Cool short movie: Mac vs. PC – Transformers style!
Tag: computers
Fire and Dreams
So, this morning I read that there were a bunch of fires around LA. Hardly a big surprise, given that we’ve had a really dry year, and it’s insanely hot for No-frickin-vember, and we’ve got genuine Santra Ana winds going.
Except that last night I dreamed I was on a ferry returning from Catalina Island, and saw smoke coming over the mountains, to the north of Saddleback. I thought there must be a fire in the Santiago Canyon area, or possibly on the other side out toward Riverside, and this being a dream I had some way to get higher (Plane? Helicopter? Really high hill that doesn’t exist? Balloon? Don’t remember.) and saw the huge conical volcano that had sprung up out of nowhere in the hills southeast of Corona.
I also dreamed that I left the laptop computer on a table at In-N-Out as I left, walked back in to grab it, and was convinced that someone had swapped it for an identical one during the 30 seconds I was away from it. And then it turned into one of those extremely tiny portables that only have half a screen and sort of fill the gap between smartphone and notebook. And I couldn’t find where they’d put the period key, which really bugged me because I wanted to use proper punctuation.
Highlights
Last Friday (Oct 3): attended alenxa’s cousin’s wedding, held on a boat that cruised back and forth in Newport Harbor. Lots of people I’d only met once before — at our wedding.
Most of the week: fixing Katie’s computer. Drive dying. Needed to (a) verify that it was the drive, and just the drive. (b) get a new drive. (c) install it. (d) install Mac OS X on the new drive. (e) Transfer all the data. (a) and (e) took the longest.
Tuesday: Finished watching entire series of Blake’s 7. The good episodes hold up quite well after ~30 years. (The bad ones… well, they were bad to start with.)
Yesterday: Checked out the restaurants at the new "Diamond Jamboree" center at Jamboree and Alton. Decided to try Tokyo Table sometime when we weren’t wearing funny T-shirts.
Friday: Finished reading Gateway. About to start on Neil Gaiman’s latest, The Graveyard Book. (I skipped the reading in Santa Monica on Monday, but my brother and his fiancee went to the one in San Francisco last week…and were kind enough to send us the extra copy of the book!)
Best Buyer?
Got an email from Best Buy today that appears to be legit, inviting me to some "elite level" of their rewards program that "rewards our best customers for shopping at Best Buy stores."
I find this odd, because as best as I can figure, I’ve only made two purchases at a Best Buy since the last Christmas shopping season:
1. A new digital camera and accessories in July, just before Comic-Con, to replace one which had disappeared. (alenxa joked that we’d find it as soon as we bought a new one, but it still hasn’t surfaced.)
2. A cordless mouse.
Oh, and some DVDs that Katie picked up sometime around March or so, but I don’t know if she swiped the card or gave them the number.
So… is that all it takes to be one of Best Buy’s best customers? Buy a couple of items and don’t return them? (Or am I thinking too much of Frys?)
This is not my idea of a good time
At this point, none of the desktop computers have made it through the move completely unscathed.
1. Katie’s desktop, when we set it up after moving, couldn’t open the CD/DVD tray. It tried, but after whirring for a few seconds, it would give up. Because of the way the case is set up, I had to open it up and pull out the drive in order to get at it with a paper-clip, manually open it, move it a couple of times, and blast the whole thing with compressed air.
2. The transmitter for the cordless mouse went on the shared Windows box. So we went down to Best Buy to get a new mouse. The next day I found the 10% off coupon I’d printed out when setting up mail forwarding with the post office.
3. My computer, after working fine for a week and a half, suddenly stopped displaying a desktop. Instead I got flickering rectangular fragments. Flaky video card, obsolete hardware, and 64-bit decisions.
Fun with Electricity! (Also Coffee and the Bust of the Year)
Heat wave + 3-day weekend = way too much hot air trying to sneak into the server room. Extra measures are being taken to ensure that the server AC can keep things cool, but I’m probably going to spend much of the weekend worrying about getting a “Server X down” SMS.
