somebody loves me?! ooh, yay!

Just got this craftily worded phishing email:

I`m in hurry, but i still love you...
(as you can see on the ecard)
http://###.###.###.###/

I've received about 1.5 billion messages of this type over the past few weeks, but none professing their love for me. I like how they keep using ` instead of '. That amuses me.

(IP withheld to protect the stupid.)

stupid, sad, half-assed, drunk

My home internet keeps going down at the most inopportune moments.

CheezyCatz is all done, or rather Sour's and my participation is done. We had discussed it a few times in the past, held on, but our hearts are no longer in it. I'm very sad about that, but it's time. (B, K, Spénce -- sorry.)

Last night Hay and I went to the movies to see Harry Potter but for spur of the moment less hassle reasons saw Transformers instead. The first hour rocked so hard I wondered why I had been told that this movie was so terrible. And then Megatron showed up and the movie went stupid. It was so bad after this point that both Hay and I zoned out during the ending and totally missed it. We were whispering to each other, "what the fuck just happened?" While walking out of the theater Hay was still saying he had no idea what happened so I said, "I know someone who could just tell us." I pulled out my cell phone, turned it back on (cuz I do what the theater tells me to do, like a monkey), and called Avi, except I called his cell phone number instead of his work number and got all flustered when he didn't pick up (because he and Amy were in a theater watching Harry Potter) so I didn't leave a message. When I got home I signed into chat and B was there and she said hi to me almost the second I signed on, and I knew her husband had seen the movie, so I asked her. DH explained what had happened, but it still seemed lame. Then Avi IM'd me and we discussed the whole ending, the one redeeming part of the ending being Shia LaBeouf's comedic timing genius. I really did laugh quite hard for the first hour, so I'd like to see that half again.


So, tomorrow's my birthday and I'm pretty sure I'm going to spend the day drunk. Advice on what to drink to get to that state of mind? (Please, no wine recommendations. The smell of it still makes me queasy from the last time I poured an entire bottle down my throat in 30 minutes. Thanks. ;)

Well, that was painful

We called Verizon last night because our internet kept dropping. They fucked up our DSL modem. Well, okay, technically, we fucked it up by DOING WHAT THEY SAID.

Fixed now, because of the wonderful Verizon tech support lady in India. She only had to mutter "oh my god" under her breath once. ;)

stupid PPP

Verizon keeps going down and up and down and up. Not that I'm really doing anything online today, it's just annoying.

stfuwtf

I hate when Gmail is down. Bastards.

Verizon is a bitch

Technology isn't being very nice this weekend. Our DSL went down earlier, and then went back up and then went down again. I have no idea if it wants to stay up now, but while it was down for the last hour-and-a-halfish I folded all the laundry in the master bedroom (*GASP*), put another load of laundry in the washer (*GASP*), and did dishes (not *gasp* because I am the dishes caretaker).

I feel so ... productive.

If I don't post until my return to work on Monday you perhaps know why. Or, I'm barely conscious in a garden ditch somewhere. Always another possibility. Those garden tours get raucous.

Getting a title in

In case anyone else is having trouble posting Blogger titles in Firefox right now, someone in the Blogger Help Group kindly tipped us off how to get around the problem for now:

I had this problem in firefox. I discovered that if you pointed the
cursor at the top edge of the title box rather than IN the title box,
the insert cursor (vertical bar) would appear and you could click and
then enter text in the title box.

The other workaround I've found (if you can't find that "sweet spot") is to use a different browser to log in and post.

K, off to mow the lawn in the rain like a crazy person! (LIKE a crazy person.) Happy Saturday, everyone!

Ohhhh, this makes me laugh my head off

From slashdot:

"Consumer-advocate blog Consumerist ran a sting operation to catch a Best Buy Geek Squad member searching for and stealing media files from a customer's computer. The article includes the story with screen captures and a video of the technician's actions. From that piece: 'Reached for comment, Geek Squad CEO Robert Stephens expressed desire to launch an internal investigation and said, "If this is true, it's an isolated incident and grounds for termination of the Agent involved." This is not just an isolated incident, according to reports from Geek Squad insiders alleging that Geek Squad techs are stealing porn, images, and music from customer's computers in California, Texas, New Jersey, Virginia and elsewhere. Our sources say that some Geek Squad locations have a common computer set up where everyone dumps their plunder to share with the other technicians.' A related story from a former Geek Squad employee details the decline of the Geek Squad and Best Buy ethics in general."

CAUGHT WITH THE PORN. Oops, my caps lock key was stuck on. Hmm.

This has nothing whatsoever to do with anything that concerns you, but it's my blog, so there.

I'm lazily /[text] enter cw[text] esc n . :w :n-ing away in vi because I am too damn lazy to use sed and awk to do it properly, but I keep pausing in between page edits because I keep being distracted by something. And by distracted I mean entertained. And by entertained I mean amused. And by amused I mean it keeps making me giggle a little. And by a little I mean a lot.

I guess the lesson learned here is: I enjoy distractions. And vi.

chkdsk /r

This might be a post you want to skip, although I think the ending is worth muddling through the little bit of mumbo jumbo sprinkled through it. I could be wrong.

