Diary of a Wolfeman

Considering how I have spent most of the last 5 Christmases, I have never really gotten around to decorating much. Having Tolerant living here has put an end to that! There has been much decorating, and we bought a new batch of lights for the porch, along with a nice wreath.

Here we have a few pix of Casa Wolfe du X-Mas:

That’s Tolerant’s stocking, I’m making myself a new one this year and retiring the old knitted sock I’ve been using.

Funny thing about those LED lights on the porch – they flicker at 60Hz. You can’t see it until you swing the lights a little, then they strobe almost enough to give you seizures.

As usual, my apologies for the blurry pix. One day, I’ll get a tripod.

So Tolerant and I have been enjoying having her digital TV plugged directly into the cable feed, and thus getting the strangely-numbered channels and “point” channels coming over the wire. It’s been kinda cool – PBS, for one, has several point feeds and there’s been some good stuff on.

Well, we get to enjoy that no more. Comcast recently re-enabled their encryption system, which disables all of this extra functionality. They claim that their contracts with their providers require the encryption to prevent “unauthorized viewing”.

From what I can see, it means that Comcast has a perfect excuse for making you rent an HD converter box to get the HD they broadcast.

Bastards.

So, big news in the Rose City tonight on KPTV12 is about a cop that shot a girl with a non-lethal beanbag round while she was resisting arrest.  The MAX station security video shows a pair of cops trying to arrest the girl, when she hauls off and punches one of the cops. The punched cop gets in close and tries to bring her down, while his partner swings his launcher off his shoulder and very deliberately shoots her in the thigh with the beanbag. Shortly after, the punched cop is successful in subduing the girl.

The girl in question is 12 years old.

This is the part where most people stop listening, but there’s one more piece of information that is very pertinent: the girl also happens to be 5’7″ tall and weighs in at 150#. At this size, she is easily as big as many adult women I know. Heck, my ex wife isn’t quite that big and I know how hard she punches – it hurts.

So from where I’m standing, the cop was perfectly justified in popping her with a beanbag. He used a non-lethal round and carefully shot her in the leg – making sure there would be no chance of a major injury. Sure, he could have used his baton to deliver that little wake-up call – and in so doing, he could have broken her leg, where as the beanbag just hurts like a bitch. The kind of hurt that snaps your attention away from everything else you’re doing so the shooter’s partner can get some cuffs on you.

We took on a new client recently, and it seems there is going to be more work than I initially counted on: I’m going to have to break some seriously bad habits.

Their former IT Admin was one of those guys that has a stupidly superior-to-thou attitude, and this went a long way towards getting him axed.The other thing that lead to this was his inability to use a simple answer to anything – everything in their system has been over-engineered, but with substandard parts. The workstations? All Vista 64-bit, but he home-built the boxen instead of buying something with a full warranty from HP or that other place. Bleah.

Since it is a large company, the Chairman has asked the husband of one of the office gals (who heads IT for some other company) to lend a hand until they’re positive things are running smoothly. This is cool by us, because he will be handling one side of the business that we didn’t really want, so all is supposedly well.

Until I look into the backup procedure.

They guy that got the axe is using a batch file to run an NTBackup routine to an external hard drive. This is for an organization that has nearly filled 3TB of data, and has some 180GB (!) of email data. And of course, the email isn’t being backed up.

So I put together a proposal, comes out to about $3k or so – a DroboPro with a pair of 2TB drives and BEX. Helper-Guy comes back and says how he has been talking with the Director, and they want to get a solution from ‘Rhymes-with-Hell’ that has BEX built-in. I do some research, and while there is no price listed for the whole solution, the individual parts list out for about $6k. I explain that this solution will also take up 5U of rackspace and is serious overkill when we have processor time lying around unused in the 7 existing servers.

He thinks about this for a couple hours, then comes back with how he doesn’t like the DroboPro, he wants to go with a NAS device R-W-H has on offer. This of course forces me to regale him with tales of how crappy that kinda hardware is, and how I will Never (that’s “Never” with a Capital-N) recommend anything that company sells. Never.

Honestly. You’re paying my company $6k a month to manage 40-some-odd users and the attendant hardware – for fuck’s sake, listen to my advice!

So any of you out there who have been paying attention to the other side of ‘The Pond’ know that England is awash in CCTV cameras, watching millions of people all the time. What you may not know is that those cameras, which were purchased and installed by the Government in an effort to abate crime, well, it turns out those cameras are hardly ever watched.

At all. Over 4 million of the little buggers, and only one in a thousand or so actually gets watched in any meaningful way. So, what’s a country to do with all this built-in surveillance?

Why, they should launch a Reality-TV spinoff out of it, of course!

Internet Eyes is the brainchild of three gents who want the people who run the cameras to pay £20 a month to have those cameras uploaded to a game server. Game players will then log in and watch the CCTV feeds, hoping to spot a crime in progress. If they see one, they then report it and the operator of the camera can investigate. Players who help catch the most criminals each month will win cash prizes up to £1,000.

