Random Fluf Archive
NerdBoy's No-Longer-Neo Nonsense Page
----------------------------------------
Saturday 12/23/2000
----------------------------------------
My lovely and gracious ex-wife has kindly volunteered to help me find the right gift for my sister today. Last night I sat with her and her boyfriend (my, aren't we sophisticated) and watched my daughter sit on the bench for an hour and a half at a JV basketball game. Their coach, who I'm sure will never read this page, seems to have a touch of Bonaparte syndrome. This, as I'm sure you know, combines diminutive physical stature with a truly impressive mania for control. He treats 14-year-old girls as if they were Marine recruits, whose most important lesson is that they should fear their sergeant more than the enemy. Oops, I think that malfunctioning RANT tag must have toggled on again. Gotta go.
----------------------------------------
Friday 12/22/2000
----------------------------------------
Last night was great. Went to dinner with a couple of lovely Brazilian ladies and spent some time reviving the lost art of conversation. We went to a Dominican restaurant. That's as in the Dominican Republic, which if memory serves, occupies the other half of the island that Haiti is on. They have this thing whose Spanish name I misremember, which translates to "Chicken Chunks," and it seems dedicated to the proposition that parts ain't parts. That is, evidently they chunk their chickens by having at them with sharp cleavers and a blindfold. Then they deep-fry the resultant unidentifiable lumps. Serve with small green salad and rice-and-beans. Tastes great, less filling, but bite carefully: life is like a box o' chocklits, but a box o' chocklits is like Dominican chicken chunks:
ya never know what ya gonna git. I had a very nice bit of flank steak, which had (my best guess) been pounded flat with a mallet, then marinated in a tasty vinaigrette. Serve ditto, consume with relish (the sentiment, not the condiment).
Actually managed to get almost all my Christmas shopping done. I don't retract my previously-expressed sentiments, but it's still true that few joys beat the joy of giving. Like virtues in general, it may perhaps be best practiced anonymously and in secret, to preserve humility in the giver; still, it's pretty darn nice to watch the smile that happens when you get one right.
----------------------------------------
Thursday 12/21/2000
----------------------------------------
Well, today I took a day off to get ready for Christmas. Last month it looked like I was going to be unemployed now, but it didn't work out that way. So now I have no (socially-acceptable) excuse for cheaping out. Last year I got ready early, and did quite a bit of shopping for books and videos over the internet. No time for that now... :^)
So what I'm actually doing, of course, is spending my time updating my web page.
Not that I know what to get for people anyway. I'm just not really very good at Christmas. I give people stuf all year long, if I have it and they need it and I don't. I think I've already given away three old computers this year, with a few more to go before they're totally, hopelessly obsolete. And I buy stuf sometimes, too; don't get the impression I just consider charity as an excuse to clean out my closets.
<RANT>But I just have a problem with the wholeheartedly commercial atmosphere of the Christmas season. It bothers me to have the name of Christ associated even in such a tepid, Disney-ized manner with what is strictly an excuse to pump up the economy by getting people to buy more things they don't need.</RANT> Sorry. And don't even get me started about Easter and bunnies and chocolate eggs...
So I guess my take on the whole thing is just that if we don't celebrate Christmas every day by being loving and giving, it doesn't balance the scale when we spend too much money we don't have to buy too many presents nobody needs, just so we can tell ourselves how generous we are. Oops, sorry... Stupid HTML RANT tag isn't working properly. Better update my software.
----------------------------------------
Wednesday 12/20/2000
----------------------------------------
Had to leave for a customer site before wrapping up the email problem, leaving the office with internal email working, but no internet email. That's not good. In fact, That's Not Good. Well, help is supposed to come in a while. Until then, no email is good email. (A bit of wishful thinking there.)
I've been reading Dave Farquhar's book called Optimizing Windows for Games, Graphics & Multimedia. Quite a serious tweaker, this lad. I have an old Pentium 75 IBM StinkPad that somebody gave me for free (and worth every penny); maybe I'll try out everything I can apply to it, and see how much difference it makes. I also gave my daughter an old HP Vectra Pentium 133 so she could flirt with strangers in internet chat rooms. (She SOOOO better not ever do that!) Maybe we'll see if she can live without some bells and whistles in the interests of performance. I'm betting she'll prefer the bells and whistles.
Footnote: the smart guy came and fixed the internet email problem. Turns out there was one more place that needed an administrator ID: the internet mail service connector in Exchange has a place to enter that information so that Exchange can automatically email whoever's responsible if there's an error. I'm guessing that when our departing engineer deleted his account, this particular field was automatically deleted, and replaced with nothing. The only error message came when trying to manually start the service: Error 2041, whose only available explanation was along the lines of "Software problem: call technical support." When you are technical support, that ain't too awful helpful.
----------------------------------------
Tuesday 12/19/2000
----------------------------------------
Some days start out just a little bit too exciting. Our little network has its backup running from an old Pentium 200 Compaq, that doubles as an Exchange email server. Last night the backup never completed. ArcServe is as annoyingly uncommunicative as most real business software. When it (for instance) happens upon a corrupted file, it just keeps trying to back it up, and failing, and retrying. No error messages, only the backup never finishes. That's my best guess about today's first booboo. So I stop the job (which doesn't work either, half the time, including now; so I resort to Task Manager to kill the individual processes. Argh.)
So then I restart the backup, at which time I notice that in a hopefully unrelated situation, the Exchange email server has failed to start all its various processes, and we have no email. As usual, it's a cascading chain of problems, starting with the fact that we changed the Administrator password when an engineer left. All good, but he had left the Exchange services to be automatically started up by the Administrator account whenever the server booted. Each one of the services had to have the new password put into it. OK, now that should work. Only it doesn't, because the Administrator account is locked out because of all the errors. Apparently one of the unique things about this account in Windows NT is that it can be locked out of all its privileges, yet still be able to log in.
OK, changed all the password info, unlocked the Administrator account, restarted the server, ...almost there. I think the engineer that set this network up didn't configure the Cisco switches correctly, so they can cause timeout problems on login. And that takes me a bit past my level of expertise. Time to get help from the smart guys.
----------------------------------------
Monday 12/18/2000
----------------------------------------
Welcome to a new week. Six shopping days until Christmas. Six more days until I have to rush out to 7-Eleven at 6:30 p.m. (that's "pip emma" for our British friends) on Christmas Eve to buy everyone on my shopping list a nifty, thoughtful, and personally selected gift... say, something along the lines of beef jerky, or maybe a Slurpee. Did you know that 7-Eleven's Product of the Month is a little black-and-white "TV with AM/FM Radio" ("Portable Entertainment for The Traveler or Sports Fan On Your List")? Only $34.99 plus tax where applicable. Or I could pick up an AT&T Prepaid Wireless Phone ($69.99 With Rebate). Let me just take the liberty of quoting from 7-Eleven's web site here:
7-Eleven has always been about convenience, but people who haven't visited their local store in awhile will be pleased to see how convenient we've made the holidays. Wanting to give just the right gift but don't want to battle the mall crowds? Participating 7-Eleven stores offer exceptional gift ideas in a range of prices. From toys for all ages to electronics, 7-Eleven's selection might just surprise you!
"With the introduction of the scooters this summer, we learned we can offer more unique items that consumers might not expect to see in a convenience store," said Jeff Hamill, vice president of Merchandising for 7-Eleven, Inc.
Ready? Say it with me now (best delivered in a Yakov Smirnov Russian accent)... "America! What a country!"