So, my dad calls me at work today and leaves me a voicemail that he broke his computer.

I don't get this voicemail until 10 minutes before my work day is done because, as usual, I was in meetings for most of the day.

I call back, get my stepmom, gruffly tell her I need to speak with my dad, he gets on the phone, and I gruffly ask about the problem. He tells me his understanding of the problem and I realize it won't necessarily be an over-the-phone fix because I don't believe my dad has done everything he says he's done to troubleshoot the problem himself.* I gruffly agree to go to my dad's house almost directly after work (I need to stop at home to feed and pet the kitties) and agree to eat sloppy Joes at their house for dinner.

I arrive to my dad's house and see the UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME error.

Because my dad is so insistent that this is a hardware problem I run hardware diagnostics and go to the other room to do some googling. While I am there someone (*ahem*) interrupts the hardware diagnostics and starts them over.

I return to my dad's computer and someone fesses up to interrupting the scan. I take this opportunity to skip out of the hardware diags and instead boot to the recovery console and run chkdsk (/p for kicks) /r on the drive. While it jumps from 50% to 75% to 50% to 53% to 60% to 50% to 55% to 100% we eat sloppy Joes with grated parm and corn. (Fine dining, I tell ya.)

After chkdsk completes I restart the computer and quietly boot it into safe mode successfully. Everyone notices and starts to celebrate (prematurely, if you ask me). I shut down the computer again and quietly restart in normal mode. While it's booting everyone keeps talking about it as if everything is fine, as if the computer was just naughty and now it's had its timeout in the corner and is back to being a productive member of society. And, fair enough, the computer does boot to normal mode successfully and my dad is able to check his Juno and his eBay auction bids and his instant message client and his Gmail and his bank account and his Hotmail and (Jesus, Dad, when did you become so ... computery?).

I would just like to point out, and I know it's silly, but Poppy doesn't talk about computers while they're booting up after misbehaving. In fact, Poppy crosses her fingers and babies the computer and promises she doesn't assume that the problem is resolved. She closes one eye and peers through her fingers and thinks happy thoughts and yells at anyone who tries to talk about the computer being fixed or not fixed. It's magic when computers decide to resurrect from the dead, and talking about them only jinxes the repair. So, I implore you, don't undo all my work by talking about the computer. K? Because that's just rude. And next time I'm making you fix the damn thing yourself.



*I have trust issues. I fully admit to this. If you've dealt with as many computer users as I have who lie through their teeth that they didn't do anything, the computer just stopped working, how they promise they've done everything you've advised them to do over the phone when you can hear it in their voice that they've just been sitting there eating chips while they pretend to follow your instructions, you'd have trust issues too.

Peeved

It annoys me greatly when trade books have mistakes in them.

If I may, I am going to call out a particular A+ Certification reference guide whose first prep test states:

When looking for information related to the problem, which of the following is not considered to be a good source? Choose all that apply.

A. Vendor manuals
B. Service documentation
C. Internet Web pages related to the product
D. Competitive knowledge base

My answer: D

The book's WRONG answer:

A, B, C. When looking for an answer related to a vendor's product, you might find some information on a competitor's knowledge base, but this is not typically going to be a good source of reference for you.

Contradiction.

Yellow birds with very sharp claws

I don't game. I'm no good at it. I die a lot and swear like a sailor as I go down in flames. But I like looking at the world of gaming from afar. I'm totally into gamecakes and Heroine Sheik and now Sexy Videogameland which has a post about the theme bento community at LiveJournal, including a game character theme. My favorite kicking ass bird of all time, Chocobo, is posted there in bento box form:



Courtesy of Pikko from Adventures in Bentomaking who submitted to the Bento Challenge community.

geeks + server room + Blade servers + $10 bill = OMFGLMAOROFL funny

Break Boy and I had a little fun in the server room today.



*grin*

He unplugged the Blade servers from their power source and 30 seconds later they started cooling themselves off. WIND STORM.

We were supposed to be having a confidential conversation about the thing I mentioned earlier. We eventually did. Fun first. It was, after all, off the clock time. (Like he or I are ever off the clock...)


In case you need to learn what a Blade server is, Wikipedia will hook you UP.

If cheerleaders had been cool at my high school...

...then I probably would have been one.

Since it was actually harmful to one's reputation to be a cheerleader -- the lowest on the food chain, so to speak -- I chose not to affiliate myself with that sport, even though I secretly and so desperately wanted to participate.

Instead I was officially involved in National Honor Society, chorus, yearbook, and computer club as well as peripherally involved in whatever trouble or interesting things I could find to do after school so that I didn't have to take the bus home. I had my geek clique, but I wandered over to wherever I felt like wandering whenever I felt like doing it. In a totally wallflower capacity, of course. I just enjoyed observing, as is stated in superlative form in my 8th grade yearbook. To be fair, I was on that yearbook committee as well and had hoped to be added to the girl with the most socks superlative so that my picture would eternally be next to the boy I crushed on super hard (but whose name I didn't mention in my crush post). I still own probably 100, if not way more, pairs of socks, but I am also still very observant.

