An archive of my old LiveJournal
I’ve spent the entire morning anticipating the monthly release of patches from Microsoft. The lack of announcements or even commentary struck me as odd, until I realized that while June 1 was the second day of the work week, it was actually Wednesday. Today isn’t the second Tuesday of the month, it’s the first.
Back to web development….
Two hours later…
Insufficient sleep.
30 minutes to drive the 7.5 miles to work. The 405 was so bad I decided to take University to Alton, which would have been fine except for the construction on University, where they stopped all traffic one car ahead of me so that construction workers could run a cable diagonally across the intersection, then hand it to a guy in a crane who lifted it up to the top of the opposite pole, at which point they all started pulling to raise it above the level of traffic. Which was at least interesting, even if it did slow down my commute.
So I arrive at work, and the monitor on my desk is showing not the blackness of a sleeping video display, but a blue screen starting out “STOP 0x00000a”. Yeah, just the way I want to start my morning, fixing my computer. It at least booted afterward, but it apparently didn’t get very far in the defragmenting I started before I left last night. For all I know the defragmenting caused it.
Fortunately I have two computers at my desk, so I can work on server admin stuff on the Linux box while the Windows box defrags. Or tries to.
Random thought of the afternoon: I always get nervous when I walk around the server room and I can feel the static electricity in my hair.
The room’s supposed to have anti-static tiles, but I’ve still managed to shock myself occasionally.
If you have a wireless network, you might want to go easy on the tinsel [archive.org] this Christmas. Otherwise you might not have a wireless network for the next few weeks!
From Dave Phelan’s “Insuffucient Time” blog regarding a Pier To Pier network outage:
“Window” was the codename for strips of foil dropped by Lancasters on D-Day to fool German Radar into believing there was an attack on Calais. Radar bounces off the foil sending the radar waves in random directions.
Nowadays we don’t call it Window, we call it “Tinsel”. Lots of small reflective strips. Tinsel is an effective blocker of microwaves as Window ever was. Yesterday’s network outage was caused primarily by the addition of some, very tasteful, Christmas decorations to the antenna of node 4!
Note: Added the quote as part of the archiving project.
I dreamed I was working on a Mac version of the Dillo web browser*. But I mixed it with some sort of commercial code, and the resulting program violated the GPL**. The next thing I knew, someone was shooting at me with a machine gun. I kept trying to walk out of a (hotel?) lobby, but every time someone started shooting. At one point they were in a helicopter, at one point they may have just been up in a building across the street, and at one point they were definitely in a hot air balloon. I’d duck back inside, or put up my hands to get them to stop shooting, but every time I walked back out, they started up again.
* An ultra-small, ultra-fast browser that’s low on features, but runs well even on old hardware.
Remember, when you’re tempted to say, “Great, now what?” — DON’T!
After watching the very intense Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars, we came home, I flopped on the bed, and thought, “I’m tempted to stay here.” But no, I wanted to post a brief, spoiler-free review. Heh, heh, heh.
(Feel free to ignore this post — I just need to vent somewhere.)
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.
… that the “accomplished” mood in my last post had nothing to do with the quiz, but rather with having resolved the really annoying network problem on the new PowerBook. Or rather, affecting the PowerBook.
You see, last night everything worked fine (mostly I spent it bringing both OSes up to date), but this morning when I wanted to bring something up quickly, the ethernet connection wouldn’t work. Eventually I tracked it down to a problem on the hub.
I picked up the PowerBook! It took me most of my lunch break to get up to the UPS center to pick it up and get back home to drop it off, so all I’ve done is open the box. It looks like I’ll be eating at my desk today.