… when you find yourself going into the server room to warm up.
Theater action! Too hot for radio!
In light of a recent expurgated version of “You Oughtta Know” played on the radio, alenxa wondered just what else Alanis Morissette might be singing about doing to someone in a theater.
I was originally going to do this as a write-in poll, but then I realized people would be limited to only one suggestion each.
So, fill in the blank: “Would she _______ on you in a theater?”
Be creative. If it doesn’t scan, that’s OK (it’s an Alanis Morissette song, after all), but stick to two beats if you can.
Post your ideas here!
Yeesh.
Around 10:00, one of my co-workers asked me about an error message he was seeing every time he booted Windows. It looked related to yesterday’s JPEG security fix (yes, you can now get hacked/infected/etc. just by looking at an image using Microsoft software), so I went to Windows Update.
And then the pop-up ads started. There should not be any advertisements on Windows Update. Clearly something was wrong.
I spent the next 1½ hours removing adware from his computer. Even after removing the obvious bits through the control panel (some of which left pieces behind), Norton found 21 different pieces of adware, including a program whose sole purpose is to surreptitiously download and install new adware while no-one’s looking, and several programs that claim to block pop-ups, but actually generate them.
Linkage: Underground Cinema
Via Neil Gaiman, the discovery last week of a literal underground cinema below Paris, followed by the revelation of who built it.
[Edit: This used to have links to Serenity set photos & weelittlepuppetman, but they’re long gone.]
Arachnid Intelligence(?)
Every morning last week, there was a spider web attached to the car. An active one, with a spider in the center, waiting for flies, moths, and possibly small rodents. It would anchor one side to the carport post, and the other side to the driver’s side rear door. This resulted in me walking around through another carport, tossing my stuff in the back from the front seat, then gleefully ripping the web apart as I drove out of the space.
This happened three or four mornings in a row.
You’d think the spider would tumble to the fact that “Hey, this giant metal thing moves every day! Maybe I should attach my web to something else!”
Eventually it did. On Friday, it stayed outside and used the post and the roof instead, and by Saturday it had gone somewhere else. But it seems to be a common failing in spiders: we went by my parents’ house one night last week and there was another one, stretched from the olive tree to the minivan.
The world keeps getting smaller
Given the lack of decent radio stations in the LA area (I swear, every frequency is filled, but they’re mostly crap), I find myself occasionally listening to a San Diego station that sometimes comes in clearly. (It’s a step above Star, at least.) It’s about 80-90 miles from here to SD. I was listening to them today, and when the song ended, the DJs came on and announced that they were broadcasting from Disneyland. About 10 miles away. In the other direction.
Blast from the past
Wow. We just turned back on a website account for a customer whose domain was “hijacked” a year ago (IIRC he didn’t renew on time, and someone snatched it up). Apparently he gave up trying to get it back, because he asked us to set it up under a new domain name.
We hadn’t moved the files at all, so all we had to do was change the name in our config. (And fix an error in a CGI script that probably relates to a Perl upgrade, since it presumably worked before.) But the site…
Let me just say it was already old before he lost the domain name. It probably looked old in 1999. Everything’s centered, it’s got blink tags, animated GIFs, a clock and a Java-based music player.
But the thing that caught my attention was the “Netscape Now! 3.0” button.
(Netscape 3 came out in 1996. Windows 95 was still new, IE was barely usable at its own version 3, NCSA was still working on Mosaic and Netscape was still charging money for its browser.)
Mudders’ drivel
I usually use an LJ client called Drivel to post from Linux. Like many software projects, they use code names for each release. (1.0, for instance, was also known as “Yeah, it really happened.”)
The latest version, 1.2, appears to be called The Hero of Canton.
(I really need to pick up a Firefly icon or two.)
A ton of batteries
My boss and I just finished installing 1300 pounds of extra batteries for our server room’s UPS* units, more than doubling our previous backup coverage.
See, the power company has decided they need to cut power to our block for 8 hours tomorrow night in order to do work on the local grid. And here we were with only enough battery power for 2½-3 hours. (This was more than enough back in the era of rolling blackouts, since those only lasted an hour or so.) We can shut down everything on the inside network, no problem… but a five-hour outage for all the websites, email accounts, dialups, DSL accounts, etc. that we host is not something we want to be stuck with.
So we got more batteries.
We’ll still have to be here at least part of the time tomorrow night, keeping an eye on things, turning off internal systems to conserve power, etc. I can’t say I’m looking forward to that.
* That’s uninterruptable power supply, not united parcel service.
Transparent aluminum?!?
I’ve been reading a lot of Trek related stuff lately, but this it just a bizarre case of reality catching up to fiction: Glass breakthrough.
Taken from a comment on sclerotic_rings.
(Incidentally, I don’t want to even think about gigapascals…)