Despite the fact that the twins who I crushed HARD on (also not mentioned in the crush post; and I even got one of them to lay is head in my lap in front of many witnesses while I got the other one to sign my yearbook stating that I was his "funky cold medina" :) were in chorus, I chose to spend my entire high school career in computer club.

Yup, true geek. SysOp of the most popular and well-known BBS in my entire state at the time (I even had a key to unlock the system and to reboot it, oooooh) all four years, secretary freshman year, grant writer sophomore year, president junior and senior year, and resident girlfriend / crush for several members (officially dated four, crushed with too many to count) for all four years.

Computer club actually helped me to form social skills. Communicating in geek talk is still talking to others, and I didn't get a lot of practice with that in other venues. I also helped design and maintain a mailing list for a breast cancer survivor group, taught technology classes to senior citizens on Macs and PCs, did graphic design work for a local company who had an outreach program, and learned how to do hardware repairs and upgrades as well as software diagnostics on the school computers. Oh, and I also helped us go from 3 modems with local phone numbers to 8 modems with phone number exchanges that were a local charge for much of the county via my mad grant writing skillz.

Given the opportunity, I'd like to coach cheerleadering. Maybe cheerleaders for computer competitions? :)



Note: I had intended to speak about body odor in this post but I don't have time to speak about it. Please prepare yourselves for me to say that I learned from an early age to tolerate, accept, and in very many cases enjoy the body odor of people I know. Too busy to post that. I'd like to not have to work tonight, so nose to the grindstone and all that. Can't watch Veronica Mars season 1 final episodes if I'm working.

mishy

I think Apple and Lisa Loeb have conspired. I have one album from Lisa that I purchased after watching her show "Singled Out" and now all that iTunes wants to play in shuffle mode is 3 songs of varying artists then another Lisa Loeb song. I'm going to delete all but my starred songs from her album and that will solve that problem.

...

For once I planned ahead and actually made a PowerPoint presentation a month ago for a training session I'm doing tomorrow. Yesterday I was reviewing the presentation before printing out the slides with notes (for note taking, because people seem to need to take notes when I talk :) and noticed a term I didn't remember adding so I went to follow the hyperlink and found that it was missing. Huh. I know that I added one, I just didn't remember to where. I started spot checking the other 29 links that I had already spent hours researching and adding to this presentation. They were all missing. I don't normally curse in front of my female co-worker because she's like a mom to me and my mom doesn't like it when I swear so I just transfer the courtesy to my female co-worker, but yesterday I did a lot of "f f f f f f f f f" exclaiming. At least I abbreviated it.

I read online from a Microsoft MVP that there was a known problem with my version of Office and hyperlinks vanishing. The suggested solutions were: update Office; remove Office completely, reinstall, and don't update. I've done both those things. My presentation's links are still missing. Looks like I'm redoing all my research. The thing that really chafes is that I could have sworn I saved every single link to a bookmarks folder in Safari back before my computer was sent in for service. I have all my bookmarks on the computer but I cannot locate any such folder. The backup version of my presentation works just fine, but I made significant changes to it so it's basically useless to me.

I know you're all gloating that bad things happen to IT people too. It's okay to do. Go ahead, get it out of your system. Just know that Murphy's Law applies to you too so make sure to plan ahead and have a backup (whether that be the data itself or a plan for how to accomplish your task if your technology fails you). This advice is rarely heeded.

Update: I finished editing alllll the links, saved the file, viewed the show, and the links are all “off”. For example, if I hover over a Microsoft link I get a link to a Wikipedia definition. The hyperlinks aren't blank, but they're totally useless when they don't point you to the right place. I'm redoing the entire presentation now to see if that fixes the problem. Effing A².

Update 2: That seems to have worked, although I've lost all confidence that the links will stay put. The worst that happens is that people have to play a memory game of matching appropriate links to appropriate keywords. If they don't like it they don't have to come to the presentation ever again. Works for me. :)

Update: 3: Yup, the links reverted to their preferred squirrelliness again. I am officially hating on a certain big company right now.

Update 4: It cannot be said that I am not persistent. I copied and pasted from PowerPoint to Keynote (Mac version of presentation software) then redid all the links then exported to PowerPoint. Magically, all is well now. Well, not magically. The only thing magical about this is that my computers are still on their desks rather than out the freakin' window.

...

This doesn't deserve its own post. AI top 12 was the worst I've ever experienced. I would stop watching the show, but we really enjoy hearing the judges tell almost every contestant what a disaster their performance was. I think this season we need to vote off two at a time until we get to the top 6: Blake, Chris, Jordin, Stephanie, LaKisha, and ... Okay, never mind, top 5. (No, I don't like Melinda.)

I'm pretty sure I have no hair left because I pulled it all out.

Our company network was down from lunch time through the end of the day. Do you know how hard it is for an IT person to get anything done when there is no internal or external network access? So awful. I got a headache by the end of the day because I was so frustrated.