greyduck.net

Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Author: Karel Kerezman

  • Oh, what a night.

    This is going to ramble incoherently. I’ve been at work for a bit more than 24 hours, so please bear with.

    To sum up, I’ll tell you exactly what I just told everyone else:

    If you can read this…

    … congratulations on digging into your Start Menu and finding your Groupwise icon after fighting with the very-confused Novell login process.

    Here’s the good news: The new server is alive and kicking, all data is intact, and the printers are apparently still happy on our network. And did you notice how much more quickly the login process goes without the anti-virus checker and the ZENworks launcher, not to mention that tedious wait to map the P: drive on the Snap server?

    Here’s the bad news: ZENworks is gone. (You won’t feel the pain of it, but my workload may very well just have doubled, if not tripled.) I have only a few suspicions as to why it broke, but there’s nothing I can do about it now, and it was totally inevitable. Without ZENworks, we get no handy-dandy icons for things like Groupwise, Tapscan, Powerlink, CoolEdit 2000. So, someone (guess who?) will need to go from computer to computer to computer to computer manually placing icons for all of those programs.

    Here’s the really bad news: If you want to print something, you’ll have to wait until someone (guess who?) can go from computer to computer to computer to computer, removing and then adding again your printers. (The quick, layman’s explanation is that your computer is looking in the wrong place for the printers.)

    Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go home and sleep after my 24-hour shift, the climax of four straight double-digit-hours working days. I’ll be here bright and early Tuesday morning, hopefully before many of you even have the chance to read this. At least you’ll understand why your computer’s acting so very strangely…

    (ps – The observant among you will notice that I am indeed not coming in for a couple of days this holiday weekend. It’s for my mental health and yours. Trust me on this: we all want for me to be rested and recuperated on Tuesday morning.)

    Overall, a qualified success. The printer thing is resolvable, albeit with a ton of tedious work. I’m just glad I didn’t have to actually reconfigure all of the print servers. As for the loss of ZENworks, well, I’m really going to feel it the next time something major needs to be rolled out to most of the building.

    Right now, I’m just praying that the only phone calls I take between now and Tuesday are from friends, not co-workers. I need a break. Starting last Tuesday morning I’ve clocked 59 hours up to this point. Folks, that’s gotta be enough for a while. I’ll catch up with you again after some downtime.

  • Past, Present, Future – Round Fourteen

    So here I am, surviving a week filled with workdays up to 14 hour long, sleep deprived, and looking at doing the 14th PPF, when it hits me like a lead pillow what this week’s seed idea should be.

    PAST: – Ah, the boundless, insane energy of youth. Do you remember the longest stretch of time you stayed awake?

    PRESENT: – I’ve heard of people who only need five hours, while I’m closer to nine. How much sleep per night do you need now in order to feel hale and whole?

    FUTURE: – In a world where sleep has been rendered irrelevant by advanced medical technology, what do you do with all of that extra time in the day… or night, for that matter?

    Sleep on it first if you have to, but your answers (or a link thereto) should appear in the comments when the time is right. When linking back, use the following: http://greyduck.net/ppf/

  • I’m all about the Un, baby.

    Found via J-Mo, I took the Untelligence Test.

    The Test Results Are In!

    “You kick ass.”

    You have a knack for greatness. For the record, you are 71% Un-telligent which is significantly higher than the current average of 60%.

    Here is the custom report of your personality that led our team of geeks to conclude (with confidence) that you are resourceful, sly, and guaranteed to get away with everything:

    “Interesting. While the subject shows a very high level of intelligence, his sense of observation is somewhat below average. We attribute this to the egotistical nature of the subject. Actually, rats behave in the same manner, but he’s smarter than any animal.

    “Also, as much as we hate violence, an occasional mauling is one way to solve day-to-day problems like unpleasant coworkers or pesky door-to-door salesmen; he just isn’t tough enough, sir, and he avoids any solution that involves violence.

    “Finally, the subject displayed a healthy (better than most net freaks anyway) sense of humor, a down and dirty sense of morality, and a barbaric self-confidence. The balance of these three traits is important; high levels of confidence, medium levels of morality, and a good level of humor make for the strongest individuals.”

    Yeah, that’s right, I kick ass…

    IN MY MIND! Har har.

  • Server-room Shuffle

    Last night I rearranged a few things in the main server rack, and here’s the result:

    Yes, that’s our new server. Two 18-gig drives, mirrored, live in the rightmost slots. Three 72-gig drives arranged RAID-5-style in the other occupied slots give us a roughly 130-gig storage array.

    And the thing’s still the loudest machine in the room. Wow.

    I’ve put in 13-hour days the last two days, with at least two more to go. Wish me luck.

  • It’s that old shoe-size myth again.

    Found via Starjewel:

    The following charts maps shoes sizes in different units used around the world (inches, centimeters, American, British, Japanese, and European shoes sizes) to the lengths of men’s units (in inches and centimeters).

    Would this be a good time to mention I’m a 9-1/2 wide? Maybe not, as the page goes on to say,

    As for shoe widths, there isn’t enough information about shoe widths to create the corresponding mapping to penis widths.

    Ah well. Anyway, without further ado, here you go…
    Shoe/Penis Size Conversions

  • Dialog you won’t be hearing in the new Matrix movie.

    A longtime denizen of animemusicvideos.org, the guy known as MCWagner likes to do movie reviews. Often they’re of semi-obscure horror flicks, but recently he took on X2 and the new Matrix flick. His capsule review reads,

    I liked the film, but it wasnít nearly as well crafted as the first, and they kept all the parts I disliked while getting rid of some of those I liked. Watch it for the fights, bring a book to occupy time during the philosophizing, and get ready to cover juniorís eyes during the sex.

    But that’s not the funny part, the part that inspired me to log into my website at 12:30 in the freakin’ Ay Em. That would be this bit, describing what should have happened during one philosophical stop-down:

    … and then lectures them for fifteen minutes on causality while causing a woman at another table to remote-orgasm in wireframe (THATíLL keep the audience awake). Through the whole speech, our three heroes just sit there, emotions concealed behind opaque shades, entirely motionless. I was half expecting Keanu to lean over to Morpheus:

    N: Psssst. Whatís going on?
    M: I have no idea.
    N: Is there gonna be a test on this?
    M: I hope not. I was only watching when he lit off that girl.
    N: Yeah, she was hot, wasnít she?
    M: I bet I could get Niobe back with a piece of that cake.

    Ahh, priceless. Oddly enough, now I actually want to see this movie… so I can mentally insert that bit of dialog at the appropriate moment.

    What? C’mon, people. You knew I was a very silly person, didn’t you? Hmm?

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