So the first question that comes to my mind (which was also mentioned in the article): what’s to stop criminals from signing up as players, and using all of that juicy surveillance footage to case out a target?

“Oi, look! That’s old Bisby’s store on the feed! There’s the man ‘imself, too! Wait, what’s this? He’s pulling a painting off the wall…and look! There’s ‘is safe!”

Brilliant!

So if you read this, you probably already know what I did this weekend.

Back in August, I convinced Tolerant to come stay at my place for a couple of weeks just to see what living together would be like (and to see if she could really put up with my shit day after day). She grabbed a duffel bag and came over in early September.

About a week in to the experiment, she got a letter from her landlord saying they were going to raise the rent $300 a month.

You read that right: Three. Hundred. Dollars. A. Month.

Needless to say, she wanted to tell them to shove it someplace painful. Being the nice girl she is, however, she just gave them 30-days notice and started packing her stuff. After some deliberation, she decided to accept my invitation and we spent last weekend moving most of her house to my house.

This is where it helps to have friends, lemmetellya.

Thanks go out to Illyana, The Fop, Crystal, The Princess and Bender for helping lug stuff up and down stairs at both ends of the move!

The cats aren’t quite sure what to do with all the new furniture here – Zoe is taking it mostly in stride, but Trouble is bouncing off of everything like it’s his own personal Parcourse.

Me, I’m liking things. We’ll see in a couple weeks if Tolerant doesn’t end up strangling me :)

Damn. My baby girl turned 10 this week, and so far every waitstaffer who has heard this has said “wow, double digits!”

I think there is a conspiracy amongst food service personnel.

So tonight is her party, a sleepover with a handful of her friends at my place. Much bragging was done as to how they would be up all night long watching movies and yakking etc.

Midnight: movie #1 is almost over, and all but one of the kids are sound asleep, and the remaining one is still awake enough to be trying to get more comfortable.

Me? I got sucked into the Harrison Ford version of The Fugitive. 2:30 am and counting.

There’s a lot of talk about making sure you get the best value for your money these days, and that holds especially true for your entertainment dollars. You have many options available to you – movies, games, books, toys – so finding the best value can be tricky.

My suggestion: spend your money on Legos.

The munchkin and I were wandering through the toy department at Freddy’s and ran across some of the Lego 3-in-1 packs, and I splurged with only a moment’s hesitation. Pookie chose a car-jeep-F1 racer  theme, I went for the more complicated airplane-Harrier-helicopter model.

I think we each spent about 6 hours building, disassembling and rebuilding those kits yesterday. Here’s some pics:

So I’m sitting there minding my own business today when Da Roomie texts me, asking if I had seen the bush at the end of the stairs. In his words, it is “Charcoal. An Ex-shrubbery.”

Rewind back to just before Memorial Day, when I cleaned up the side yard area due to a large number of cigarette butts. I had originally thought they were mine from when my ashtray blew over, but they were all Pall Malls, a brand I’ve never smoked.

Fast Forward just a couple weeks after that when I noticed our neighbor toss a lit butt into that same area. I tried to catch him, but he slipped inside before I could get out. A couple of days later, I did manage to catch him outside and just about ready to toss a but, and told him not to.

This is the weird part – while I was speaking at him, he deliberately stood behind the post of his porch in such a manner that he never made eye contact with me. The post was too small to hide behind, but apparently he felt if he couldn’t see me, then I must not exist.

Okay, now we’re back to today. I run back home and grab my camera, and find that my bush has indeed burned to cinders, more than likely caused by a lit cigarette butt being thrown into my yard from the AssholeNeighbor.

See the pink stuff to the left? That’s another bush, and that one touches the house. If you look closely at the Burned Bush, you’ll notice that there is white ash on it still.

Now, those of you who know anything about fires will know that if there is white ash on a burned bush or tree limb, that means that it has not been disturbed since it burned – that white stuff falls off pretty easily.

All of this means that AssholeNeighbor is a lucky son of a bitch, because nobody extinguished this fire – it went out on its own before it could ignite the pink bush, which would have burned my fucking house down.

So I went and hammered on their door, but discovered that the asshole in question wasn’t home. The man I did speak to has been there nearly as long as I have, and he and one other tenant have always been cool, so I kept my temper mostly to myself but asked him to have his roomie call me soonest – so I can decide whether I am just going to kick his ass into next week, or if I’m going to have him arrested for Arson.

Some 4 hours later, the neighbor I spoke to called me back to let me know that he still has not seen AHN yet, but that they have had a house meeting and they’re kicking the fucker out. That’s all well and good, but I think this particular brand of stupid needs to be more painful.

I ran into this at lunch a few weeks back and just found the picture – I had to upload it to FailBlog.

moar funny pictures