Diary of a Wolfeman

11:30pm, and weather.com says it’s 66F outside. Utter bullshit, I assure you. Well, maybe not bullshit, but the fact that the air is absolutely still means that the warmer air in my house (and it gets warmer by the minute) isn’t moving. At. All.

Who in the bloody blue blazes builds a house so weathertight that they fail to include an exhaust system to remove waste heat?

Yet again, another case of “If they had asked ME first…” It was so hot in my house it woke me up at 4am sweating. It’s almost enough to make a ‘Wolfe shave his head.

Then again, it could just be worse for me considering I spent the larger part of the day tucked into an air-conditioned server closet at precisely 67F. That was nice. The fact that I once again got nothing accomplished was not so nice. It seems the antivirus server has become borked, so it came out to go back to the shop for rebuild – along with the two other “spare” machines I will use to Frankenputer something worthwhile out of.

Really, it is necessary. When it takes a full five minutes to reboot a server, things are screwed. Considering that the server in question is a former domain controller that got demoted to simple antivirus chores, this should allow for some streamlining. Too bad we already bought a Windows-based AV suite – it seems like a perfect time to overhaul them into a Linux solution like Clam or Astaro.

The past two days at work have almost been enough to make me want to quit my job and go back to cutting firewood or pumping gas for a living.

Monday: had to call my 9am in-shop appt to remind him about it. He came in at 9:45 for help getting his wifi card to work – just as our wifi test routers dies. No problem, I’ll ad-hoc with my laptop…(quick flash of BSOD, then spontaneous reboot) What do you mean NO OS FOUND?!?

Later that morning, drive out to cool oldster’s house to tell him his computer (that we built two years ago) needs at the least a nuke-n-pave and maybe a power supply. Wait, what’s this “adblaster” program? It lets you send thousands of emails at once? You’re a SPAMMER?!? AAAUUUUGGGHHHH!!!!

Then I find out a solution I proposed and partially implemented for a new customer isn’t going to cut it – 10 minutes before I was to go finish it up.

Tuesday: Spent 3 hours hammering at a laptop that I later find out may or may not have a networking problem – first, we have to see if the Sonicwall’s stupid 5-user license (on a biz-class firewall? WTF?) may be watching MAC addys and killing me.

Spend the rest of the day at aforementioned Monday site bashing away at a Linksys WRV54G router and VPN connection. DO NOT BUY THIS PRODUCT. At least, not until there is more than two positive user reviews on the entire Internet. Great product in theory from one of the top manufacturers – who completely dropped the frelling ball when they built this stylish piece of shit. Spend the money on a more reputable router and hire a specialist to install it.

You have no idea how much that last part hurts me to say. The Great and Powerful Techie From Hell says to get a specialist. Ugh.

It should be illegal to drive a musclecar at anything less than 105% of the posted speed limit in the fast lane. Yes, I am speaking directly to the nitwit in the Mustang 5.0 headed South on I5 Saturday afternoon. (50 in a 65 zone. In a 5-0. What a maroon.)

When you are driving in the right-hand lane (AKA the merge lane), do not speed up in your stupidly oversize truck so that some poor bastard like me can’t get in front of you, when there is plently of room for me to do so. Especially when you have room to change lanes, you fucktard. Will it really slow you down all that much to let me in?

This is why I don’t own a firearm, people: I live in a target-rich environment.

In an attempt to scout things out before installing a new ceiling fan the EMC gave me for my bedroom, I tripped both of the breakers labled ‘lights’ in my switchbox: the only thing that turned off was the alarm system. Then of course there’s the fact that there are two light fixtures in my room running off of the same switch, so I’ll need to re-route some of the wiring to do it right. I just love electricians.

A note to HR recruiters: do not personally correspond with people you do not intend to call up for an interview. Hullo, tact?

I am even better at interpretting Microsoft verbage than I thought I was. I took the extended job-placement test at a recruiter’s the other day, and one of the tests was on MS Server 2003, an area I have very little training in. The test seemed to be simply phrases extracted from the manual re-phrased as questions, and I was able to correctly guess the answer far more often than I thought I would. Often enough, in fact, to score 10% higher than a large portion of other test-takers.

The other test they had me take was on MS Office support, and the only place I did badly was on the Access portion – a product that Microsoft has yet to realize that nobody uses. (Anyone wanting an actual database uses SQL or D-Base.) I nearly aced the rest of the test. I really need to take some certification tests so people will listen when I say I’m the Techie From Hell.

