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Someone at work asked me to fix their printer as it was a legacy from our previous owners that someone had pulled from the garbage.  The power outage reset the print servers and the device was no longer showing up properly so I set to work.  One of the fellows told me I had it set up to print through the locally connected computer but I didn’t see that as the settings.  After dicking around I was asked:

Bob: Don’t you remember what you did?
Me: Nope, not a clue.
Bob: But you seemed so confident last time.
Me: Well, I have one of four methods of dealing with it.  I’m not sure which will work.
Bob: You mean you don’t diagnose it and then fix that?
Me: No, not at all.  I guess until something works.
Bob: YOU FOOL!
Me: What?
Bob: NEVER GIVE AWAY A SECRET LIKE THAT.
Me: What are you talking about?
Bob: If you had said “yes” and said there was a technical issue, we would have never known.  Now we know you’re bumbling through it like the rest of us.
Bob #2 (there are two Bobs in the machine shop):  *nodding head* We never would have known.
Bob:  You bake a lot, so I’ll keep your secret.
Me: Thank you (?)

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I’ve been looking forward to simply throwing myself into the tasks of my second job, to experience the simple rush of knowing that hours have dripped by as you’ve been engaged in a battle of wits with a piece of unthinking, unfeeling silicon or stitching together the work others in a novel way to solve a problem.  Instead, I descended into a world of obscurantist one upsmanship.

The first iteration of the software I was using had a detailed but broken setup that clocked in at about 4 pages.   The main page had a “use this instead” link that led to a piece with 2 pages or so of instruction.  This page also had a “windows users, get the latest and use this” which led to a page with another piece of software with a 1/2 page of instructions which wasn’t too revealing.  I did some Googling and found an update for that suite which by far had the best documentation: A text file with four lines of text, of which 2 referred to folders that didn’t exist in the download or that referred to a file not created as part of the operating process.  You win, French programmer’s documentation guy.

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I continued the manual move process from yesterday and as of 6 AM I had moved 135k of our 120k posts and updated 5700 of our 4389 topics.  I guess this fits with the fact that I’ve been working on this for about 30 hours of past day.

I.  Hate.  Joomla!.

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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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I lost my thumb drive the other day and today I relocated it.  I lose my thumb drive every six months or so usually because it falls off the carabiner I use to hold my keys which means I could switch to a conventional key chain but the knife has proven very useful.  So, what to do with my damaged thumb drive?

After mangling the USB end to fit into a computer, I formatted it and wrote over all sectors with 1s and 0s but I wanted more certainty.  The microwave proved much less interesting than I thought so I resorted to the simple elegance of a claw head hammer.  Blow 1 and 2 did little but blow 3 had a comfortable crunch as the two RAM chips fell off.  I put it inside a cardboard box which I doused in toluene, lit on fire.  I am comfortable that my data has been securely erased.

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I made a short video today of a test method and wanted to cut together two takes as each had a step the other didn’t.  The OS on the office computers isn’t recent enough to allow me to use Windows Live! Movie Maker so I opted for just Windows Movie Maker through Add/Remove Windows Features.  Partway through the install, I was informed that the application was blocked by group policy which I thought was strange as IIS, Windows web hosting platform, is in no way restricted.  I could create a website hosted from my desktop that was just a directory browser of our internal documents that could be visible to the public in under an hour but I can’t use Windows Movie Maker.  Super.

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By my count, today I build my 16th computer but were I to include rebuilds and replacements that number would triple but take out about a half dozen where I got to some point, realized I was in over my head and scrapped the whole thing.  The PC was nothing special and will be a Minecraft/web server which will leverage my reasonably fast 25/15 connection to save me the monthly cost of a VPS.  I had scheduled four hours to get the box up and running and I was able to boot to OS install in about 20 minutes.  20 minutes.  Installing the first 10 base-T card I’d ever seen took me two whole days and that was with the assistance of both a technical support expert and my then boss.

Building a computer is now officially easy.

Software, on the other hand, is still largely fucked.  It took me about 8 hours to figure out why updating my PHP version broke MySQL.  The fix?  Reinstall the OS.

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I’ve gone through three four client logins at work and today I received a fifth but which didn’t have admin privileges on my local machine.  I called the help desk and had this conversation:

Tech Agent: What do you need admin access for?
Me: So I can control programs that were installed for all users.   I also need to make some registry changes.
Tech Agent: You seem to know what you’re talking about.  There are two ways to do this, first I could walk over and do the install.
Me: Or?
Tech Agent: I could just give you my username and password.  Just don’t tell anyone.
Me: Ok.

I can in no way see how me having a global admin login could be a problem and I consider this karma for getting a new login every darn time I return to work.

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There are two time sinks I encounter: Saw sharpening and ax sharpening.  Saw sharpening occurs in cases where a little prep work could save a lot of task time.  The name comes from someone having difficulty cutting wood with a dull saw.  Someone suggests they sharpen the saw to which they reply “I don’t have any time, I’ve got all this wood to saw”.  Ax sharpening comes from a story of a guy who wants to cut some wood but first sees his ax is dull.  So before he can cut he needs to sharpen his ax, but first has to replace his whetstone, but first he needs to fix a flat tire…

My boss was out to meetings most of today and at the end asked me what I did.

Me: Depends, either one thing or eight things.
Him: What was the one thing?
Me: Installed a UPS
Him: What were the eight things?
Me: I  added InstallCleanup to fix an Office install, so I could add Java, so I could add Firefox, so I could overcome network configuration, so I could load the configuration url, so I could set the “boot on power return” to “no”, so I could use the UPS.
Him: Sounds like an efficient wasteful day.

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Normally I replace my computer every 18 months but I’ve pretty much decided to skip this cycle.  I added RAM a month or so ago and just wanted a spot more desktop space so I bought a new video card and searched Craigslist for a monitor.  For rarer items I’ll search in nearby areas like Allentown and even New York City and this was one of those cases and my extended search was rewarded with a hit in New York.  I made contact with the seller and after a bit of haggling got the price to $600.  He gave me an address which was a lacrosse store (I didn’t know there were lacrosse stores) and saw that it was in Long Island 140 miles away.  Thinking over the selection process I realized I had picked a location near a location near a location near me, which apparently adds up to 140 miles.

I left at 12:30 PM on a Saturday and arrived at 5:30 PM, averaging slightly under 30 miles per hour.  When I got there all the cables were tied up with lacrosse laces.  I asked the seller why he was parting with it:

Him: It wasn’t good for games.
Me: What was powering it?
Him: A 13″ MacBook.

The ride home was only 3 hours.  Now I just need a video card that can power it…