if this becomes a trend I’m going to be talking to someone in charge. This could quickly become absolutely absurd. Ugh.

Dear Radio-Listening Public,

Don’t call me to gripe about your dissatisfaction with K-something-something-something, your (most or least) favorite radio station. I can’t help you. I can’t make it better. I can’t even be bothered to care because, you see, I don’t even listen to the radio. No, really, I don’t.

Here’s a bonus tip, just because I love you all so very much: On the off-chance you come across some direct-dial numbers for various people who work here, please exercise some brainpower before actually dialing any of those numbers. I say this because, as stated above, I cannot help you, and additionally, because making me answer random phone calls from complete strangers who want only to complain about things I can’t fix is one of the fastest ways to get my mood from “tired but generally upbeat” to “ravingly pissed off at humanity in general.”

I only mention all of this because somehow, someone out there (whose caller ID was blocked, sad to say) called my direct line in order to spout something pithy along the lines of, “Hey, why don’t you play more music on (I don’t even remember or care which station)?” (If anyone I work with is reading this: I was polite, I told him I couldn’t help, and I sent him on his way cheerfully and professionally. I waited until the phone was firmly on the hook before starting in with the bad language and rude gestures.)

Thank the goddesses that it’s Friday.

KNRK’s program director called me over so I could look into why his music scheduling program was running so darned slow. He’d already performed the obligatory reboot to no avail, so I dutifully went to his office and watched the software misbehave as claimed. The problem manifested as long pauses of up to 90 seconds when performing random tasks.

I checked the Task Manager. NTVDM took up most of the CPU power during those pauses. Fine, so the Virtual DOS doohicky was working overtime. Why? My next thought was to check the program’s working directory on the server for telltale files. I found them, alright. I found four thousand of them.

VDM(hex-numeral).tmp files. All of them zero bytes in size, ranging in age from a couple of days to a couple of years. Apparently the VDM never, ever deletes these puppies. So I did, and it… almost helped.

I looked deeper. Deeper into the directory structure, that is. In one of the subdirectories I found something that really surprised me: 65,000 of those VDM*.tmp files.

Whoah.

I wasn’t at all surprised that deleting all of those files made the program work better. In fact it ran considerably faster than the PD expected, as he’d grown used to it being fairly slow. My next amazing feat will be the implementation of a timed script that regularly removes those damned “temporary” files…