Graumagus at Frizzen Sparks brought to my attention that the town of New London, who petitioned to use the Eminent Domain laws to oust a large number of people from their homes so that Pfizer, a pharmaceutical company, could build a conference center and hotel, has not only won their case in SCOTUS, they have decided to charge the ousted for back rent for the time they continued to live in their homes while the case was being decided.

Read the full article here.

I am at a loss for words, so I will just quote Grau and ask all of my fellows to permanently boycott the Pfizer company and all of their products. See the entire list in the extended entry.

Should you wish to write a letter to Pfizer yourself, here is their contact information:

Pfizer Inc
235 East 42nd Street
New York, NY 10017
USA
1-212-733-2323

Read the rest of this entry »

Maybe the folks from the last post should be reading this…

Unshelved

Read the full story here.

Florida Librarian Suspended over Porn Incident
The director of the Valparaiso (Fla.) Community Library was suspended without pay in early August after city officials found that a registered sex offender had used library computers to access pornographic websites.

This pisses me off on so many levels I can’t believe it. Aauugghh!!

1.) It is unbelievable that a county library system would be asked to censor patron’s use of the facilities. Maybe Oregon libraries are just liberal about these things, but the libraries here do not censor anything, whether it be print, audio or video. They even carry a selection of erotic magazines, such as Playboy. You have to prove you’re over 18 to check one out, but they are there. Oregonian kids can at least go to the library to learn about sex when their parents won’t talk to them. A library should be a repository for all data, not just what some jerk in office deems appropriate. It is the parent’s job to monitor what their children see and hear, not the government’s. Get your head out of your ass and stop trying to nanny the nation.

2.) It pisses me off that an elected official is so amazingly ignorant about the realities of the Internet that they belive it is possible to completely filter out pornography from the terminals in the library. This is IMPOSSIBLE. Period. Sure, you can filter out the lion’s share of it, but we’re talking about a world-wide system with very little supervision. I simply cannot tolerate that kind of ignorance in an elected official of any stripe – whoever was involved in passing that particular policy needs to be whipped.

3.) The article mentions that the patron was a registered sex offender. I don’t recall being asked about my criminal history when I signed up for a library card, so just how the fuck were the librarians supposed to know? Do you want them to memorize the names and faces of all sex offenders so they can keep them away form the porn? And why the hell is he a registered sex offender and not a lifer in the first place – who let this asshat out of jail?

Just too pissed to write more.

I have been sitting here reading the news releases regarding the Shuttle program and the changes you have planned for our Space Program, and I just have to ask: were you not paying attention?

Burt Rutan and Scaled Composites were able to produce, launch and successfully recover a vehicle to LEO for a very mere fraction of the cost of a traditional Shuttle flight last October, and here you are going back to the Apollo configuration of a capsule at the tip of a rocket. What gives?

SpaceShipOne would require merely some scaling-up to handle the Shuttle’s current role, and in fact Scaled Composites has plans already laid for such a vehicle designed to be able to dock with the ISS. Why are you not bringing them into this project?

Currently, the Shuttle is utilised for launching payloads into space, personnel transfers to the ISS, and a microgravity test lab. In my opinion, we should leave the heavy lifting to unmanned rockets for larger satellites – a proven technology. The ISS was designed to take over the Shuttle’s microgravity labs, and we should allow it to do so.

Scaled Composites’ Tier Two program, however, is specifically designed to handle the personnel transfer duties to the ISS and should be used – the cost savings over the current Shuttle program would be significant, allowing us to do more for our NASA tax dollars.

Wake up, people.

Considering how all of the comment smap I get around here consists of nothing but a link, I am now implementing the “no-follow” attribute on all links posted here on the blog. That means the search engines won’t follow the links, and the linker will not get their page rank increased.

So neener!

If that doesn’t stop the bullshit, I will simply disallow all links in the comments and be done with it. Seeing as how there is maybe one comment on this whole site with a legitimate link in it, I don’t think it will be much of an issue.

To the asshat in the baby-blue VW pickup that was tailgating the car in front of me today on Hwy 224:

You are so fucking lucky that it was not me in my old ’74 Plymouth. That car was made of solid American steel, and I would have brake-checked your ass hard and told the investigating officer that a cat ran in front of my car.

You would have been sitting there with steering wheel in your teeth and the engine to your POS would have been permanently mated to the radiator, all because you were in such a fucking hurry to get someplace else you couldn’t follow a simple safety concern.

What a prick.

It seems that I somehow managed to get a black line into my spam comment filter’s blacklist – which appears to be the equivalent to a star-dot-star wildcard, killing all the comments.

This has been fixed. Bash away!