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Domains are really easy to buy and thrilling to own.  Calling “suburbanadventure.com” my own or the surfeit of ones tied to Scouting makes me feel like I’ve done something regarding a project even though I haven’t and switching hosts has kicked me into reviewing the domains I own and seeing if I really need them.

  • superhappyfunkitten9000.com – Came up during a TF2 game whose context I can’t event remember, dropped.
  • Terryrobinson.org – Maybe one day I’ll die and start a foundation, kept.
  • Scoutstockimages.com – Most Scouting events are promoted with clip art or crappy pictures.  I thought it would be useful to have a place to store stock art.  I never got the momentum behind it that I wanted as fewer people than I thought refuse to release their pictures under any sort of copyleft license.  Dropped.
  • Teamfortresscountryclub.com – There was a brief period of time where I was thinking of starting a TF2 team where one’d have to be 25, have a kid, or a college diploma to join.  I still think there’s a market for such a thing, it’s simply unlikely that I’ll ever be the founder.
  • Hothotsluts.com - Purchased during this incident.  I thought to drop it but it’s just too good a conversation piece.  That address now redirects to an old copy of my webpage.

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Many badges in Scouting now require web access as either an explicit requirement (visit the American Society of Landscape Architects webpage for Landscape Architecture merit badge) or implicit requirement (Personal Management requires tracking certain stats about stocks and very few publications offer these) and this week the only web access in a kid accessible building had been cut off, literally, by a fallen tree.

I’ve thought camp should have another area for kids to get to computers so on Monday I put out some feelers and Sam Lodise responded that Arcadia University was sending some PCs for recycling.  I stopped by, grabbed them, and brought them to camp.  This triggered a conversation between myself and another staff member.

Him: Wow, how did you get those?
Me: I asked, nicely.  We’re a non-profit, a lot of people will give us more stuff than you most people think.
Him: I just wish we could get paperclips.
Me: Have you asked anyone for them?
Him: No, but don’t you think we need them.
Me: Well, we can either buy them or we can ask for them.
Him: It’s ok, we can get by without them.

Ages ago I did a staff training exercise on how to compose an apology.  Maybe “how to ask for something” needs to be added to that list.

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This will be my last post using my 15 keyboard.  Once I was unemployed, I started to clean the unk out of random thins in my office and finally took a critical eye to my keyboard.  I’ve popped the keys off before and cleaned the interstitial areas and ave the keys a ood cleaning in the dishwasher in a mesh ba but that wasn’t enouh to unseat five years of accumulated flotsam.  After unscrewin the back, I ot the keypad separated and removed the rayscale LCD screen.  All three went into the dishwasher on entle and came out quite clean an hour later.  After re-assembly I was saddened to find that the  key did not work.  I tried to work around this and see if it was just residual water but oolin thins or oing to oole’s mail and even izmodo was too touh.  The 15 served valiantly, I wish it well in the keyboard afterlife.

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I have a new rule when it comes to my mother and tech support: she must make a good-faith effort to fix the problem.  She called me with speaker issues and I asked “did you try to fix it?” she replied “yes, I traced all the cables from the speakers and they’re connected”.  I went to her house, looked at the back of the speaker and saw the power cord was unplugged.  I politely informed my mother and she immediately stormed about the house loudly proclaiming her own foolishness.  Most would consider this bad but I saw progress: A few short months ago she wouldn’t have considered a device not having power a reason for it to not operate.

Parents, they grow up so fast.

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One of my duties is to patch our servers when we find issues.  It’s not terribly difficult but involves some things people are uncomfortable with like Remote Desktop, Drive Mapping, and the Command Line, so I gladly do it as a two-hour “Get Out of Legitimate Work Free” card.   I wanted to patch one of our systems as a test and requested remote access as the access restrictions had changed and was surprised by the response:

Him: What would you like to do?
Me: Apply a patch to the test machine.
Him: Please provide documentation that the patch will function.
Me: I can’t, that’s why I want to try it on the test machine.
Him: I’m sorry, I cannot allow access without proof of efficacy.  You can try applying the patch locally.
Me: So, you recommend I take the software to which we only have one license, took a specialist 3 weeks to setup, and normally requires 3 PCs in a cluster to run, and run it on my local machine?
Him: *no response*
Me: *hang up*

I’m going to take a stab in the dark and assume this person isn’t familiar with the setup.  Work around: Create a batch file that when run produces a wall of text followed by the line “Patch Applied” and send him a screen shot of that.  If that works, my last few weeks of work just got a lot easier.

