greyduck.net

Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

  • Have I mentioned that I hate printers?

    It’s just about 7:00 in the evening, and I’m taking a dinner break before diving headlong into tonight’s project: Going from computer to computer in the building to remove the printer objects for the now-removed Savin copier/printers, and replacing them with properly-configured printer objects for the new Toshibas.

    That’s right, today at noon the new copier/printer devices arrived. My entire afternoon and evening has been spent dealing with them… installing, testing, configuring, more testing, tinkering, more configuring, more testing.

    Well, except for that fun hour when the corporate WAN went down. Thanks, Worldcom! I needed some more excitement!

    Not being able to efficiently “push” the printers out to the network clients means a long night spent manually installing both machines onto each of some 60 computers around the building. Sometimes being a “Department Of One” really blows, you know?

    See you in the morning, folks.

  • Blogrolling PSA

    Woke up this morning, fired up the trusty ol’ web browser, and stared in panic at my blogroll.

    Every damned link pointed to some conniving bint called Laura whose blog I won’t link to. This fine, upstanding trollop apparently had her hacker boyfriend go into Blogrolling.com and change everyone’s ‘roll so that every link pointed to her website. As of 8am the News page at Blogrolling.com had nothing about this, so I sent off a support email… and turned off my ‘roll, as well as Wendi’s.

    I’m debating turning it back on again, and will do so only if my list can be restored, not if I have to rebuild it from scratch. Even then I may decide to go back to a hand-built link list. It’ll decrease the load time and increase the security, two very good things. It’ll suck, though, not to have recently updated sites marked accordingly. Oh well. Small price to pay, eh?

    UPDATE: It’s fixed, and while I still intend to convert over to a self-hosted link list I probably won’t do so right away (too much on my plate right now!). I should take the time to mention that for a free service, Blogrolling is one helluva nifty deal. Just for the record.

  • For that special someone on your Xmas list…

    From the NorthWestAnime Yahoo group, it’s my pleasure to present: Otaku Barbie!

    Also included is a tacklebox containing all of Otaku Barbie’sô art supplies and a portfolio which she uses to lug around her (mostly traced) fanart creations from one convention to another. NOT PICTURED: Barbieô sized lanyard and laminated pass to Anime Expo and shopping bag filled with plushies, posters, and slightly naughty yaoi doujinshi which she hopes to God her mother never catches her with.

    Share and enjoy. Heh.
    Otaku Barbie

  • Past, Present, Future – Round Thirty-nine

    PAST: Did you and your family do the “big summer vacation” thing when you were a kid? You know, long hours on the road (or at the airport), “Are we there yet?”, “Don’t make me come back there!”, and all that fun? Do tell…

    PRESENT: When was the last time you took deliberate, premeditated time off from work for the sole purpose of goofing off? And what did you end up doing?

    FUTURE: You have the means, motive, opportunity, blah blah blah. Where do you go, who do you bring, what do you do on your no-holds-barred vacation?

    And while you’re reading this, I’m probably curled up in bed at a hotel, or just lounging around like a lazy bastard. Neener neener!

    You know the game, folks. Leave a comment so we know you were here and where to find your answers, and if you link back (as I hope you do) please use the always-current permalink below. And thanks for stopping by!
    http://greyduck.net/ppf/

  • I know too many 80s songs, apparently.

    Thanks to Dawn for giving me a way to kill half an hour completely dead:

    Final Score: 95.5

    That’s right, almost 100 points. Out of, er, probably a lot more. *cough* I got bonus points for knowing some “obscure” ones, but I totally choked on some song lyrics I had no business not remembering. Argh!

    And I call myself a music collector. Feh. At least the page where you get the answers is full of delightful snark, both for correct and incorrect answers. The quiz is worth it for that alone, actually.

    Okay folks, how did you do?

  • Bailing out of NaNo

    To save energy, I’m just going to repost what I wrote on the NaNoWriMo forums just now:

    Sorry, folks. I won last year, but this time I’m merely a “participant.”

    There’s a very nice and intelligent man, my ex-wife’s father and my childrens’ grandfather, who’s laying in a hospital room right now on a morphine drip because the cancer has eaten so much of his spine that he’s in constant and excruciating pain. If that wasn’t enough, I have two significant personal events this month, and work projects of significance are due to land any day now.

    In all this, I find that my priorities must be reestablished. I can’t take care of what’s important if I’m tired, stressed and have sore fingers from hours spent typing every day and night.

    In a weird sort of way it’s a relief, since I find that my technique for streamlining the generation of wordcount has left me within a few days’ writing of the end of my story. Well, what would I do then? I don’t know, and what’s more I don’t want to have to figure it out. It’s only a contest with myself to produce 50,000 words, and I’ve done that before. I learned some lessons, and that was my main goal this year. Mind you, they weren’t the lessons I thought I’d be learning, but life is often that way.

    I shall cheer you all onward to whatever goals you’ve set for yourselves. Will I do this again next year? Maybe not. You see, one of the things I learned this time is that if I want to tell the stories in my head, the printed word may not be my best medium…

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