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** -- previously read
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Saturday, December 29, 2001
OK, after further review, I'm not posting my Loot List 2001. Why? Because I got so much stuff that after trying to compile it, I felt a bit sickened by the avarice. I can and will talk about some cool things I got tho.
Christmas went off without any major problems. We spent Christmas Eve at Julie's mom's, where I think I may have set a record for time spent on one piece of furniture, and we had a nice dinner, as well as getting a couple of humidifiers for our horribly dry house. Oh, before getting to Bay City we stopped in Birch Run to eat at Tony's, a place that I hadn't been to in about fifteen years and which I remembered as serving giant breakfasts -- which they still do, with enough bacon to kill you outright. We then went to my parents' and grandparents' for Christmas, with a big old dinner made by my grandma, and gifts went all around. It was a lot of fun, even if Julie started coming down with her sickness by the end of the night. As usual, I seem to be resistant. As for gifts, I'm having fun with Dann's Civilization 3, even if I suck at it (a rant for another time), and I have both Metal Gear Solid games to take a crack at in the future. Seems like the break is already over though. I guess time dilation is really starting to kick in the closer I get to thirty. Monday, December 24, 2001
Just some quick stuff before bed and travel tomorrow --
Good Christmas so far, with friends and gifts both given and received. I think one of the best things I got was from Mer -- a pint of ice cream, a mini-zen garden, a Wonka bar and Mario Tennis. What a great mix of stuff! Saw Lord of the Rings this evening -- beautiful. Have a safe and happy holidays! Friday, December 21, 2001
It's been a weird week -- work, shop; work, shop -- but now that work is out of the way all that's left is the holiday stuff. I only have a little more shopping to do, and that will wait for tomorrow (I only have stuff for Julie left to get and I want to make sure I don't get anything someone else is already going to get for her).
I'm working on putting together a Loot List -- it should appear on the left eventually. I'd also like to do a little reorg/cleanup of the site over the break for the new year, so stay tuned. I will have had my desktop here for three years in 2002 and I'm only now starting to get into that area where the software that's coming out has system req's that press what I have. I think three years (hell, it'll probably be more than that) is pretty good life without making any sort of hardware changes whatsoever. Let me tell you about my first PC... I graduated high school in 1992 and used some money I had plus some graduating gifts to buy a PC. BY 1992 my C64 was about as dead as the Dreamcast is now, so I bit the bullet and shelled out about 1200 bucks for a 386 SX, 16 Mhz processor with 2 Mb of RAM and an 80 Mb hard drive. These were not actually horrible for the time, but the thing that did me in was the dual floppy drives -- 3.5 *and* 5.25. In 92 CD's were just starting to be the media of choice, and it wasn't but a year later that diskettes were phased out in most software. Anyways, I lugged that piece of crap with me whereever I went, since windows 3.1 and crappy shareware like Doom could still play on it. At one point I'd managed to get win95 running on it (the install took like 6 HOURS) and Dann gave me a modem card that amazingly made connections even with the Standard Modem driver, so I could use telnet. Anyways, I bought my Dell in 99 and sold the old machine to my buddy Neil for him to play with Linux on it. I'll probably get another machine in a few years -- by that time it'll probably cost the same as that 386, but have a 2 Ghz processor, 60 Gb hard drive and 512 Mb of Ram. Luckily hardware is keeping well ahead of software demands. Monday, December 17, 2001
Dude, here's someone searching out MacDonald's with the Original Deep-Fried Hot Apple Pies. Those were da bomb back in the day, even if they were often hot enough to take a few layers of skin off your tongue.
I wonder if the one in Chicago is the same as the Rock and Roll MacDonald's there? Friday, December 14, 2001
Whoo! Now there's blazing fast speed at the dwinn household now that the DSL is running.
Here's how you know that the Osma B'Laden Video is Fake (check Dec 14 under "A New Moon Record"). And here's a bunch of "A Christmas Story" sound clips -- Fa ra ra ra raaaa, ra raaa raaa raaaaaaa Tuesday, December 11, 2001
Courtesy of Jason:
Gangsta Name: Old Fool G Porn Name: Harley Tittle Cab Driver Name: Iyaue Brown Cutesy Pet Name: Aardvaark Jubblies Monday, December 10, 2001
Did a good chunk of purchasing this weekend. Most of my Christmas shopping is out of the way -- just some odds and ends and then I can focus totally on what to get for my lovely wife. I was also able to get a nice and cheap ethernet card for my PC, since incredibly my work group is going to fund DSL out to our place, and even more incredibly Ameritech can make it happen.
