Diary of a Wolfeman

From KATU News:

Porn download at state office puts taxpayers at risk

SALEM, Ore. – Electronic files containing personal data of up to 2,200 Oregon taxpayers may have been compromised by an ex-employee’s unauthorized use of a computer, the Oregon Department of Revenue said Tuesday.

Fucking ass-hatted morons. You’d think that a government employee would know better, but apparently not. Some dipshit was surfing porn on a government workstation when his computer was infected by a trojan.

I’m not surprised that it hapened, either. I see this kind of idiocy everyday from both sides of the fence. That’s right – not only is the surfer an idiot, but so is the sysadmin who trusted a government schmuck enough to not filter the internet connection. It doesn’t take a whole lot of effort or resources to implement a bit of ‘net-nannying, and any IT guy worth his root access should have been able to see the potential need: people do stupid things when they think nobody is watching. Sometimes they don’t care if people are watching or not.

I once spent 8 hours rebuilding three workstations because some idiot couldn’t keep his paws off the configurations of the computers in his department. He was putting windows 98 themes on XP machines, he invited tons of spam into the network, and infected one computer with at least 15 different viruses. His boss told him “if I ever see you on a computer in this shop again, you are fired.”

Two weeks later, the numbskull was checking his email at work. WHAM! Instant pink slip. Too bad I wasn’t there to see it.

* “If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.” – Benjamin Franklin
* Comedian Billy Connolly, in one of his performance videos (Live 1994), called Politically Correct “the language of cowardice.”

And how cowardly it is. It drives me nuts anytime I run across some ass-hatted governmental decision to alter a phrase for fear that someone, somewhere, may eventually be offended. Some tidbits pulled from the Oregonian’s Living: The Edge section today:

Amherst Regional High School in Amherst, N.H., banned the word “freshman” as “oppressive” and “non-inclusive.”

Apparently “sophomore” and “sophomoric” are still ‘go’.

Police in Britain are being told to limit their use of wanted posters because the posters might violate the privacy of those wanted by police.

Uhm, I’m sorry, but piss off on this one. The only right to privacy a wanted person should have is when they’re in the shitter. Cuz really, nobody needs to see that.

In Australia, the federal attorney general’s office ruled that eyesight and medical tests required of flight crews and air traffic controllers could no longer be given because they violate the country’s anti-discrimination laws.

There are certain jobs in this world where I want a little discrimination. Requiring the guy guiding a jet to the runway to have vision correctable to something resembling 20/20 is a good thing. Sure, I can build a Braille interface for a radar screen, but the guy driving the fuel truck needs to see what he’s doing.

But it never ends. What did I find in my mailbox today? An offer from a cigarette company for a free little tin doohicky that looks like a modified Zippo lighter. It has a flip-top lid; inside is a space to mash out your smokes and next to that is an opening to stuff the butt in. Close the lid, no trash on the street. Cool, I thought, until I saw the name: a Portable Litter Device.

Fuck you, it’s a buttcan.

New Electronic Control Module: $78
New Oxygen Sensor: $24
New Manifold Air Pressure Sensor: $34
New Plugs & Wires: $ 30

FINALLY being able to say I fixed the frelling Beastie? Priceless.

The plugs (Bosch Platinums with the crazy 4-electrode heads) are probably the easiest thing on the Beastie to change, as they are the only thing on the top-front of the motor. Plug wires, on the other hand, are a stone bitch.

My car has an electronic ignition system, which means the ignition coils (yes, that’s a plural) get an impulse directly off the crankshaft, which means they are located on the bottom-rear of the engine – right there with all the steel fuel lines, transmission linkage, trans dipstick, exhaust…you get the idea. Tons o’ shit that can’t be just pushed out of the way.

This also means to do the job, I have to lift the front end of the car about 17″ off the ground so I can get under the car to thread the wires the last few inches to the coils after I have fed the line down from the top. Days like today, I really miss that old Plymouth – sure it was a gas-sucking hog, but I never had to crawl under the damn thing to change a plug wire.

There was one “oh shit” moment when I first started her up – the #1 plug wire had popped off the coil – but thankfully I have the world’s smartest fingers and was able to weasel my way in from the top to snap it back on. After that, the Beastie purred like a kitten all the way up the freeway and back.

On the way home from the initial test drive, I started hearing a brass band playing. “Really, guys, I appreciate the sentiment, but I’m not that good of a mechanic…oh, wait. Portland in early June, traffic re-routed down a one-way street…this can only mean one thing: the Rose Festival Grand Floral Parade.”

Thus explaining the brass band. :)

Traffic is a little sticky on Grand, MLK and any adjoining streets this morning folks – take a different route.

Grau asked, and the answer started getting long-winded, so I made a post.

