Diary of a Wolfeman

If you drink alot, and have been known to sleepwalk, put your laptop away before the drinking starts. Or at least seal it up in a waterproof bag. Yes, there will be a “hazardous duty” surcharge for trying to clean that up.

If your Linksys router is giving you fits about a static IP, flash the firmware.

The FCC requires you, Verizon, to make your copper infrastructure available to outside agancies. You are getting paid for the lease. Calling the customers of those other agencies to harass them for not buying your service while you drag your feet on the install will not endear said customers to you. Bite the bullet and complete the circuit before people like me start to badmouth you on public forums. Having worked in the industry, I know it takes precisely fifteen minutes to configure a DSL line, so this whole “three to five weeks” line is pure bullshit. If your customer service was as good as the outside agencies we recommend, then we would be recommending you. Think about it.

It is possible for an Intel processor to outperform an AMD64 proc – but there is a $400 price difference to use the Intel silicon. I can’t imagine anyone thinking that would be acceptable, were they aware of the choice.

Okay, maybe not quite that many, but it sure feels like it at the end of the day.

Today was devoted to moving BtFR into the empty apartment at the other end of my building, making him B:TNG

I wonder how long it will take him to spot and identify the reference.

Anyway, this is somewhat funny, since B and I used to live at opposite ends of a building back in Tigard when I first moved back to Oregon. If we can get another old friend to somehow move into the middle apartment, it will be just like old times :)

Only in a better neighborhood. With better apartments. With no second-floor apartment for TS. Okay, so maybe not just like old times…you get the picture.

The move itself went pretty smoothly, us all being old hands at this sort of thing. I drive the truck and act as Loadmaster, since I play a decent game of Tetris and can usually manage to pack everything into one trip. The Ratboy acts as Stevedore, since he’s 17 and has the energy of youth. Pookie, of course, just tries to help. Today she assiduosly swatted at the dirt on the truck ramp with a broken branch bearing leaves in an attempt to sweep up, succeeding mainly in sweeping it onto us.

Anywho, the end result is we moved 98% of his stuff in less than 7 hours. Not a bad day’s work.

“Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies!”

I seem to be running into this topic alot lately, so I’ll ramble a bit here.

Like many small-town hippies, my folks were never big on religion in general, despite at least one fairly devout Christian grandma. The subject really just never came up. Sure, there was a Bible on the bookshelf, but I don’t think that copy had ever been openned more than twice in my lifetime, and once was when I looked up a particular quote.

(An anecdote from a magazine described how college kids had taken to putting taglines on the front of their pants, and one smartass had put “Mathew 7:7”. Look it up.)

(truncated for easy avoidance) Read the rest of this entry »

I’m in a strange situation at work. I’m running the East shop and reporting directly to the owner as East Tech. Meanwhile, the guy running the West shop is nominally my manager. This means that those things I need approval on have to go through one or the other. Unfortunately, neither one of them is exactly Johnny on the spot about it – but for different reasons.

The owner is usually running around the world doing site surveys and bids for new work, and therefore rarely someplace I can throw paperwork at him. The manager, however, is usually in the shop – he just can’t organize his time effectively. Case in point: Friday I asked him, while he was sitting at a computer, to take a couple minutes to proof $2000 worth of bids so I could fax them out in a timely manner. I asked him to do this at 10am, and it never got done. I’ll grant him that his shop is busier than mine, but still…it’s getting bad. Part of the problem is that we’ve been on a training schedule for over a month now, with people that can’t handle the workload long enough to get good at it. They keep leaving, one reason or another.

What this all boils down to is that I still get calls from the West shop for me to abandon my post and come help him out. So I’m billing time for his shop and not billing anything for mine. That alone is bound to irritate me, but the way he tells me rather than asking me really gets my goat some days. This guy is not a good manager, and I don’t want to be working for him.

I think it’s time I talked to him about it.

CNET News.com reports that Nokia has finally decided to build the perfect phone for my girlfriend. As excerpted:

The N91 has an integrated 4GB hard disk and supports digital music formats including MP3, M4A, AAC and WMA, Nokia said.

Additionally, the handset comes with a stereo headset with remote control. The N91, expected to ship by the end of the year, will also feature a 2-megapixel camera, e-mail support, a Web-browser and video-sharing capabilities, the device maker said.

Now I know what to get her for Xmas :)

So here I am, siting in a motel room somewhere north of the Sound, watching TV and pretty much bored outta me skull. I hate overnight work trips.

If you’re out for a week or more, you have time to settle into things and get a routine going. Short trips, everything’s up in the air. Bah.

And not a damn thing interesting going on.

Grau made a mistake earlier tonight, and I’m in just the sort of mood to pounce on it :)

Here are my cats:

Zoe The Monster, a fine lady, even though she is the primary fur-monger in the house…

…and Trouble Underfoot, the cat Ratboy claimed when I got him home. Turned out to be a good fit.

Trouble is in feline teenager-dom currently, and often tears around the house at speeds approaching Warp 2 just because he can. Or maybe he’s trying to run away from his tail, I haven’t quite figured that out yet. (His tail does seem a bit long for him.) “Underfoot” was simply too appropriate a surname to pass up, since that’s where he tends to be. Especially when I’m cooking. His truly favorite thing to do though, is push his nose into your face at 5am to wake you up.

