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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Month: October 2008

  • Does this mean that Dumbledore is Gandalf, or Saruman?

    I’ve stated over the years that I’m something of a dilettante. Among the interests in which I dabble you’ll find the fascinating field of etymology. Words are fun. History is interesting. Therefore, the history of words is an endless joy… to me, anyway. A case in point:

    Kyla and The Roomie and I were in the kitchen yesterday morning, eating and fixing breakfast respectively, and my eye chanced upon the cat food bag on a nearby windowsill. One of the featured fish caught my eye: Albacore tuna. For some reason I thought next about the albatross (and refrained from quoting Monty Python, I’ll have you know), at which point I mused aloud about the similarity in naming. “What does the ‘alba’ prefix mean?” I knew that it was going to bother me until I found out.

    Late last night I indulged in a few minutes’ research. Turns out that one of the sources of ‘alba-‘ is our old dead friend Latin, “albus” for white. Albacore? The “only tuna species which may be marketed as ‘white meat tuna’ in the United States.” Albatross? A mostly-white seagoing bird. (Granted, the etymology is a bit mixed here, being a weird morphing from an Arabic origin having to do with being a “diving bird” to a Latin-influenced final product.)

    Thus educated, I could sleep peacefully.

  • The Letter, Not The Intent

    The scenario: Working with one of our biggest vendors on the product that all of our techs (and several of our big clients) use every day on an annoying bug related to virus alert generation, I had to nudge our rep this morning because it’d been a week since any activity took place on the ticket other than a note that “this has been escalated to a feature specialist, you should receive an update shortly.”

    By the by, if I had a dollar for every time I’ve received that bit of tech support boilerplate then I could afford to take both of my girlfriends out to a very nice dinner, each. I’m in the habit lately of updating tickets solely to ask, “Is it SHORTLY yet?”

    Anyway. Our rep emailed back to say that he’d escalated us to the head of support, and that if I didn’t get some kind of response by the end of the day, I should notify him. Okay, great. I hate feeling like I have to play the squeaky wheel game, but at this point I just want the situation resolved. (For the curious: The antivirus system is detecting a false-positive “virus” file and generating two alerts into the system every two minutes for that lone file. We have to clear out thousands of alerts every day from the file… which, of course, I’ve left in place so the tech support guys can look at it!)

    Ten minutes ago I took a phone call from their support staff. No, he wasn’t on the phone to help me with the problem. He called to tell me that someone’s looking into the problem and that I’ll receive an update via email when things are resolved.

    Well then.

    So, I was contacted “by the end of the day,” considering that they’re on East Coast time and it’s coming up on 5pm there. Mission Accomplished. On the other hand… I just received the verbal equivalent of the email boilerplate!

    Do you ever get the feeling that you were being placated… badly?

  • Mary Sue Gets A Dragon, and other great stories

    Everyone’s going to link to this, and so am I. Check out Mighty God King Versus His Adolescent Reading Habits, Part One and Part Two.

    I’ll be honest: I read and loved (or at least liked) quite a few of the books/series that he’s poking fun at. I laughed my damned fool head off nonetheless. Relax, it’s funny. (I’ll add a language warning, though. The F-word makes an appearance, and so on.)

    There’s one modern ringer at the tail end of Part Two. I won’t spoil the surprise, but consider yourself fairly warned.

    EDIT: Well, naturally the site goes down within hours of this post going up. That’ll teach me to, you know, post stuff in my journal. Le sigh.

  • What’s another $38bil between friends?

    Man, I hate posting about current events. I keep up on them, mind you. I just don’t post about them very often, mainly because I don’t want to get into arguments with strangers on the Internet. I also don’t want to get into argument with friends on the Internet, come to think on it.

    With that said, I think I’ll take Two Lumps’ James L Grant’s recent post seriously. Here’s my humble rendition:

    In case you’re wondering whether the men in suits we’re “bailing out” with fantastic amounts of money that’s being devalued by the minute are doing their utmost to set things right again, the answer would appear not only to be NO but also HELL NO. First AIG parties like there’s no tomorrow on our collective dime, then they hit up the Fed for more money. Hell, guys, all you had to do was not blow your wad to begin with! Let’s hear it for rewarding irresponsible behaviour!

    I’m not (yet) in the doom-and-gloom camp, but this is the sort of thing that causes me to alternately weep for the future and froth with rage at the worlds of high finance and politics.

    For more of the frothing, I recommend reading Mr. Grant’s aforementioned post. Be warned that strong language awaits. I kind of agree with this bit, though:

    “I say we need to have these executives hauled into the streets like mad dogs and executed on national television.

    “All those in favor?”

    Aye.

  • Why I Love System Restore CDs

    The Spud’s computer went sort of kerblooey, in a software-ish sort of way, a week or so ago. Luckily it’s a Compaq D310 (well, most of it is, anyway) and I have all of the restore CDs, still in the big fancy ziploc bag they came in. I booted off of a handy-dandy “Bart” DVD, copied off everything that I deemed worth saving onto the network drive (wasn’t about to use the USB drive on a machine that old), and swapped out the two smaller drives for a newer, bigger model I happened to have kicking around.

    You’ll be amazed to know that I can see eight unused IDE hard drives from where I’m sitting, without even turning my head, won’t you? Right.

    Sorry, that’s ten. And two SCSI drives. Anyway…

    Say what you will about PCs built by megacorporations, but HP/Compaq restore disks have saved my bacon dozens of times in the last half-dozen years. You have to go in afterward and tweak a few things, it’s true. If you leave out the “supplemental software” disk, however, there’s surprisingly little garbage to worry about. Among the nifty benefits is that you don’t have to worry about entering the license key. Any time I don’t have to stress about typos is a good time.

    The next step is to install video drivers (you don’t think it’s using the motherboard video chipset, do you?), throw on some of the key software that no Windows PC should be without, and haul those files back off of the network drive. When I’m done the machine will be cleaner (dust bunnies? try dust elephants) and leaner (less leftover cruft from years of installing and removing software) and feature greater capacity on a single drive instead of two drives so it’ll also run cooler and on less power.

    All I need to do is complete it by the weekend. I can do that, right?

  • Writing, first. Writing project, later.

    As some of my friends and readers know, I’ve been batting around the idea of doing an Autumn Writing Project in the same general vein as my Summer Music Project. That’s great and all, but let’s take a look at my writing output for 2008 so far.

    Go ahead, check out the archives for the past dozen months or so. It won’t take long.

    One of the goals I set myself was to avoid creating a guaranteed failure situation. Which is to say, I don’t want to (yet again) begin something that I know I can’t actually finish, then beat myself up because I don’t finish it. Self-perpetuating negativity should be avoided, yes?

    So. The project isn’t dead, but it’s on hold indefinitely until I can accomplish something else that’s been nagging me for quite a while now: I want to get back into the habit of writing here again. Once I’ve proven that I can actually write on a regular basis and at a consistent level of quality, then I’ll think about taking on something a bit more challenging.

    And that’s how I’m turning a morose and dreary Monday mindset into something a bit more positive. Go, me!

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