greyduck.net

Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Author: Karel Kerezman

  • Fixed! But Not! Then Really Fixed!

    It’s been that kind of week. I can demonstrate by detailing my most successful support ticket so far. Note that it’s halfway through Thursday by this point, and this is the highlight by far:

    Tuesday: Ticket assigned. Contacted software vendor, found that the IP address they were given to configure their firewall rule for our client was off… by two entire quads. The first and third quads in the IP address were correct, the second and fourth weren’t even close. Gave the vendor the correct address, told them to contact me if problems persisted.

    Wednesday: No contact from client or vendor. Good!

    Thursday: Mid-morning, decided to close the ticket. Not five minutes later, the vendor emailed to say that they’re still getting the same error. Cue facepalm. Figured out the permissions needed for the user to run the program & save files successfully (note that up to this point, we were never given or shown the actual error message), used a command line utility to remedy, problem solved, client’s happy. Closed ticket for the second time this morning.

    Everything else I’ve worked on this week has gone much worse. And the less said about unresponsive product vendors who can’t read what we put into the ticket updates, the better. Grr.

    Is it the weekend, yet?

  • No Pain, No Loss

    Speaking of numbers?

    Push-ups completed this week: 41

    Sit-ups completed this week: 11

    I started a morning exercise routine this week, and yes, I’m starting small. I figure on doing ten push-ups and five sit-ups per morning until that gets (relatively) easy, then move to some combination of more of those activities and another activity yet to be selected. The idea isn’t to turn this into some massive workout or use this as a weight-loss program; I just want to get my body back to a place where I can do things again without becoming winded way too quickly or just plain being too weak.

    Unfortunately my abdominal muscles flat-out gave up after the second day of sit-ups. Wednesday’s attempt was accompanied by “OW OW OW.” Which scuttled my push-ups as well. Since then I’ve been starting with the push-ups since I know I can do those. My sit-up attempts yesterday and today were met with a big fat “NOT HAPPENING” from the abs.

    I think they’re on strike.

    There’s talk of putting in a workout space into the office expansion (yes, we’re expanding again). This might be a good thing, as I can’t afford or schedule a proper gym. (Nor would I want to deal with that environment, really.)

    So. There’s me, trying to get a bit healthier. Yay?

  • By The Numbers

    This post marks 2000 entries to the journal.

    On June 26th this journal will be effectively 11 years old. Now, we achieved this partly by importing some back-dated entries from the previous website, but there you have it.

    We’ve racked up nearly 4000 approved comments, and let’s not speculate on how much spam we’ve deleted in over a decade.

    It’s worth mentioning that since posting dropped off precipitously after I lost my job with Entercom six years ago, the bulk of these 2000 posts took place in the first half of this site’s existence. C’est la vie, I guess.

    I have more content queued but when I noticed in the WordPress Dashboard that there were 1999 posts in the system, I figured I should mark an occasion somehow. And here we are.

  • Year Four of Quacked Panes

    I don’t always have much luck with this particular method, but apparently what it took to shake off several days’ worth of deep blue funk was to hunker down and get some creative work done. What this means for you is that Year Four of Quacked Panes kicks off Monday, both comics for next week are already queued, and I whipped up a new banner image.

    Considering that I was starting to worry that I’d lost my webcomic mojo, this makes me feel much better about things…

  • Don’t don’t fence fence me me in in

    I took the camera to Advance Camera out in Beaverton for a cleaning a couple weeks ago, and now that it’s back I’ve decided to take some pictures that include some nice blue sky, since I no longer have to worry about “Photoshopping” away the smudges that kept showing up.

    What I want to know is, who looks at a fenced in area and says, “You know what? That needs to be fenced in.”

    (It’s probably because they don’t want horses jumping out and running into the new road alongside the Washington County Fairgrounds. But why should I let a good, practical answer get in the way of a joke?)

  • Litmus Test Services

    I’ve often said that I should hire myself out to organizations, advertising agencies, or major corporations to vet their proposed media campaigns, domain name choices and so forth. The deal is simple: If at any point in your presentation I start to giggle like a teenaged schoolboy caught looking at naughty pictures, you should rethink your strategy. Here’s an example, and if you’re averse to a certain… ah… kind of language I recommend that you stop reading and go look at disapproving rabbits or something instead.

    So! What crosses your mind when you see the following domain name?

    cumcpdx.org

    Don’t worry, it’s actually safe for work. I’m not linking to them because I’d rather not have someone checking their referer logs and coming (ahem) after me for what could be considered a bit of mockery.

    And if you don’t understand why all the fuss… congratulations, you’re probably a nice, normal, well-adjusted person. What’s that like, by the way…?

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