greyduck.net

Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Author: Karel Kerezman

  • Father’s Day 2003

    When your day starts with breakfast in bed and the giving of gifts, you know it’s not going to be too bad of a day.

    Wendi and the kids brought me french toast and bacon. I love bacon. Mmmmm, bacon. I also received a bunch of Father’s Day cards, both commerical and handmade. Add to that a stack of music CDs and you’re talking about a pretty good morning.

    For the record, pardon the pun: Phil Collins’ “No Jacket Required” and “But Seriously,” and Sting’s “Brand New Day” and “All This Time.” One of the discs I already owned, but that’s okay. I was very touched and very happy all the same.

    I spent most of the day playing games by myself, recouperating from the stresses of work and from the strange day Saturday turned out to be. At day’s end, Wendi went out and picked up a bit of chinese-ish food from Safeway as well as various pizza-like objects and a whole bunch of Henry’s root beer.

    A side note for those who are interested: If you really want to butter me up then bring me Stouffer’s french bread pizzas, the pepperoni if you please. Thank you.

    Another side note: Safeway’s chinese-ish food is really not all that great. As if you needed to be warned.

    One more side note: Henry Weinhard’s is the best root beer on the planet, bar none.

    I put in a call to my own father late in the evening. Some incorrect notions about the divorce needed laying to rest, and we talked about falling headfirst into major life changes. All in all, we had a nice chat.

    The last event for the evening was a round of Boggle with all five members of the current household. Yes, even “grampa” got into the act. After a number of truly horrid rounds (“I can’t believe you managed to make that entire half all vowels!” alternated with “Um, how did you manage to only get one vowel?”) we closed out the game with the boys all well ahead on points. I won, of course.

    Yet another side note: We play Boggle with slightly modified rules. To wit, the kids are the only ones allowed to write down or score from three-letter words. It forces the adults to really work for their words, and it ensures that the children will get a respectable score as long as they put forth reasonable effort.

    After the Boggle game we shipped the kids off to bed, Grampa went singing, and that was pretty much the end of the day…

    I can only hope that dads everywhere had at least as good a day as I did. Happy Father’s Day!

  • Snapshots Galore

    My sister Christine and her husband John are in town this week on something of a late honeymoon. Today the Kerezman household went to my Aunt Jean’s place outside of Wilsonville to a family gathering where Sis could show off her hubby. Grandma Arlene and her husband Walter arrived with Great-Grandma Penny in tow. We collectively chowed down on burgers and hot dogs and chips and later on some chocolate cake with chocolate frosting and M&M Minis sprinkled on top. Man, that was a nice cake.

    Erica got to feed goats and hold a turkey. Alex got to play on a piano. Both kids splashed around in the pool for a while.

    The adults talked a lot as adults are prone to doing, especially members of a family that isn’t exactly known for its frequent gatherings.

    A nice time was had by all, everyone praised Sis for landing herself such a nice and good-looking husband, and the awkward family moments were kept to a merciful minimum.

    For the complete set of images I snapped during the afternoon, check out the “Family Gathering, June 2003” gallery.

    I also uploaded (finally!) a few of the pics from back when one of the Sakura-Con staffers had some folks over for a housewarming. Look in “People, Places, Things” to see his super-cool, super-mini screening/gaming room.

    There are more random images strewn about, but you’ll just have to poke around in the Gallery to find them all. Happy hunting!

  • Past, Present, Future – Round Seventeen

    I’d like to begin by welcoming the dozens who arrive here via The Memes List, and remind you (politely, ever so politely) that you are encouraged (very, ever so very) to leave a comment (it’s the “quack me up” or “wisequacks” link at the bottom of any given entry) so we all (okay, just me, to stroke my ego) know where to find your answers (assuming you don’t flee in disgust swearing off the whole thing as a bad job).

    Was that silly enough for you? No? Good. Let’s proceed, then.

    PAST: I can’t believe you used to do that. I mean, really. Didn’t anyone tell you that you shouldn’t? The mess! The smell! We won’t even go into what could happen if you got caught. You didn’t get caught, right? Right?

