greyduck.net

Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Author: Karel Kerezman

  • Past, Present, Future – Round Ten

    Ten weeks of this? And we haven’t all gotten bored yet? Incredible.

    PAST: The connection between our brains and our mouths is supposed to be governed by a buffer of common sense and wisdom. Of course, that wisdom and sense are lacking when we’re young. Tell us about a golden moment when your pre-teen self said something you shouldn’t have, right in front of God and everybody.

    PRESENT: Our buffer is always an imperfect device. What was the last time you slipped and fell on your own tongue, as it were?

    FUTURE: Flipping the coin for a moment, think about something you’d really like to say to somebody, some day when you can get away with it (last day on the job, for instance). And, of course, you have to tell us about it. You can obscure the names and locations as much as you like, however, to protect the guilty.

    There you have it, another round done and gone. Leave a comment if you choose to answer it here or on your own site, please! And as always, the return link is http://greyduck.net/ppf which will always point to the most current entry.

    And I really will get my answers to this and the previous two done up soon. I promise, by the end of the weekend, unless the big earthquake hits and Portland is flattened. Honest.

  • Low-gravity environment produces art.

    Via AccordionGuy, we have an air bubble suspended in a water droplet attached to a leaf. Afterward, we learn a few things.
    It could only happen in space

  • Just a little bit about me, and about my kids.

    I wrote up a large-ish posting for one of the 3WA forums, then realized it would be perfect journal fodder. So here you go:

    I’ve always been your basic easily-amused borderline-immature type. Why, just the other day I scored 69% pure on a 500-question purity test. Oh, the irony!

    Spoonerisms (“scooter crew,” mwahahaha!) have always been part of my stock in trade, as are cheap puns and sex-based humor. Making fun of road signs and reader boards is a hobby. (On the side of a U-Haul building, where an “H” had gone missing: “Custom Itches.” Priceless.)

    And then I became a father. And my children learned to speak. And life became ever so much more amusing!

    We call them chipmunks, by the way, not farts. No, I don’t remember how that started.

    I honestly, truly believe that my ability to act silly with my kids and bring out the silliness in them is my strongest parental skill. Let’s face it, my wife and I are both scarred survivors of childhood, having been unpopular introverted types. It’s painfully obvious that our son is a true child of ours, and so we are doing everything in our power to give him the confidence (and sense of humor) to help him survive what will unquestionably be his toughest years. Encouraging the responsible use of his remarkable powers of comedy is part of that preparation.

    (In the past six months, I don’t think I’ve gotten the last word in. Not once. He’s ten years old and already funnier than his dad. I try to contain my jealousy…)

    As for the little girl… we don’t know where she came from or how. She’s one of those instant charmers, a naturally gifted social goddess who has almost no enemies but creates enemies among those who vie for her favors. She’s nine going on fifteen. Whee.

    This has wandered wildly OT, but let me try to get back to the point.

    Among the dozens of silly names and games are Meep and Koosh, being a finger to the tip of the nose and a flat hand on the top of the head respectively. Random meeps and kooshes are part of the repertoire of affection in our household.

    And then one day my daughter, the one who had never before shown signs of incipient comedic chops, got her hands on the Nerf “baseball bat,” bopped me on the top of the head with it and announced, “I am the Exe-Koosh-ener!”

    I couldn’t see for the tears in my eyes after that one. Ah, was ever a father more proud of his progeny?
    You’re so Immature!

  • Mari’s Meme, “What would you do for?”

    So here’s my answers to Mari’s “What would you do for”:

    1 US Dollar – Say anything to the person giving me the dollar.

    10 US Dollars – Say almost anything to some other person.

    100 US Dollars – “You just bought yourself four hours of prime Grade-A tech support, my friend.”

    1,000 US Dollars – Shave my head bald.

    10,000 US Dollars – Wear a funny costume and stand in Pioneer Courthouse Square singing a bawdy ballad at the top of my lungs.

    100,000 US Dollars – Wear nothing and stand in… well, you get the idea.

    1,000,000 US Dollars – Tech support and odd jobs for life for you and your friends.

    10,000,000 US Dollars – Move anywhere in the world and do the odd job tech support gig.

    I could probably have come up with better answers, but it’s late and I’m distracted. So there. And in half an hour, the PPF cometh…

  • Gracelessly Admitting Defeat

    Let’s skip the “ado” and go right to the email I sent to my Corporate Boss a few minutes ago:

    The story so far: Last summer, strapped for network storage space on the main office network, our hero researched alternatives and chose a Network Attached Storage device (the Snap! server) over attempting to upgrade the second RAID array in his existing Netware server. This solution cost about $2500.

    Late last year problems arose; the Snap! server began a monthly cycle of crashes, costing the office a day of downtime on every occurrence. This became increasingly unacceptable, and Quantum’s tech support was lacking. (“We have no idea what’s wrong with your machine. We’d send you a replacement, but we don’t have any.”)

    After one crash too many, more accurately two crashes on the same day, our hero swallowed his pride and admitted his mistake in choosing the Snap! appliance instead of expanding the Dell Poweredge server’s storage capacity. Hard drives were ordered, to the tune of about $1600.

    Then the other shoe dropped. It is impossible, according to Dell, to delete only one array from a Poweredge 2300. One must remove all arrays, then recreate. This would mean fully reinstalling Netware onto the core office network server. All of a sudden, the “upgrading the Netware array” solution has become utterly unworkable.

    The problem as it stands: Live with a day of downtime every month, in addition to the other problems the Snap! appliance is causing? Spend somewhere between two and five days attempting to recreate the Netware environment we currently enjoy, with no guarantee of completion date or even success of any kind? Drop another big bundle of cash on Some Other Solution?

    I’m at a loss, and so I’m punting this up to the Powers That Be at the home office. I look forward* to discussing this at some very near date.

    Yours, etc.

    ( * Okay, that’s a lie. I don’t look forward to anything involved in this giant ugly snafu anymore. I’m ashamed and disheartened at the whole damned affair. But we need a solution, so I’ll carry on until we have one.)

    There are days when just being me is enough to wear me out. This is one of them.

  • The BlogShare Reset Cometh

    I stealthily added the BlogShares button over there on the left side a while ago, when I discovered that for some reason my site had “cracked $1000” and was thus available for share trading.

    Today I learned that there’s a reset coming as BlogShares prepares to go live on May 1st. Accounts and cash balances are to be preserved, held shares are not. So I liquidated.

    I think I did pretty well. I bought shares in J-Mo at 44c/ea. and sold ’em at $2.35/ea., while The People’s Republic Of Seabrook cost me 98c/ea. but sold for a very nice $18.62 per share. And then there was the cashing out of my own pitiful little website’s shares, all of which leaves me with a net worth of $3,593.95 to carry into the reset. Not too shabby, eh?

    Now I just need to figure out how to crank up the worth of this site. Ideas?
    BlogShares

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