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After yesterday’s awesome discovery regarding FTP setups I tried to find other ways of setting this up. One option was to remote into the computer and email a file but with a caveat as I explained to the person requesting the solution:

Me: I think I have a solution, email yourself.
Him: How?
Me: Get subscription to GoToMyPC.com and remote into the computer and send an email to another account.
Him: Great, how do I set it up?
Me: First you need to go home and setup the account.
Him: Why?
Me: It’s blocked from work.
Him: But I can remote home, can I use that?
Me: Probably, so, remote to your computer at home via VPN then setup the account on your laptop and use that to remote into your computer here.
Him: Is this the simplest way to do this?
Me: Using your office computer to remote into your home computer to setup a remote account to get a download to put on your laptop that then won’t be accessible from work but only from home or remoting to home. Yes.

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I’m working on a project at work requiring pulling up data from a remote location to something that our guys can then parse. My first idea was to have it upload to a local FTP site through FlingFTP or another tool but was stymied by firm not allowing inbound FTP connections so I contacted tech support:

Me: I was wondering if I could get a port opened so I could upload to an FTP site locally.
Tech Guy: What do you need?
Me: I’m looking to automatically move some data from a remove device to a local computer.
Tech Guy: FTP is terribly insecure, is there another way to do it?
Me: I suppose we could use SFTP.
Tech Guy: We don’t allow SFTP, only FTP and I don’t think we’re going to make an exception in this case. Please try another method.

So, I’m not allowed to use FTP because it isn’t secure enough but which is still apparently doable but our firm bars SFTP, the vastly more secure option, across the board. Awesome.

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One of my work tasks is printing out large format objects on the 41″ printer.  Someone send me a 3′ x 4′ poster, and I printed it.  After printing the document I found several typographic errors and reprinted it again after checking with the requester.  After the 2nd copy, the requester came to me and had a revision, all the references to the competing company on the poster needed add “(R)” after the name.  So, I checked that all references had “(R)” after it and reprinted it.  I was then told I needed to print another one and received an attached email saying “Sir, you need to replace all instances of (R) with (R) to avoid legal consequences.”  That’s downright Kafka-esque and I double checked the annotated PDF which had circled the (R) with the note “replace with (R)”.  At this point we were sufficiently confused and talked to the legal person.

Me: What does this change mean?
Him: You need to replace your “registered” abbreviation with our “registered” abbreviation.
Me: What’s that mean?
Him: You used parens, R, parens, you need to use what we wrote.
Me: But you wrote, parens, R, parens.
Him: No, that means the circle thing with the R in it.  It’s a common abbreviation.

Apparently when we use (R) it means (R)  when he uses (R) it means ®. How foolish of me not to know.

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I brought in peanut butter cookies today.  A lot of them.  When a recipe starts with “24 oz of chunky peanut butter” followed by “3 sticks of unsalted butter”, it means business.  Anyway, I sent out a blanket email when I bring something in and slowly a trickle of people came through.   A bunch of these folk were from a specific work group and three had a cookie and graciously took an extra cookie for a specific person who was “too busy to come up”.  They should have planned their excuses for gluttony better.  There person for whom they supposedly took cookies is deathly allergic to peanuts.  They’re so selfless.

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So, after yesterday’s incident I got thinking “why doesn’t this RAM work?”  I checked on-line and the RAM appeared compatible so I contacted their tech support who said the RAM I used was generically non-compatible.  I said this to a coworker who was curious of my methods:

Him: These are high-end machines, how do you know it meets the system minimums?
Me: The systems were top of the line years ago, now they’re nothing.
Him: But how do you know the RAM’s fast enough?
Me: The number on my RAM is higher.
Him: Well then, it’s confirmed: The iron law of technology “higher numbers are better” says so, IBM’s tech support is full of shit.

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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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I’ve returned to the R&D Lab to run some testing to tide the lab over until I could train someone.   It was nice to be back in the lab working with things that actually existed and getting data but with it came some less interesting factors, like work order requesters who don’t understand physics:

Requester: When will the filter testing finish?
Me: It’ll take about 60 hours to do all the filters so probably two weeks.
Requester:  Is there a way to speed up the testing?  Could we increase the odorant gas flow?
Me:  No, we’d be leaving the parameters of the method.
Requester: Hmm… What if we just increase the flow rate?
Me: That’s the same thing.  That’s like increasing the speed of a car without increasing its velocity.
Requester: Could you make the gas… go faster?
Me: Yes, just put the quarter million dollar test rig under a heat lamp and pray that Graham’s Law of Diffusion doesn’t notice.
Requester: Can we do that?
Me: … No.

And he’s the one with the Master’s degree…

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I want to purchase a new laptop and have it narrowed down to a few options.  I’m looking for the impossible backpacking laptop that’ll run CS5, oh well.  Anyway, I wasn’t sure how 3 pounds vs.  3.3 pounds vs. 5 pounds felt so I went into the R&D lab, grabbed a bunch of weights, massed them and started lifting various configs to see if I could feel the weight difference.

In the middle of trying to see if I could hold 3 lbs vs. 5 lbs in my arm pit a coworker walked in:
Him: What are you doing?
Me: Testing a laptop.
Him: Ok.  Break down your laptops and put them away when you’re done.

We’re all mad here…

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The Medical division has had a somewhat cushy existence seemingly in the employ of turning down others’ ideas under the justification of “risk avoidance” .  That padded life has recently come to an end with they lacking the simple skills to operate in an office environment.  I printed something and walked to the printer to find it out of paper.  I checked the drawer marked “paper” and seeing none walked to the central paper storage closet 150 feet away, grabbed four reams, and returned.  Upon filling the paper trays the first of the 29 jobs in queue started with a print time of four hours ago.  The whirring stirred life from the department as I heard someone blurt out “oh good, the help desk people finally sent out someone to add paper.”  Not even our VPs have someone reload the paper for them.

Not knowing how to change toner I can understand.  Failing said task can result in an inadvertent black face performance but not loading your own paper?  I think I may start making my own artisan paper to stay a step of self-empowerment above them should they learn to harness their opposable thumbs for something besides giving people the thumbs down.

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So a mass email was sent out that the building is losing its water from 4 AM to 6 AM Monday.  My coworkers started chattering about why their time was wasted with the message not realizing how this could cripple a portion of their work staff: me!  That’s the quality time where I check email and then read Wired magazine on the can.  It’s when I make ice cubes and take a really long time to wash my hands because one soap dispenser has nice soap.   It’s when I setup the office report cover slip ‘n’ slide!  Now when am I going to get a headstart on not doing anything important?