As I’m gearing up for what I expect to be another one-pick-goes year of The Dead Pool, I decided to sign up for the Celebrity Death Beeper. Now, I’m not the most superstitious person I know, but this has to be a good sign:
Welcome to the Celebrity Death Beeper family!
You are family member #11,711.
Whoah, Nelly! That’s not only a bunch of lucky numbers, but it’s also a palindrome! This must be my year.
Right? *cough, cough* Right?
My wishlist has grown smaller. Dawn saw fit to gift me with not one, not two but six music CDs yesterday!
And all I gave her in return was a bracelet… Hmm…
Believe it or not, I did things this past weekend that didn’t involve one particular gaming obsession. (Though I’ll admit I engaged in a fair amount of that, too.) For instance, I went out shopping with Wendi and the rugrats on Saturday. Our time was cut short by an annoying false alarm at work (and other factors I won’t go into here), but we still had a fun time. The kids, they are definitely becoming interesting and wonderful people in their own right.
After resting and recovering a bit at home, I was invited over to Lil’ & Geoffrey’s for some hanging-out time that included snarky fun with the Lyse-beast. We watched a sizeable chunk of Stargate SG1’s second season, which wasn’t all bad but it certainly did set off my snark-o-meter often enough. Still, fun was had by all.
Yesterday I went shopping. I picked up one of the last of the holiday presents on my list, some paper and pencils, some dice for gaming (yes, I’ve been absorbed into the collective, blah blah blah) and a few grocery items. Shortly after the roomie and I got home from that extravaganza, it was time to game.
(Geeky side note: If I tell you that my Champions superhero character is loosely modeled after Marc Remillard, would you think ill of me? My original template was based on Aiken Drum, but I didn’t think I could roleplay him very well…)
Anyway, that’s my weekend in a nutshell. This evening I pay another visit to the rugrats, and then pick up a particular someone from the train station. Yay!
While I was waiting for something to break (I didn’t have to wait that long, it turns out, as the crappy DOS-based log-handling software our Traffic department uses has up and decided to hate running under WinXP), I upgraded my Linux workstation from Fedora Core 2 to Fedora Core 3.
You know what? It worked almost flawlessly. I only had to do a bit of apt-get patch-and-fill to make all the quirks go away, and most of the quirks were my own doing anyway. Wow.
So, at least something went right today…
Let me paint you a mental picture. One of our employees is gazing with frustration at his computer screen, on which the contents of his Recycle Bin are displayed instead of the email login prompt he was expecting. In a fit of frustration, he comes to see me.
“Every time I open Groupwise I get my Recycle Bin.”
“Wow. That’s weird. Are you sure the icons aren’t on top of one another?” I’ll grant you that it’s unlikely, but it’s the first thing that comes to mind.
“Nope.”
“Have you tried clicking and dragging the Groupwise icon somewhere else on your screen to be sure?”
“Yep, I’ve done that.”
BZZZT! Wrong answer! There’s no way in hell the co-irker in question, technophobe that he is, would have tried that. Sorry, but when you try to make yourself look smart while I’m tossing out non-obvious solutions (my brain’s funny that way, I tend to think of the weirdest possible fix first, then the obvious stuff later), all you’re going to do is prove that you’re a dumbass.
So I trucked over to his desk. Sure enough, the Recycle Bin is open… and there’s a blinking taskbar item indicating that yes, indeed, Groupwise’s login prompt is awaiting input.
Here’s what happened: See, it turns out that Novell’s ZENworks has a quirk under XP and 2000. When you launch a ZEN icon, keyboard focus is then kicked back to the desktop. So when you don’t notice this, blindly type your password (and said password starts and ends with the letter ‘r’, as in ‘recycle bin’), then hit “enter” when you’re done… what do you suppose is going to open up?
Yeah. So now he knows what everyone else in the building knows, namely that you have to click on the login prompt before typing your password. Sheesh.