Brownout during lunchtime. I was at the Spectrum food court. All the lights flickered off and back on, and the muzak went silent for just a second. Twice. Here at work, most of the desktop machines rebooted. (Servers, of course, are on UPS.)
Coffee Crisis! Coffee maker at work shut off this morning just a few cups in. Determined that the power outlet had gone dead. Tried plugging it into another outlet, via extension cord + power strip. Power strip started buzzing, then circuit breaker tripped. Further analysis of coffee maker’s plug identified melted, cracked plastic. The company we lease it from can’t send out a replacement ’til Tuesday.
So, only 3 cups of coffee for the entire office. No gladiatorial combat, oddly enough. Though I did joke that it must be a fiendish plot by the cafe downstairs to sell more coffee.
Bust of the Century: Yesterday afternoon, got onto the 405 and immediately got stuck in traffic. Turned out to all be rubbernecking from something going on by the side of the road, where police were searching a stopped car. Lots of them. At least 5 squad cars, from at least 2 different cities, and a sheriff’s car.
New criteria for “White and Nerdy”
This morning, I put the release dates for new versions of Firefox and Internet Explorer on my calendar.
Though I think I lose a few points for doing it in pen instead of using Google Calendar or something.
&@!#^!@!!!!
Stupid heat wave. Stupid air conditioner that doesn’t work. Stupid RAID card. Stupid backup problems.
Not gonna be a fun day.
I, I.T.
The best laid plans…
I arrived at work early today in order to do minor maintenance on a pair of servers. The plan was that it would be done by the time people started showing up at 9:00.
It’s 11:40, and I just finished.
Server A: Install latest patches and reboot. Problem: Server decided to hang on login. Solution: reboot again. Simple, but annoying.
Server B: Shut down, install RAM, reboot. Problem 1: Server would not take any of the new memory that, according to the manual (downloaded as a PDF from Dell), it should have accepted. Problem 2: After re-installing the old RAM, Microsoft Exchange refused to start, offering only a 10-digit error code as explanation. Solution: Lots of Google and MS Knowledge Base searches suggesting database problems turned out to be completely irrelevant upon finding another set of logs that mentioned a nonexistent drive F. Opened up the computer, reattached the loose SCSI cable, and everything ran fine.
Fighting fatigue and frustration
I’m the only one here today. I at least thought my boss was coming in, but I haven’t seen him yet. Still, he keeps odd hours, so it wouldn’t surprise me if he showed up at 3:00 and stayed into the evening.
Busy trying to get a new mail server set up. Using Mandrake instead of Red Hat due to driver issues. And while things that are built in work great, things that I’ve had to configure manually have been problematic. Right now I’m fighting a PAM/LDAP bug that I hope is limited to SSH, or else the server’s going to be unusable for any sort of authentication. Beginning to wonder whether it will be ready before the current server melts down under the load.
Staying up way too late. I was the first one in this morning, and started some coffee, figuring I’d need more than the one travel mug from home. Didn’t go back for a while. Co-worker showed up a bit later: “Did you make coffee this morning?” “Uh, yeah.” “Did you get enough sleep last night?” “Uh, no… why?” I ran through my memory of the morning and while I could remember getting the filter, the filter basket, and the coffee grounds, and I could remember turning the coffee maker on, I couldn’t actually remember putting the coffee pot under the spout. Guess why.
On Monday, the uberboss talked with me, my boss, and two other co-workers about a reorganization plan. It’s a bit complicated, and involves the fact that someone from a copmany we do development for is coming out to work with us on-site for 8 months, but basically I need to pick up skills I haven’t used in about 7 years instead of doing (a) what I’m good at and (b) what they hired me for. So I’m trying to take care of various back-burner projects before I have to focus on programming.
One of those back-burner projects was a server upgrade that went wrong and kept me at work until 10pm on Monday, and took up a big chunk of Tuesday morning trying to resolve the remaining issues. I’ve still got one web project I need to finish, and just picked up a new one. And there’s the melting mail server. And we’re coming up on a 3-day weekend of which two days are already planned with various sets of relatives. Vacation? Yeah, right!