Diary of a Wolfeman

And I can’t say it any better.

Go read this article by Coyote Sharptongue

From Forbes

LONDON (Thomson Financial) – Microsoft Corp and Apple Inc could face a possible lawsuit for failing to include measures to control access to copyrighted material in products such as Vista OS, iTunes and the iPod, two companies have warned.
…
MRT and Bluebeat said the failure to use an available copyright protection solution contravenes the Digital Millennium Copyright Act…

So, if you follow their logic, the producer of the world’s safest automobile could conceivably sue anyone who isn’t driving their cars for public endangerment. Doctors and hospitals could sue bandage manufacturers for enabling the public to do without their services.

If the judge doesn’t just laugh them out of court, I will personally hunt him down so I can ask him to share whatever it is he’s on.

Way back in the 80’s, IBM manufactured a large mainframe system called the 4341. This system, like many today, included an emergency power-off switch, which could be used to immediately stop power should the sprinklers go off (or some other power problem), saving the unit from destruction. This switch was quite large, very red, and a little too accessible – as proved by a programmer’s daughter (named Molly) who managed to hit the switch twice – in the same day.

A Molly Guard is now considered to be anything that covers up a Big Red Switch to prevent mishaps, but is most commonly a plexiglass cover that can be flipped up. These devices have been installed all over the world – usually after someone trips the BRS accidentally.

Such is the case with one of my former employers.

I had just transferred to a new department – we were connecting slot machines from all over the country into one central jackpot. While I was in the installation department, actually getting the games online, we worked very closely with the guys in the data center and were fairly regularly in and out of it’s lovely air-conditioned depths. (Hey, it was ‘Vegas in the summer, and sometimes the building AC got a little overloaded.)

The Big Red Switch was not right out in the open, but it wasn’t exactly hard to get to, either. Nor was it covered with a Molly Guard.

One day I was out in the field testing my latest batch of installed machines with one of the DC guys on the phone when I hear a sudden silence and then “oh shit.” Then, quite distinctly, I hear my supervisor Al say “uhm…ooops?” as every machine in three banks of games starts flashing “no link”.

Turns out Al had been in there just to BS and soak up some AC, when he got bored and started looking around, and there’s this Big Red button, just asking to be pressed… so he pressed it. (None of us were surprised that Al was the one to trip it, it was completely in character.)

We had maintenance in there inside of 20 minutes with a new plexi shield.

So there we are, me and my supervisor sitting in the SonicWall Roadshow when the bit about “gold Partner Requirements” comes up. My supe gets to thinking about his own expired rankings and gets the idea we need to send someone to training. Just so happens there is one this week…

You guessed it: Da Wolfie goes in for another vendor-sponsored cert. Okay, in their defense, this is a useful class all on it’s own considering how many of these firewalls we support, and having additional alphabet-soup on my business card will certainly never hurt. It is, however, a little daunting that the class costs $1300!

No pressure here, Wolfie, but you’d better pass on the first try.

Oi!

Today has been a real swinger of a ride, lemme tell you.

I spent the entire day today and most of yesterday working on a project for one of our clients who has a bad habit of waiting until the last minute before calling us in to help. The project? Build a completely new network for a new start-up subdivision of the parent company that will eventually break off on it’s own. The timeline? 3 or four weeks. When does he call us in? Two days before it i supposed to be running.

Fucker.

What’s left to do? The domain is built and the users have been created, but the Exchange server is barely functional. There’s no definite IP address in use, and we need to get additional IP’s from $ISP. We need to build a VPN, and then configure two routers for the whole thing to flow through.

Worse than anything, however, is that it all gets dumped in my lap. (The guy who normally would handle this account is conveniently busy elsewhere.) Yeah, I can muddle my way through a lot of stuff, but I don’t like working under a deadline that will get someone else in trouble for not meeting – so I’m just a wee bit stressed.

