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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Author: Karel Kerezman

  • An Open Letter To Desktop Computer Vendors

    Dear $VENDOR,

    I understand your urge to design (and continually redesign) the innards of a desktop computer in such a way as to make them a) more easily accessible than usual, b) more efficiently cooled, c) able to fit more hardware in less space or d) all of the preceeding letters.

    It’s option “e” I take exception to. That would be, e) unable to have anything other than vendor-supplied parts for replacements.

    What really lit my fire this afternoon was the discovery that I can’t even replace a burned-out power supply in what looks like an otherwise-standard desktop mini-tower. Oh, no, that would be too easy. Sure, it was fairly easy to get to the unit. But there isn’t a standard power supply made that will fit into this chassis. Why? Because of the extra-special slot-based retention system you came up with. Nevermind that 99.9% of desktop power supplies are perfectly capable of staying put with the four screws usually used for such a task. Oh, no, you guys had to be different. “Let’s use only one screw, and some tab/slot dealie-bobs!” Great effing idea.

    Did I mention that of the parts inside your average computer, the power supply is second on the list of Most Likely Bits To Fail? (The top item is, of course, “box containing flat round hunks of metal covered in magnetic bits spinning at very high rotational speeds.” Otherwise known as a “hard drive.”)

    So if you have a situation like I did today, where one of my better salesfolks’ power supplies blew a capacitor, and I find I’m unable to replace the power supply from any of my numerous available stock… what am I supposed to do with the rest of the computer? I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay through the nose for a special $VENDOR-made power supply, thank you very little.

    Consider this one more nail in the coffin of my ever being able to recommend your products with anything resembling my former enthusiasm, you braindead bastards.

    I guess it’s time to gut this tower for parts, eh? Let’s see… 550 MHz Pentium-III CPU, 64 MB of RAM, and a ten gigabyte hard drive. Whee. What a freakin’ waste.

  • Silence: It’s loud.

    It’s not that I haven’t wanted to write, but rather that I’ve had very little to write about. You see, I spent my weekend being as completely laid back as possible. I did a lot of reading, putting a huge dent in that massive Arthur C. Clarke short story uber-collection I picked up at Powell’s a while back in the process. I played some Diablo II, because I still like that game and enjoy trying out new character builds. I listened to music. I lounged around in my jammies. When I did get out of the house, it was to either hang out with my kids (seeing fireworks, for instance) or with Lil’. Otherwise, I was an utter non-member of society.

    And it was nice. I feel much more at ease now than I have in a while… not that anything majorly bad was going on, mind you. I just felt a bit too harried. Now, not so much.

    Now, of course, I have to actually force myself to write about all the things I’ve thought of that need writing about…

  • Score!

    Marlon Brando, dead at age 80.

    Thus, worth 45 points.

    Unfortunately, not nearly enough to put me in the running for a placing finish this year, either. I suspect everyone else on my roster can sleep easy for the rest of the year…

  • Washuu V

    The first two computers to be named Washuu where I work were puny little NT servers designed to serve up a few web pages and also run a NetMeeting portal.

    The third Washuu added file-depository work to those earlier tasks, and also saw the upgrade from NT 4 to Windows 2000.

    The fourth Washuu has been in service for a couple of years now, actually. We’ve long since stopped using NetMeeting (though she was still basically set up for it), but we added hosting a QwestDex directory as well as the server monitoring system. But she was getting just a bit slow for the sorts of tasks I wanted to add to her workload; there’s also the fact that getting the last of the Windows servers off the public internet would be a Job Worth Doing ™.

    So I took the innards of my former office workstation (a P4 2.4GHz and other nice bits) and built the fifth server to bear the name Washuu here… and the first not to run any Microsoft code whatsoever.

    I still have some work to do. For one thing, the website needs complete revamping, and there’s the minor issue of not having any automated system in place to ping my phone when servers go down. (Oops. Yeah, that’s Priority Number One right now.)

    Anyway. For what little it’s worth, check out The Lab, the cheesy little website I run on (the new, improved) Washuu.

  • TMA: Too Much Anime?

    I spent Friday and Saturday afternoons and evenings over at the kids’ place while Wendi worked DJ gigs. This isn’t unusual, actually, except for the “Friday” part.

    What is unusual, however, is the sheer volume of anime I viewed over those two days. I’m trying to churn through all of Card Captor Sakura, for one thing, and there’s all this new anime I’ve been getting my mitts on that also needs watching…

    So, let’s see, what’s the tally so far this weekend?

    Card Captor Sakura: Episodes 12 through 30.
    Scrapped Princess: Episodes 1 through 4.
    Samurai Champloo: Episode 4.

    You do the math. Me, I don’t want to know how many total hours that is. Oh, and let’s not forget the non-anime programming (Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Day The Earth Froze) we watched yesterday…

    Whew!

  • …my robot wife…

    Don’t even ask me to retrace the lengthy and bizarre websurfing path that led me to it, but here’s a comic strip (of sorts) that caught my eye and made me laugh:

    A softer world (May 21st 2004)

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