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I got a text message at 10 AM on Monday that my team’s website was down which I chalked up to DB difficulties after a few hours and frantic emails I found out that our site had been compromised and that I was allowed to start crying.  After a few days of hacks, and communicating with a programmer who’s helping us with our site migration, I got an email today at 11:30 AM that all was going well and did a fist pump in the middle of lunch to indicate my approval.

I returned home only to find out at about 5:00 PM the site had reverted to its status as of 12/2/2010.  I wasn’t sure what was up so I waited and by 8:30 Pm, the site had reverted to its state as of 10/2/2010 and these changes were being wrought by an IP address in Belarus.   Not knowing the source of this march of devolution I contacted the conversion plugin programmer with a furious “WTFOMGBBQ” and received the response back of “led programmer is gone till monday.  We sorry :(“.  So I set to start manually moving forum categories one a time and after a mere 10 hours, I had 110k of our 125k posts moved.

I’ll be damned if my team goes without a web page for a week.  Happy New Years.

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Our work computers run up against a performance barrier when running newer versions of our CAD setup so I figured I’d bring in some RAM as a temporary measure.  I popped in the RAM and restarted and the computer ignored the new RAM.  I popped out previous RAM, sawing through layers of dust that saw George Bush re-elected and felt my adrenal glands swell to the size of golfballs as the the “OHNOES!” light went on after switching the DIMMs.  I popped the RAM out, returned the original stuff and the OHNOES!” light still stared at me.  I unplugged the computer, plugged it back in again and the light was still there.  I blew out some dust and the light remained.

Knowing I’d be decapitated if I just admitted failure, I did the only think I could do: I poked the light.  I cycled power again and the “OHNOES!” light was replace with the “OHAI!” light.  There was much rejoicing.

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A coworker left and as is the sacred tradition of my workplace, we drew lots for his crap.  I emerged with a 22″ monitor that most of my coworkers didn’t realize could be used in tandem with my existing one each computer in the CAD group has a double dual-link DVI-capable video card.    I connected the 2nd monitor and suddenly felt at home.  Not quite my 2560×1600 30-incher but I was wrapped in monitor again with roughly 90° of my field of view taken up by screen.  So at home, in fact I began searching for TOR  proxy stuff I’d been looking for, luckily the crack between the screens revealed the drab off-white paint of my generic office encampment before IT could realize how much of a 1337 h4xor I was.  Aside benefit is the confuse the setup induces; the lowest guy on the totem-pole has the pimpest rig.  Maybe I should do some case mods or bring in an illuminated keyboard and maybe they’ll give me a business card.  Even the group leader was interested saying “it looks neat, but I’m not sure it’d work with the stuff I use.  Maybe I’ll start out with something small and work my way up.”  He constantly has 9 things open at full screen, his head’s going to pop off when he tries it.

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My 2 TB home server has been on the fritz and I’m convinced it’s getting Munchausen Syndrome.  Somehow, the motherboard generates a wailing beep that doesn’t correspond to any normal beep code that’s only placated by rebooting.  It then lost my backups (go entire point of the damn thing!) and corrupted my system backup.  I’m not sure what’s wrong but I’m scared to death to let the thing wail when it’s possibly about to light on fire while deleting everything I hold digital.

So right now, I’m sitting here staring at my computer with a glass of Pepsi Max in one hand and a fire extinguisher in the other knowing that if I fall asleep, the power supply will break, hobgoblins will spill out and individually rape each of the four hard drives that hold my precious 5-Color deck ideas and a meticulously sorted collection of hard-to-find por…. pictures of kittens.  Yes, kittens.  Only another hour before everything transfers to my external hard drive, but that’s Microsoft’s estimate.  As anyone who used Windows 95 or newer knows, that the last 2% of a file transfer take three times longer than the rest combined.

At least if my room lights on fire I already have recovery experience. (Note to self, post pictures of room having lit on fire)

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I wanted to test drive Firefox RC3 at work as the memory leaks had started to become problematic on my new old computer.  I tried to get the American English version but the work filter blocked it as a Phishing Site so I downloaded and installed the British English version.  I haven’t noticed any difference.  I need to leave now to get in queue to take a lorry to the lift at my flat.

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CIS 1055 is mercifully ending and today groups had to pitch sales to get people to buy specific computer configurations based on pre-defined criteria.  After hearing the following
Picasa pronounced “piss-casa (Spanish for urine house)”, protege pronounced as “poor-teej” and people talking about bigger megahertz and one group actually using the word “interweb” I did my presentation.  My client needed something portable that he could do office functions on that would be able to take numerous plane trips.  I sold them a GRiD Compass from 1982.  I highlighted it’s portability as it weighed a mere 11 lbs, had a whopping 384 k of RAM, a high res 320 x 200 CGA monitor which displayed a stunning 16 colors and the optional 1200 baud modem was fast enough to see the text race across the screen.

I pointed out how it interfaced well with their TRS-80 at home and absolutely smoked the Altair 8800 in benchmarks.  Also, as an added bonus the Ni-Cad batteries were much safer than the exploding lithium-ion batteries of today.  Finally, it’s ruggedness was proven by it having flown on the Space Shuttle Discovery.  All this for less than $10,000.  I can’t wait to see how the class voted.

I can’t weight to

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My computer hobbying has gotten around the office and co-workers have asked me a more than one computer question.  Today, one of the engineers was asking me about upgrading his processor and as I told him what he’d have to do the engineer saw his manager coming over and quickly switched topics when the manager says hi and immediately looks over his shoulders looking for his boss and asks me what he needs to do de-crap his daughter’s computer.

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After playing a DVD back-up I made that skipped quite a bit, I’ve begun sifting through my back-ups to see which work and which don’t.  Part way through, my free space was going down and discovered my drive hit 16% fragmented.  This is the highest I’ve ever had a drive and like a moth to the flame, I’m now trying to see if I can break 90% by continuously copying, decompressing, recompressing and deleting ISO files of drives.  Let us see who gives in first, man or machine.  BRA HA HA HA.