It also doesn’t help when the IP the client tells you to use is in fact the IP of his Gateway, and all of his DNS has been configured wrong to boot, so nothing will be officially usable for 48 hours from when I figured out he fucked that bit up.

That was 2:00 this afternoon.

I just about blew a few fuses, but with the help of a couple of my teammates (including Da Roomie) we got it all done.

So, I pack up my shit and run the hell away before he can call me back. When I get to Tolerant’s, I realize all over again that she is simply the Best Girlfriend Ever.

To wit:

She went shopping at lunch to pick up stuff for dinner and dessert.
She was mixing me a drink when I walked in the door.
Dinner was already cooking – beef tips in gravy over mash with corn, yum!
Some of my favorite music was playing to a happily hypnotic visualizer.

Inside of 15 minutes, I’m parked on the couch with my feet up, a drink in one hand, dinner in the other, and my sexy librarian snuggled up beside me. Dessert consisted of about 2 hours of cuddling and creampuffs with sliced bananas topped with Cool-Whip and chocolate sauce.

I am a lucky bastard.

Here’s an interesting bit of news: apparently Billie Piper (‘Rose Tyler’ of the most recent incarnation of Dr. Who) is set to play Bell de Jour in a new television series hosted on Brit station (network?) ITV2. Find details here.

This looks like a pretty good move. Billie gets to completely ditch her “girl next door” image, and the show’s producers just guaranteed that a rather large portion of the Dr. Who fanbase will tune in, at least for the first episode. All that for a show that is sure to include lots of sexual situations should get them some pretty good viewer numbers.

I hope there’s a torrent for it…

Thom was kind enough to reply to yesterday’s rant, and my response has outgrown the comments area so I’ve brought it up here. Here are Thom’s thoughts:

Hey f*ckwad

Next time you go cherry-picking for stats to back up an opinion, at least make them contemporary. It’s not 2001. And a side by side of gun violence in totality in the U.S. and UK might round things out a bit. An increase, for example, of 1 to 2 per capita would mean little against say a drop of 4,000 to 3,999. Understand?

You like guns and you think they should be legal. That’s your position and you deserve it. I like guns, don’t shoot like I did when I was younger, but I always liked it. The question is: Would a sigificant drop in deaths by gun in the U.S. be a worthwhile trade for more restricive gun laws? If it’s reasonably showable, I’d say yes. People who have experienced gun violence in their family or among friends overwhelmingly do. They deserve that say, without derision.

Now, my first thought is this: dude, don’t hold back. You want to call me a fuckwad, go right ahead and spell it all the way out. Don’t censor yourself somewhere they still allow free speech. I’m an asshole, and I will freely admit it.

Okay, I didn’t choose a contemporary report because there isn’t one. I was specifically looking for crime stats in the time period after the English law went into effect, and plainly wrote that the numbers were for the two years after the law change. The date of the report does not change the validity of the information.

The point of the post was to point out to people that other countries have tried banning handguns, with little effect. Since I so plainly stated the two-year mark, one could hopefully be smart enough to infer that I am speaking in the short-term.

I specifically do not compare the UK to America because of the vast difference in the size of the two nations, and the differences in culture. The UK is slightly smaller than the State of Oregon in land area, but has a much greater population – over 60 million, compared to Oregon’s 3.4 million. That kind of density does not exist in the U.S., with the possible exception of New Jersey. I don’t have the background necessary to estimate what differences in culture are the result of that population density, so I did not compare the two nations.

It is likely, however, that a disarming of the American law-abiding public would leave them at the mercy of the lawless who retain their weapons. I have been unable to find a decent breakdown of gun violence by legally obtained vs. illegally obtained handguns, so I can’t estimate what that rise in violent deaths might be.

There is aso the point, however, that it doesn’t take guns to kill people. That maniac could have walked in to a roomfull of people with a baseball bat and done similar amounts of damage. A fast man with a kitchen knife could arguably have done as much as well.