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Boss: Terry, did you disconnect that license server?
Me:  Yea.  It’s been down for an hour.
Boss: I can still connect to it.
Me: How?
Boss: Well, I can ping it.  What do you think’s causing it?
Me: Honestly?  Internet gnomes.
Boss: Gnomes?
Me: Well, maybe faeries, but rarely do web faeries work on the business levels.
Boss: So, gnomes?
Me: Yes, gnomes are well known for finding packets destine for disconnected computers and ferrying those packets to the appropriate computers.  That’s why my iPhone works in some train tunnels.
Boss: So… what do we do?
Me: Act quickly to get the server back online, otherwise, the gnomes will get tired and turn against us.  Remember that day we had 10kbps upload to the offsite server?
Boss: Yes.
Me: We angered them without offering tribute.  They extracted their pound of flesh.
Boss: Hm…

I love knowing I’m going to be fired.

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The SSD I got simply wasn’t cutting the mustard on my desktop so I decided to move the drive to my laptop.  I thought I was going to have do some hardware-fu but was relieved when I found that my laptop had an empty hard drive bay in it, the laptop’s that big.  My attempt at a straight move didn’t quite work out as every f#ing piece of partition management software on the face of the planet won’t allow you to migrate to smaller disk.  So what did I do?

1) Create new partition of the same size as OS partition (which in my case was done using the SATA cables to connect to a disk 3 feet away that was a 3.5″ drive).
2) Migrate to new partition
3) Defrag new partition
4) Shrink partition
5)Backup partition
6)Track down 32-bit network drivers for everything
7)Restore to original target partition

Just as easy as it says on the Windows Home Server box.  On the plus side, the Microsoft Community moderator gave my solution a gold star!  24 more and I get the “Expert” tag and a green border on the MS forums.

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I was migrating a program from one PC to another and learned I needed to turn on ftp on one of the computers.  I didn’t know how we did that at my workplace so I asked my boss who to ask:

Boss: You should contact the head of server support.  But you can’t just call him.  You have to call the helpdesk have them tell you that they don’t know how to do it and then contact him.
Me: Can I just call him and say that the helpdesk wasn’t, well, helpful?
Boss: No, he’ll ask for the ticket number.
Me: Ah, so I need to show him the bruises on my head before he’ll believe me that I’ve been banging my head against the wall?
Boss:  That’s probably the best explanation of our tech support system I’ve ever heard.

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I was speaking with the OSR Program Director about some preparations for the upcoming program year.  I was following along until he said the following “oh, and I added a folder to the Network Drive that has all the stuff I use in it, everything was scattered all over the place”.  My heart jumped to a level of activity such that I lost my sense of hearing.  The network drive at camp as it currently stands represents three years of collaborative work among at least five people.  When I and two others arrived in the office, each person had a little fief on the drive and all the documents they used went in there.  So, it was perfectly possible to have three or four copies of a single file in multiple places being revised individually.  Additionally, works in progress were stored locally so nothing existed for public consumption until it was done.  The pinnacle of this idiocy was the following document tree contained on a specific computer:

User Name –> Desktop –> User Name –> Documents –> User Name and Year –> Documents (containing a shortcut to the desktop) –> Camp Stuff

This was barely outdone by another person who simply saved everything in a folder as sequentially named “document1.doc” “document2.doc”, etc.

Warring factions fighting over revisions, duplicitously recreated text generated long-hand from PDF output.  How do I present to him the fact that this choice leads to damnation and ruin?

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My mother purchased a new computer and having setup a pile of new computers I laid down some ground rules to do the setup:

  1. She’d need to put all her documents in one folder.
  2. She’d need to state ahead of time if there were any odd applications to move.
  3. She’d need to provide dinner as it’d take an hour to remove crapware and install Office.

I unboxed the new PC after moving her My Documents folder to a thumb drive, and my mother popped a pizza in the oven.  I connected the new computer and booted, went through the initial setup and arrived at the desktop… which was pristine.  I occupied myself by removing the Lenovo backup agent and installed Office but was otherwise done in 10 minutes or so.  With the expectation that I’d be there for another hour I needed to do something that generated some computery noises so in installed Snood and reminded myself of how uncoordinated I’ve become.  Between that and Spider Solitaire I killed enough time to justify the Red Baron pepperoni followed by victory cocktail weenies wrapped in croissant roles.  My mother’s very happy with the speed and moreso with the fact that power button is on top.

If these are the benefits of IBM’s PC division being in Chinese hands, I really hope Dell and Westinghouse go overseas soon.