When in need of a warm place to party the proper way to go about it is to dig a firepit the size of an open grave for a very fat man, insert half a cord of wood, and light ‘er up :)

All joking aside, it sounds like a good time. How much leeway do you guys have for campfires and the like. I’ve heard that a lot of SCA events are idiot proofed to the point of being ridiculous.

I replied to Grau via email and forgot one point, then elaborated on others:

Most SCA events are held at public parks / campgrounds, so we have to deal with Fire Marshals and State / Local ordinances, which usually boils down to above-ground fires only. (Parks Depts really bitch when they see you digging that grave-sized pit…) The SCA itself only has common-sense fire regs, as in if you have a fire, you should also have at hand two means with which to extinguish it. Considering our camp shower has a battery-powered pump, we have a small fire hose plus all our camp cookware to use as shovels :)

There have been a couple of late-summer events where the FM stated “no open flame” due to extreme fire danger, which can really get irritating for lighting issues. (We used to surround our main pavilion with tiki torches.) If it’s that hot we’re thankful for the cooler nights and don’t light a fire anyway.

Really. You think you get hot and sweaty running around in a Great Kilt? Try it from inside a pot-bellied stove made of plate armor!

We do have a decent foldable fire pit in my camp, but we also have as much other gear as we can stuff into our rigs already, so getting any wood to the event is sometimes an issue. Then there’s the whole Great Wet PNW factor that often causes problems. (We went to the tavern at 40-year because we couldn’t keep the wood dry enough at camp to burn reliably.)

In the past, we have found that the most reliable way to keep warm at night is t get a big party going under our main pavilion – 10 or 15 jovial adults produce enough body heat to make it comfy, and if you get enough booze flowing, you may just end up with a Gypsy Pig-Pile. It’s difficult to think about little things like the weather when you’re being nibbled on by half-naked Gypsies!

Well, our second foray into eventing this year went pretty good. Yes, it rained nearly the entire weekend, but the sunny part came on the last day, allowing our gear to dry out before having to pack it – yay!

The main bummer for me was the fact that I actually had money to spend this time, and the one thing I wanted was a new pair of boots – something which none of the merchants available thought to bring. Pirate clothing of every other sort was there, just no boots. Bastards!

Tolerant and I were first to arrive on-site, and had to go through the rigmarole of tracking down the landocrat and securing space for our group, which was a bit tricky since everyone and their uncle Bob seemed to get there before we did. As luck would have it though, we got space near both biffies and a source of water with enough space for us to throw up the whole kit-and-kaboodle of tents we brought. Which, for 5 people, turned out to be three personal tents, a 22-foot main pavilion, a kitchen pavilion and a shower tent. Yes, we try to bring it all with us.

No, Grau, we’re not wimps. We just refuse to live in squalor like you black-powder-sniffing freaks :) The main pavilion (Nightsky) also functions as a lure, drawing passing party-goers in where we may knock them out and steal their booze bid them join in our revelry!

The mud almost worked in favor of our entertainment value, since the main walkway outside Nightsky was a bit of a slippery mess. Alas, we were not able to do the Patented Gypsy Point-and-Laugh, since nobody slipped.

We’ll put more bacon grease in there next time!

Going to The Pirate Gathering this weekend, and in fine Oregon tradition, the forecast for Memorial Day weekend (which marks the beginning of barbecue season in even slightly more southern climes) looks like shit. More thunderstorms are expected.

The good news is that they may call for rain, but it looks like it won’t be freezing like it was at the last event. I know how to stay dry in An Tir weather (been SCA-ing up here most of my life, after all) but freezing is something you just can’t get used to.

I think I’ll buy a new tarp on the way out of town.

On the other geekery side of things, you may notice the thing at the very bottom of the page where it lists how many spam comments have been killed by my SpamKarma2 installation here on the blog – over 1500 to date since install. In all of those, I’ve had to manualy moderate maybe a dozen, and sometimes it has caught close to 200 in a two-day stretch!

So, if you are getting hounded by spam comments, check it out.

At least, not when you own an older Chevy.

You’ll remember the last car-related post where I mentioned that it blew the replacement alternator? Well, I found another problem that may have been caused by or the cause of said malady.

It seems the low-to-midrange acceleration in my car went to hell last week. The ignition would cut out for a second, unless I was A.) moving at a steady speed, B.) accelerating very carefully or C.) punching it to the floor. Definitely not conducive to happy driving or fuel economy. So, I swung in to Tolerant’s bro-in-law’s garage, and he diagnosed it as a faulty ECM unit.

That’s right, the fekking computer crapped out on me. Good news: easy to replace, actual plug-and-play equipment. Bad news: just as expensive as the alternator. If I could lay my hands on a copy of the schematics, I’d try and fix the computer instead of replacing it.