And the rest of the world hasn’t had the best luck with gun laws. Russia, for instance, has very strict gun laws – and a horriffic murder and violence rate, most of which is not gun-related. They just kill each other with something else. South Africa has tough gun laws, but the criminals still have access to them so crime rates have not gone down as much as you would hope.

Perhaps I should have been a little more pointed in who I was railing against. The bereaved certainly have the right to voice their opinion for stricter gun control. My complaint is with un-informed celebrities, clueless media hacks and others of similar ilk spouting off about stuff when they haven’t done the research to back their opinions. People like Jack Thompson and Dr. Phil, who were trying to lay the blame on violent video games before we even knew who the asshole was in the VT killings.

The top problem, the Big Issue, is that people end up wanting to kill other people. It is my firm belief that if people were just a little bit kinder to each other, shit like this wouldn’t happen. There are simply too many people in this world who don’t give a shit enough to notice that the boy from next door is about ready to snap and go haywire.

No law can possibly help you if you cannot muster the gumption to ask someone if they are ok. In the long-term, an increase of human decency and kindness is the only thing that will bring the violence in check.

Dear $diety I sound like a hippie.

I am getting REALLY fucking tired of the anti-gun fuckwads getting up in everybody’s faces and blaming guns for violence.

Guns don’t kill people. People kill people. Take away the guns and they will use whatever else comes to hand. A baseball bat is just as deadly.

I’m also tired of people pointing to Jolly Olde England and saying “See? They don’t have any guns! Why can’t we be like them?”

Here’s something for you: guns haven’t always been illegal in the UK. When they did ban handguns in the late 90’s (due to a primary school shooting in which 16 were slain), it didn’t help – handgun-related crimes actually went UP 40% in the next two years.

Australia has run into the same exact problem: they took the legal guns away, but the criminals kept theirs. People can no longer defend themselves, and are proving to be easier targets.

The problem here is that society has gotten to a point where personal responsibility for our own actions is not enforced. With the massive number of people around us, it’s too easy to find a scapegoat for our own actions. “Daddy didn’t love me enough” or “they didn’t make it hard enough for me to get a gun”…

BULLSHIT!!!

YOU pulled the gun, YOU took aim and YOU pulled the fucking trigger.

Everyone has choices in this life, and each individual is responsible for those actions.

If you want to ban something to save the children, BAN STUPIDITY. Base stupidity has probably killed more people than any other cause in the history of Man. Require prospective parents to pass an IQ and general knowledge exam before being allowed to reproduce. Require them to have gainful employment and $20,000 in savings to cover the hospital expenses.

If you give a standard teenager a car, they will more than likely treat it poorly. If they have to work their asses off to buy that same car, they will more than likely treat it with respect and take care of it. If you required the same sort of work to become a parent, chances are that they would put more effort into raising that child, and do a better job of it, leading to a better world in the long run.

You want fewer violent acts in your world? Be a better person and help others to be a better person. Stop looking for someone to blame. Or if you really want to look for someone else to lay the blame on, start with a mirror.

End Rant.

Okay, I gotta ask: just what the fuck is up with the pedestrians in Downtown lately?

Today, I had to stop and wait for a footie to clear the crosswalk on my green at 5 consecutive stop signals. And not just a few seconds as they made the last couple steps, either – these tards were barely halfway across when the green tripped. Worse than that, the last one was a dude in an electric wheelchair!

You’re thinking “Oh, cut the guy some slack!” but no – he was rolling fast enough that I would have been running to keep up with him, and I was halfway into the intersection when he blazed up from my left. I was in the far right lane!

What really pisses me off is how they don’t even look at the cars stopped at the intersection – they just stroll along like we’re not even there, with that whole “I’m walking and not polluting the air, so you can just wait for me” attitude. Well, listen up, treehugger: I AM polluting the air with my car, and you making me wait is dragging it out even longer. You want to save the planet? Then get the fuck out of my way so I can stop burning fuel at idle.