Zoe, on the other hand, has been with us for almost ten years now, and is quite the laid-back kitty. She definitiely did not appreciate being stuck in a carrier for two days while we drove up from ‘Vegas – kitty qualudes didn’t seem to help much. She has developed a splendid “long suffering” look she brings out whenever Trouble is on a rampage and does her best to hide on a windowsill. If she were a bit smarter, she’d realize that she’s the EXACT same color as the couch, and could hide there indefinitely by just curling up and closing her eyes.

Zoe’s surname came about because as a kitten, she often looked like something Henson would have put together – way too much fur for a kitten to deal with. Once she entered adolescence herself, she lived up to the name by ravaging all the cat toys in the house mercilessly and chasing a laser-pointer-dot so far up walls she would almost do a backflip.

If you haven’t noticed, I have recently upgraded myself to a camera phone, and these are some of the first pictures I have taken with it. The resolution isn’t horrible, and it has a decent zoom feature but no flash. It also takes videos which more resemble screwed-up stop-motion animation – there’s a hiccup every second or so in the playback. For adding photos to the caller-ID display it works just fine. For my privacy-minded friends, fear not: the phone makes a “shutter” sound every time it snaps, so you’ll know when I’ve tried to steal your soul :)

Here’s an unexpected bit of news: my little brother went and got himself hitched early this month. This comes as a bit of a shock, none of us saw this coming at all. (And no, the new Missus isn’t preggers.)

Well, good luck to ’em! To quote a favorite movie: “May the best days of your past be the worst days of your future.”

Ok, so there really hasn’t been any content at all here for a while now. Maybe I should put some of those English skills to use and get scribblin’.

Work has, of course, been the major drain on my time lately. We’re either swamped, or treading water and trying to drum up business. Monday, as a matter of fact, was one of those days where I had almost nothing to do, so I picked up the phone and started calling customers in our database I hadn’t talked to before. I figured, if I hadn’t talked to them, they haven’t done business with us for at least three months, and therefore they were bound to have something needing checking-up on.

Four hours on the phone netted me two appointments for my boss to go out and try to push our managed services on the unwary. The cool thing here, is that if he sells ’em, I get 10% of the first month’s proceeds from the contract. Of course, if I sell them myself, I get 60%, so I need to learn more about what we can and cannot do. Or better yet, how to convince a customer that the intangible is not only genuinely cool stuff, but that they need it desperately.

One of those two appointments should be an easy sale – the vic…err, _customer_ made the mistake of worrying about his network security to me. “It just so happens…” ;)

The Ratboy has once again turned the tables on me. He’s getting some cool stuff for his birthday this year, and I can’t wait to see the look on his face when he opens the gifts. I got everything wrapped up and displayed nicely in the living room for him to drool over, and the punk is being almost bah-humbug about the whole thing. I’m tempted to sneak in, empty out the packages and stuff them with rocks if he doesn’t let me catch him at least shaking one soon. Punk-ass.

For those who may be looking for a cool new apartment, there is a unit available in my building: 3 bedrooms, 2 1/2 bath with a big kitchen and a two-car (if you have Minis) garage with a cable outlet (a previous tenant turned the garage into a rumpus room). It’s and end unit, so there are neighbors only on one side, and they’re quiet folks for the most part. It also has the Northern facing, so it will be cooler in the summer than mine.

The house is located in the Near-East, just a few blocks North of Broadway. It’s in Elliot, which is trying desperately to ride Irvington’s coattails into prosperity and doing a so-so job of it. This building was constructed 4 years ago with that in mind, but everybody else is content to just re-paint instead of demolishing and building new. Rent is $1025, with a whole bunch up-front. Email me for contact info.

Should you like the place, there are some interesting folks here in the neighborhood. In the house to the East of us, I get the sneaking suspiscion that one of the tenants has recently returned home from an extended stay in the hospital. When she left, she was one of those gals who could have been a lipstick lesbian if she were just a tad more feminine. Now, she’s got sideburns and wears boy’s clothing.

Across the street and down a bit is a household of guys who like to sit on the porch until all hours, and they talk just loud enough so that most of their conversations can be heard clearly. Some days, it’s like listenning to a radio soap opera. A dull one, but just the same…

On a good note, there is only one house on the block that has any criminal activity (or at least, it had some in the past.) Unfortunately, it’s right across the street. It’s also the only house on the block with bars in the windows. Go figure.

Okay, I’ve rambled enough. Time for bed.

Well, two long workdays in a row. Monday Started out waaaay out in Sandy, then back at the shop until 10 or so catching up on shop work and futzing with a dead fax machine so I can fax in my timecard and get paid. Then today was up in Lakewood WA, undoing some idiot’s idea of a good LAN and putting things together as close to the right way as we could. Need more parts. And yet more busy, as the phones lit up all day, and I am apparently scheduled for the rest of the week. Always good.

The trick comes in not getting so busy that you get backed up.

Oh – and having a home life would be nice.