I’ve only driven it around the block so far tonight, but it seems to have done the trick nicely. I love the ten-minute fixes.

Weekend Recap Time! Actually, this goes back a bit longer than the weekend, but you’ll see why.

Last Saturday, Tolerant went up to the 40-Year Celebration with Illyana, like I told you before. Well, it seems that Monday night, Tolerant got a wee bit too tipsy and was smooching on a gent camped with them – an old friend of the family. Nothing serious happened, but she still called to tell me about it on Tuesday night, feeling a little guilty about things and needing to know what I thought about the situation.

See, we started dating while I was rather seriously involved with another woman in an open relationship. As such, we set the rules for our own relationship to “open”, but never went anywhere with it. Frankly, an SCA event is the only place either one of us could think of where such a situation may crop up, so we made allowances for event flings (and there’s always the possibility of a Gypsy Pigpile to consider *LOL*).

The rule was to call if at all possible, but she had never thought she would be the one calling. I’m still a pretty open-minded guy and I trust her, so I told her just to be careful and check his references. Who wants to go a whole week horny if they don’t have to?

Keep reading… Read the rest of this entry »

After a long hiatus, Tolerant and I have decided to get back into the SCA this year, if only a little. There are three events that our House will be attending, but only one of them is a sanctioned SCA event.

There is The Gathering in late May I think, which I believe has never been SCA, just built around that idea. It has been growing more popular over the past few years because the big SCA event that happens on the same weekend has been going to pot badly, with a string of management issues and bad sites.

Then there’s Gypsy Days / Sea Dog Nights (mostly just called Sea Dog) in late July which started out SCA, but then the BOD decided they didn’t like the way the event was being run – how dare the Autocrat offer to have more biffies delivered instead of turning people away from the event! So now it is an unsanctioned event that scads of people go to anyway.

This week, however, is the SCA’s 40th Anniversary celebration. The An Tir version is being held up in Randle Washington, and it runs from last weekend through this weekend. Nothing like camping with several thousand of your closest friends, wot? Since I couldn’t afford the whole week off, I will only be attending this weekend. The Ratboy is seriously bummed, since he has to work Saturday and can’t go with.

Tolerant, however, jumped in the deep end with our Lady Illyana and has been there all this week suffering through mostly bad weather and trying to compensate for dehydration and high altitudes. I can’t wait to get up there, so I have taken tomorrow off from work.

So, first thing I take Pookie to school, then straight to the store for supplies. Swing back to the house to shovel the accumulated detritus out of the Beastie, and then shovel in my gear. This won’t take long – I packed most of what I need last weekend, and Tolerant took all the big stuff with her last Saturday. Top off the fuel, and I should be on the road (hopefully) by 10:00am and singing bad ballads at the top of my lungs all the way.

“…And in a startled voice he cries / to what’s before his eyes
Ach lad, I don’t know where ye’ve been / but I see ye’ve won first prize!”

One of our clients has a server we have been limping along for several months. It runs an old DOS database that the client is in the market to replace, but we decided that the random crashes mean we can’t wait for the new to replpace the old. In line with this, we built them a handsome new server powerful enough to handle any of the current software solutions the client might purchase. Today was install and migration.

The domain has been screwy for some time now, and today I got a look into all the things that were causing problems on a software level. It turns out that (unbeknownst to me) a server I pulled out of the network and rebuilt some time ago was actually a backup domain controller. It’s ghost was still mucking about in the system, though, and prevented us from integrating the new server until it was cleared out. Whoops.

Unfortunately, there were other things wrong – like the fact that for DNS to work properly on a domain controller, the DC’s own NICs have to point to itself. And no, the DNS installation wizard does not do that for you or ever mention the idea. Useful information that is now imprinted on my brain for life.

The list doesn’t stop there, but it does involve about 15 command-line scripts that the Server2003 installation wizards never mention. It is quite obvious to me now that I need to purchase myself a book detailing all the tips and tricks of Windows Server2003.

For now, though, we realized that with less than 20 users on the network, it would be quicker and easier to rebuild the domain from scratch on the new machine than try to iron out all the little bullshit preventing the by-the-book method of join server to domain, promote inside domain, demote old server. And we were right, and it now works just fine.

Login speeds have improved dramatically; there is a ton more storage on the new SATA array; they have a real tape backup system; and I can now complete the rollout of the corporate-edition anti-spyware solution that would not run on Server2000.

Next step is to take the old server back to the shop for some serious hardware diags and a tune-up or possible re-pave to Server2003. Better yet, I’ll throw SuSE on the damn thing. Okay, I can’t really do that, since we can use it as a backup DC once we get the crashes sorted out.

Rats.