We also noticed that Best Buy is trying to wrangle people into managble checkout lines for the holidays -- quite a shock from their usual policy of "You wait in line regardless of how many people are in the store". Not that people weren't just cutting through the homemade barracades anyways. I hope to be done with shopping before the real nightmare of crowds begins. Wednesday, December 05, 2001
Boy, that last entry seems full of histrionics.
In any case, I asked my boss's boss if she might be able to yell at someone. I'll keep you updated.
I had my dignity robbed from me yesterday.
Yes, I know how silly and pretentious that sounds. In my job, my main focus is to fix the problems of the average person who relies on the computing services of the University of Michigan. I talk to the end users, try to figure out what's wrong and then alleviate the problem. Occasionally there will be problems with services that my group has no direct control over -- in this case it was Netatalk, a graphical server-mounting application for the Mac that makes this nice and easy on people trying to get at their server-based files as opposed to using a plain old FTP client. A user called in to report that he couldn't connect with the service, and when we tried on our Macs in the office, we had the same problem. Thus, I called the group that maintains the connection to those servers. The gentleman who answered, "Bill", asked what I wanted. I reported the problem that I and the user was seeing. At first he wanted to know how many people were having the problem -- as if it really was not a problem unless hundreds of people were calling. I told Bill that not only was the user on the other line affected, but every one of the Help Desk Macs had the same error -- that the volume on the server that Netatalk looks at could not be loaded. For that, I was told that just because an error happened did not mean anything was broken. I sighed and asked my coworker Tracy to attempt to connect to Netatalk the long way -- through the Chooser. This also failed but with a slightly different error message, which I then gave to Bill. His response: "Well well well! You made a big mistake there. DUH!" I sat there silent for ten seconds. Duh? DUH? This guy was what, over thirty? Are we still in junior high? Nevertheless, the message was clear: dwinn is an idiot. Losing my patience in a hurry, I told him the circumstances of what had happened. He claimed to not see a problem with anything on his end as he did whatever he was doing. A few minutes later, Tracy tried her method again -- and the volume mounted. I tried the application icon that our Internet Access Kit puts on the desktop -- same error. I gave this information to Bill, who smartly responded: "Well that proves that it's not our server that's the problem, it's your client." I asked him why one method would work while the other would not, since the app's alias just does exactly what Tracy did automatically. I should have known that Bill had no actual practical knowledge of the program his servers communicated with. "The problem is probably that too many people were connected at once, leaving old connections." I asked if these connects would time out. "Nope." I asked if they could set up something to automatically clean out an unused connection. "Nope," he snapped. "Listen, do you work with anyone there who actually knows the program?" he asked snidely. I put Bill on hold and turned to my colleagues, who could only hear my end of the conversation and wondered what the hell was up. Another colleague, Kris, came in and said a similiar thing happened yesterday to Netatalk and she talked to a person named J. who fixed it and asked us to call back when this happened again. I put Bill back on the line and told him that we'd talk with our Internet Access Kit developer, then talk with his coworker J. "J?" Yes, J.B., I said. "I know who she is. Why her?" he snapped again. Because, I said, a similar problem happened yesterday with Netatalk. "Your choice," I heard, and then the line went dead. * * * * * I stewed on that the rest of my work day, the rest of the evening, and even now. Supposedly Bill and I are part of the same organization with the same goal of providing services. However, the man made me feel five inches tall and that I was nothing to him but a nuisance. I turned to my colleagues. Some had had similar run-ins with Bill. When I explained my frustration to my boss, she explained that Bill's group, not having any contact with students or end users at all, just didn't understand. Bill's boss was the same way, so complaining about this incident would likely do little to change anything. But it's not about that. I want to look Bill in the face and ask him -- do you even realize what you're doing? How rude you were on that phone? I would be justified in actually punching you in the face if I wanted, but what would that solve? I want to ask him if he has any shame at all. I want to tell him what he did to me with that phone call. I want him to look me in the eye and say that he was wrong, that he knows he was wrong for what he did, and I want him to say it because he knows and means it, not because I complained or my boss or his boos is making him. I want to take back my dignity. Lastly, I want to tell him, should anything like this happen again, to myself or any of my colleagues, that I will be back at his office for another "apology." * * * * * Will any of this happen? Probably not. Will I feel like starting anything tomorrow? Would I actually want to do something that would risk alienating the big bosses around here, keeping a promotion from ever happening? Sometimes, things are more important than jobs or money. We'll see. Tuesday, December 04, 2001
Courtesy of Ticqle:
Viking name: Myrkjartan the Hated Cereal name: Cracklin Choco O's Hillbilly name: Bobby Joe Stanton (but everyone calls me Scooter) Exotic Dancer name: Danglin' Warren Cox Monday, December 03, 2001
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