• Gone Domestic

    How to prove that a die-hard geek has turned into a devoted family man: Look at his Palm Pilot and see a grocery-list program installed.

    We’re going to try out HandyShopper to see if it makes our grocery trips a little less chaotic. I’m sure Wendi is rolling her eyes at the prospect of using geek toys at the store, but I figure it beats spending a lot of time asking ourselves, “Now what is it we’re forgetting?”

  • Restroom Conversations

    Maybe it’s an urban legend, maybe it’s just a joke, and maybe you’ve seen it before. Any way you look at it, though, it’s funny. (Thank you, Snappy the Clam.)
    You’ve probably heard this…

  • There is too much; let me sum up.

    Having spent a couple of hours at the office last night in an attempt to resolve the Tapscan issue (“which one?”) and then coming in again this morning extra-early to do the same, I’m now quite very groggy and tired and such. If my journal entries this afternoon ramble more than usual, I apologize.

    Tapscan is incapable of running on a NAS device. I moved it over to the system volume of our main fileserver, a trusty Netware server which had hosted the application for years, up until this past weekend in fact. Viola… or not. It started crashing every time any salesperson tried to create or load a schedule. No no, very bad.

    By 10:00 last night I was stumped and frustrated. By 7:20 this morning I was back in my office and struck by inspiration. I think I have a bruise inside my skull to show for it. If I could show the inside of my skull, that is.

    I discovered that my account worked just fine. The fix was to set “write” and “modify” permissions to the data directory for Tapscan. Regular users still can’t create or erase files, but apparently there are market data files that users need to be able to change. Who knew? It was working the old way for years.

    Twenty minutes into my workday and the problem that had stumped me the night before was totally solved. Then I went to the department head meeting (during which we didn’t get around to discussing The Tipping Point, we’re going to do that another day) and then I’ve spent the remainder of the workday running all over the building putting out small fires. I also needed to fix a bunch of small permissions problems on the new storage drive.

    It’s been a crazy couple of days, and I’m very tired. Tomorrow I’ll be more coherent, I assure you.

  • Memorial Day? A memorable weekend, anyway.

    I’ve already written plenty about the most recent development in my job, so I’ll just link to the articles in question:

    Memorial Day Migration

    Wild And Crazy P: Drive

    That covers the work stuff, anyway…

  • Random Quote Cuteness

    So what else does a guy do with his massive taglines collection other than use it for random email signatures? Why, he grafts it into his website, of course. At the moment it’s just a raw text dump; given some free time I’ll turn it into something a little more appealing.

    Yes, this is the kind of nonsense I just adore adding to my website. Deep down inside I’m probably very ashamed of myself.
    Random quote generator

  • Friday Five from Dreamland

    Am I awake or am I dreaming that I am filling out this week’s Friday Five?

    • What’s the last vivid dream that you remember having? – I… can’t seem to remember now. I know I had a couple within the last three weeks, but as is typical for my feeble brain I can’t recall anything that was in either of them. Maybe I’ll come back and edit this one.
    • Do you have any recurring dreams? – Not as such. There are elements that pop up in different dreams, a particular location or bit of dialog perhaps. I think I’ve had one particular portion of a dream more than once over the years but I’m not absolutely certain that it wasn’t just a case of deja-vu-while-dreaming.
    • What’s the scariest nightmare you’ve ever had? – Every couple of months, apparently, my brain decides that I need a good scary “let’s wander through the spider mansion” dream. Big spiders, cobwebs, the whole nine yards. Sometimes I have the ability to deal with them. Sometimes I’m powerless.
    • Have you ever written your dreams down or considered it? Why or why not? – Sometimes I’ll dream something that looks and feels like a really, really good story idea. I’ve only written down a couple of those, and now I can’t find the notebook I wrote them down in. Silly me. I’ve had a couple more “good story” dreams this year but don’t keep a notebook by the bed. Again, silly me.
    • Have you ever had a lucid dream? What did you do in it? – A lot of those “story dreams” are lucid or semi-lucid in nature. It has a lot to do with the dreamworld in my mind, the one I spend time building when I’m awake and sometimes appears in my sleeping dreams. When I’m in that familiar territory, part of me wakes up and takes control of my dream-persona to actively manipulate the situation. It’s a lot of fun, really. Again, if I were smart I’d be jotting down elements of those dreams for later use. I’m probably a better storyteller in my sleep than I am awake. Sad, really.