    PRESENT: If you were faced with the choice right this minute would it be the leafy green homogenized free-range cajun-style, or the scented glossy well-coiffed hardwood islander variety? Hurry, hurry, we don’t have all day!

    FUTURE: The language barrier has largely been surmounted, but the passive-agressive alien race with the lovely aquamarine eyes and the poison stingers and the remarkably prehensile appendages still has so much to learn about the myriad cultures of homo sapiens. You’ve been called in as an expert on the obscure subject of…?

    For the record, as if anything said here counted as a valid method of tracking reality, I don’t smoke anything. I don’t even like smoked salmon all that much. If you want to share the silliness with your readers then I suggest you link back to the PPF using something that looks a lot like http://greyduck.net/ppf/ or whatever it translates to in your extraterrestrial tongue. Or speech-assist appendage, anyway. Sheesh, you aliens are so damned weird anyway. Why can’t you just have two arms, two legs and one set of genitalia like the rest of us? Freaks.

  • No, I’m the stupid one.

    It wasn’t Fisher, it wasn’t our own corporate guys, in fact nothing at all happened.

    When someone in our building tried to send email out to someone at KWJJ after the time when the corporate team had set up our mail system to accept KWJJ email, is it any wonder that our mail system assumed that mail destined for kwjj.com should stay in the system?

    The fact that this only dawned on me this morning while on the phone with my corporate boss (who was understandibly upset at the accusatory voicemail I left him yesterday) is not exactly one of the highlights of my work week.

    I suppose I can take some small comfort in the fact that the corporate guys didn’t think of it either, and were quite baffled by the failure to send email to KWJJ since Fisher hadn’t changed the MX records yet.

    Oops. Once again, Karel overreacts without thinking things through. It seems to be a bad habit I need to work on breaking.

  • Grr. Argh.

    Bite The First:

    So we’re given a budget for new computers, since the machines currently at JJ aren’t fit for bringing onto our network. That’s all well and good. I went to our wonderful CDW rep and asked for a quote on enough computers to equip the people coming over, and enough Netware licenses to get them on our server.

    And then I asked her for a bigger quote, adding some machines and network switches to the mix. I looked at the final quote, called it Good, and fumbled my way through the paperwork to get everything ordered.

    Two hours after I faxed over the purchase order, I looked at the quote again and noticed something lacking: The Netware licenses. Gah! Dumbassed me! A frantic bit of phone tag later, our wonderful CDW rep promised a fix, and disaster was narrowly averted. Didn’t help my frame of mind much, though.

    Bite The Second:

    The plan for migrating the “former Fisher folks” onto our email system called for Fisher to make the change to the email domains tomorrow, after confirming that everything was ready on our end.

    For instance, it would be unwise to repoint the domains if the new email server doesn’t have the accounts set up, wouldn’t it? And since I’d only very recently received the list of accounts, I was spending the afternoon entering those to the server.

    One of the ladies from the business office came to ask why emails to folks over at JJ were bouncing back. I looked at the bounce message and sure enough, Fisher had already made the change. Gah! Dumbassed Fisher! I scrambled back to my workstation and cranked out the rest of the addresses, and now all I can do is hope that there weren’t too many bounced messages.

    Mind you, now we have a bit of a problem. Even if mail is coming here now, that means nobody over there can get to it. It looks like we’ll be making the WAN change earlier than we’d planned.

    Which doesn’t help my frame of mind much…

  • Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!

    After nearly six full months during which it came be known to its participants as the Amish Tech Support Live F***ing Forever Pool…

    … we have two, count ’em two, deaths that count as scores for some of the players.

    Please note that we here at The Little Grey Duck do not make a habit of celebrating the death of other human beings. Unless, of course, those human beings really really piss us off. This is all in good fun, and the humor-impaired can jolly well bugger right off.

    To follow the fun and frolic, click the provided link, or use the handy “Death” icon down at the bottom of the left-side column.
    Amish Tech Support Dead Pool

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