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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Month: August 2005

  • I should just call it “geekcam” and be done…

    I’ve fiddled with a couple of things, as you may have noticed. Okay, the one you’d notice most easily is the webcam link just above the webring bit. This isn’t my normal office-cam, but instead a cam pointed right at my (as yet unshowered) noggin here at home as I do my Blogathon duty. I think I got the caption the way I want it… and yes, I know that the colors are off. It’s a stupid old 3Com Homeconnect, and it’s finicky that way. Ugh.

    A less-easily-noticed tweak is to the server itself. It turns out that the server’s been creeping steadily behind on time accuracy, so I gave it a swift kick (in the form of ‘ntpdate 10.21.80.102’) and now it’s at least within a couple of seconds of right-on-target. I noticed the problem when my first post was marked as being several minutes before 6:00 when in fact it was posted about three minutes after…

    A geek’s work is never done. And by “work” I mean “tinkering,” of course!

  • Blogathon 2005: The Starting Line

    Well, here we are, on just a few hours’ sleep, ready to tackle another Blogathon. Are you surprised that I managed to wake up on time? I’m not. It wasn’t the getting up I was worried about. It’s the staying up that gives me the ever-so-slightest bit of worry. (Okay, you pervs. Get your minds out of the gutter, now.)

    What can you expect from me for the coming diurnal? I plan on throwing out some creative writing bits along the lines of the dialogues I’ve done recently. I want to review a few music albums, both new and older-but-obscure. Other than that… well, I can’t remember right now. It is awfully early in the morning for that sort of thing, wouldn’t you agree?

    So. Let’s do this. Woo hoo!

  • Midnight in the Garden of Blogathon

    Wow. Can you believe it? We’re three quarters of the way through this thing. It’s tomorrow, already. Wow.

    That’s the good news. The bad news, of course, is that we’re going into the most grueling stretch of the event. We’re entering the oh-dark-hundred times, when our bodies want very much to tell us how this is quite past our bedtime, thankyouverymuch.

    I’ve done without sleep before. I used to make a career of it, back when the equipment at work was far less reliable than it is today. (This was also back when I didn’t have as good of a handle on things, I admit.) I’m not as good at it as I used to be… but I still know how it’s done.

    Watch me. I’ll be here. Six hours to go. Hot diggity damn.

  • Six Hours to Fix

    By 9:30 this morning I knew something was horribly wrong. Several computers located all over the building were unable to sign onto the fileserver. The error message, when input to Google and Novell’s support site, turned out to be singularly unhelpful.

    By 10:30 I’d exhausted most of the seemingly-obvious solutions. By 12:30 I’d rebooted the fileserver, to no avail. By 1:30 I’d downloaded updates to every bit of software I could think of.

    At 2:30 I noticed that someone’s computer was plugged into a “new” jack in that particular office. Oh, hell. The “new” jack meant that their computer wasn’t on the “old” set of racks in the server room, but instead on the “expansion” racks, which meant that…

    Yep. One of the network switches in the expansion racks is hosed. Moving the affected individuals’ network connections to other switches fixed their problems completely. If I’d simply traced the damned network connections in the first place I could have saved at least five hours of work.

    Of course, actually tracing out everyone’s connections and getting them moved took another hour.

    So if you’ve been wondering, “What kind of idiot is this guy, anyway?” Now you know.

  • Subtle, isn’t it?

    Hey, look! I’m on a webring! I’m one of the hip, trendy, cool kids now!

    Okay, so it’s a mandatory thing for the Blogathon. It’s there so the Blogathon site-watching teams can easily skip from site to site to site checking up on us, the participants.

    Right! This is a good opportunity to remind you that there’s still plenty of time left for you (yes you!) to be a sponsor! Here’s how. Here’s my campaign page. Heeeeeeeeeere’s Johnny!

    (I’m in a darkly whimsical mood today. Deal with it.)

  • Another “It Figures” Moment

    On Monday I thought, “It figures that I didn’t bring my music player and ended up suffering the bleatings of some loudmouthed jerk on the bus.”

    Today I’m thinking, “It figures that I left my backpack at home and ended up receiving a box full of nifty stuff from Dawn and having my name drawn in the raffle at the end of the company BBQ.”

    From Dawn: A touching (and amusing) card, tea, cocoa mix, a box of chocolate biscotti, some cookies and a grey Totoro t-shirt (yay!). From work: Two caps (one for the country station, the other for beer-and-sports… oh well), two grey t-shirts (with Sierra Mist logos), and a denim jacket (delightfully unadorned).

    I don’t mind when the universe conspires to cheer me up out of a dark-souled funk. I don’t mind a bit. I will, however, enjoy the irony with a jaunty smirk on my face.

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