Look, folks, let’s get something straight. When the crosswalk signal shows the white “man walking” icon, go ahead and cross.

When the red “Halt” hand starts to flash, it means you need to clear the crosswalk. Those already crossing should step right along, those who have not begun should stay put.

When that red hand turns solid, it means “stay the fuck out of the street”.

When the light in front of me turns green, I WILL GO. If you are in front of me, don’t give me that pissy glare and amble on across, I want you to jackrabbit those last three steps.

In ‘Vegas, (and it’s one of the few things I miss) the law states “the pedestrian does not have the right of way when the walk signal has turned red.” That’s right. If you are out of the crosswalk or crossing against the light, and you get run down, the law thinks it was your own damn fault.

Mind you, they also gave the footies about 30 seconds more walk signal because they knew the corners are crowded. So they were nice about it.

Me, I had my own way of helping them hurry up. I’d plant my left foot on the brake and my right foot on the gas. When a 6000-pound land-based aircraft carrier like my old Plymouth lurches at you with the front end twisting from the motor’s torque and the 400″ engine growling, you get the fuck out of the way. When the above happens and you look in the windshield to see me grinning in that “mmmm…rOaDKiLL!!” way, you teleport, leaving nothing behind but the faint whiff of ammonia as you piss your pants.

I swear my next car is going to have a great big cow catcher on the front with salt and pepper shakers attached to it for easy seasoning.

Our company, being as IT-related as we are, has decided to migrate our Exchange 2003 system up to Exchange 2007 so we know what do to when our clients ask for it. Here’s how to do it:

1) Buy new server. You cannot upgrade an existing E2003 server.
2) Install OS of choice – in this case, Server 2003 Enterprise Edition 64-bit
3) Install all updates, antivirus, etc.
4) Print and read the 15-or-so pages from Technet describing the install process.
5) Read them again, damn thing is still updating.
End of Day 1
6) Join new server to domain.
7) Run dcpromo to convert to backup domain controller.
8) Watch dcpromo fail because you have to run adprep from the S2003 Ent-64 cd first.
9) Watch adprep fail because you have to run it on the Server 2003 domain controller.
10) Run adprep on the other DC…ok, it worked that time.
11) Run dcpromo on new server. Again, it worked this time.
12) Read the docs again, discuss with more experienced engineer – who doesn’t recognize any of the new terminology M$ is using either.
13) Curse M$ for the bastards they are.
14) Slot the Exchange 2007 DVD and run the installer.
15) Blow past the first three meaningless EULA screens and get to the actual install screen.
16) Steps 1-3 are to prep the server for Exchange. Step 1: install .Net 2.0. Click on Install, it bounces open IE to a download page. They had over 4Gigs worth of space on that DVD and they couldn’t include the .Net2 runtimes?
17) Download and install .Net
18) Step 2 is to install MMC – already done. Moving right along.
19) Step 3: Install PowerShell. Again, it bounces me to a download screen.
20) Download and install PowerShell.
21) Step 4: Install Exchange! Woohoo, here we go!
22) Watch installer launch the tester to see if you are ready for E2007. Watch tester throw big red X’s. Read and discover that I need to update .Net and install IIS because I forgot it. Read further about the pre-install Exchange Server Best Practice Analyzer that would have told me all of these things and possibly more – that was not mentioned in any of the docs I already read.
23) Update .Net
24) Install IIS.
25) Google search for the Analyzer and download. Double-click to install.
26) Watch as install fails: I need .Net 1.1?!!?
27) Download .Net 1.1
28) Curse M$ for the Bastards they are.
29) install .Net 1.1 – watch installer throw warning that the 64-bit version of the OS has a known issue with .Net 1.1 and I will have to type a really long command into a command shell after I install it. Save info to text file because you know that shit won’t be at the end of the install where it really should be.
End of Day 2. Read the rest of this entry »