Notes

2014-05-19

My company doesn’t always get it. They have these training videos that are mandatory that are just some kind of propaganda. I’m not sure what we are supposed to take away from this training. I suppose they want us to know different ways to put the customer first. I’ll keep watching.

I don’t even remember the walk in this morning. I do remember looking out the bus window and noticing the dawn looked pretty cool. By the time I got to work, however, it was just sort of blah.

We had another situation where a restore was called for at work. It turns out a different piece of hardware failed with pretty much the same result. I only want to know why my folder is so far down on the list to be restored.

Lunch conversation

We went to the Mexican place. We spoke about something. For some reason, I cannot remember much of anything. I didn’t really contribute much either. I was off my conversational game today.

• Work
• Sports
• A party everyone went to over the weekend.

Notes

2014-05-15

Stopped at Chick-fil-a this morning on the way in. I got Nat’s minis by accident. I was grabbing the box of hashbrowns and missed. Funny how bad I feel about it.

The Blogger app on my Android phone will not push some photos. It just sits there saying it is uploading when all it is doing is hammering my battery. Idiots. Billions to patent breathing, but not enough to fix the bugs in their existing software. thanks Google.

M1 Abrams tank 62 metric tons.

Space Shuttle 74 Metric tons

The facts above put me aback. The shuttle is many times larger than an M1. I can imagine every care is taken to lighten up the shuttle. Then I think about how much more horsepower the shuttle has over the tank.

Of course, once you add fuel, coolant and things like toothbrushes, the shuttle probably adds up to a number double that.

Podcastle has outdone themselves with this one. I love spoken fiction.

Bronze paperweight

Sunday afternoon

The Chuck Norris Slingshot (a.k.a. Shooting Yourself In The Foot)

Vlog clips from this past week

Putting together table

Passing by

Notes

Death by a thousand cuts

We had a small name change in one bit of one function cause a headache in a bunch of tests. it broke a bunch of crazy stuff in a bunch of crazy places. It turns out the tests need to be updated. Broke stuff for a day. Planned change that rippled. These things happen in development. It was such a small change. It was such a nasty ripple. It really is one of those butterfly wing conundrums.

I never used to rely on a battery for a laptop. I have to at my new ... Well, current job. It isn’t really new any longer.

So glad I got the kmag (KDE screen magnification program) working. It makes this whole laptop on wifi thing work Otherwise, I couldn’t  really use my laptop screen for much.

We have awesome printers at work. I Cannot use them for scanning. They will scan to email. Pretty cool when it works. I cannot make it work fast enough for the goddamn printer not to reset back to the main screen. I really hope I do not have to deal with this printer for very long. I will end up smashing the fucker the next time it cuts me off after fucking with it for fifteen minutes.

Phonetic alphabet from memory

Alpha

Bravo

Charlie

Delta

Foxtrot

Golf

Hotel

India

Juliet

Kilo

Lima

Mike (took me a minute)

Nora --> November

Ocean --> Oscar

Papa

Quebec

Romeo

Siera

Tango

Uniform

Victor

Whisky

X-ray

Yankee

Zulu

Mislanious

Lunch Conversation

I almost didn’t go to lunch today. It was a tossup. Ken was “Adamed”. Ken did not get his meal with everyone else. He had wait for what I would consider too long a time for his meal. I reminisced about the days Adam’s mom would track down the kitchen staff who screwed up and not let the manager get away without compensating in some way. She was or is the manager in a retail store and simply will not put up with such nonsense.

• Trees
• How to tell when trees are stressed (higher a tree guy to tell you)
• Sometimes bushes are worth more than the trees next to them.
• Trees can’t use the dirt under concrete very well. (I suspected this)
• Trees use mostly the soil within the first 30 cm of ground or so.
• Deep roots are really for water.
• Pressure fertilize watering trees (with the probe that squirts the mixture under the ground) may simply aerate the soil
• Oxygen rich soil may promote microbial growth that the tree depends on to get nutrients out of the soil.
• Beards! Heck ya!!
• Kids
• How different they they are from one another even only a year apart.
• Private schools and curriculum.
• Molecular Physics compared to chemistry
• Controlling the magnetic spin of molecules to force electron tunneling between molecules.
  I believe this was to ram electrons down the throat of tiny structures like Buckyballs.
• 3D printing and Molecular Physics
• Citizenship (U. S.)
• Half the folks at the table were from Britain. At least one is seeking U. S. citizenship.
• Have no assets and you get a free ticket.
• Similar crap happening in Britain.
• International affairs
• Russia, WTF!
• Why is Russia doing the things it’s doing.
• It can
• Snowden (the prick)
• Russia killing civilians and blaming the CIA.
• The oil pipeline going through Ukraine is now running from Eastern Europe in to Ukraine.
• Libya and issues there - We saw something happening on the TV in the restaurant, but couldn’t make it out.
• Work (not too much)
• How our infrastructure uses our old equipment.
• How some of our old equipment is not nearly as reliable as our new stuff.
• Planning around IT issues
• How much we depend on our network for everyday work.

Haven't taken a selfie in a good 15 minutes

Look how blue that sky is.

Notes

Nat gave me a ride in this morning. It was a great day to have a ride. The weather was pretty nasty. Lost of rain and thunderstorms. They don’t put up 100% chance of rain very often, but today had about 8 hours at 100%.

Well, the machine at work is running much better after the restage. It is soft of a restage in place. They have a bootable image that allows you to reinstall the entire system to a known good state without destroying your user data. Nice. It tries to catch you up on what is installed, but fails. I’ve spent the last two days installing and configuring the machine. There is one proprietary software package that refuses to install. I’m using a server somewhere for it instead.

Registered on Dilbert.com to lodge a comment.

Remember that missing plane? It sounds like the data that said it turned left might be wrong. That or the path that some say it took after the left may be wrong. Great. This means it could be anywhere in an area that covers 1/7th of the globe mostly covered in deep ocean.

Latest in conference tables

Glass hall

Notes

2014-05-12

“Hate coal, not the miners.” -NPR Pinko tree hugging ... They gave advice on how to avoid investing in coal and coal related companies.

I had to rebuild my work Linux computer over the weekend. It went pretty well. I’ll let yo9u know after a couple days if it fixed my hang issue. It didn’t take long to get back to a basic functioning system. Well, most of the morning, but that was a software update.

If I had my palm read, the palm reader would shake her head and give me my money back.

When I was a lad, I didn’t hear the name of the president every day. Now I cannot listen to news or indeed any online content without hearing the name of our leader.

This life

This life is waisted on me.
I will never accomplish anything that is better than was already there.
I am not good enough at what is required of me to stand in one place.
The world will not know.

May I  retire?

Notes

2014-05-09

Elle’s school is out for summer today. They have some little performance for the kids. Note sure why. I remember hanging out and playing paper football the last day of class. I did get in trouble the last day of my senior year for playing cards in class. We thought the teacher was kidding when she said to stop. It was just that kind of day. I didn’t notice a single book on fictional spaceships. My favorite book of all time was a fictional history of spacecraft, illustrated. I used to sit there for hours after reading the bio of each shop and daydream about the drawings.

They mowed along Westheimer. I’m so stoked.

Bitg the bullet and put KDE on my work machine just to get kmag. Huge overhead for a simple program. Worth it. Pride had been holding me back. Should have done this a while ago. I decided to do this during a training course a couple weeks ago. The other tools are far less reliable.

I did something today that I hadn't planned on doing. I called support at work. This is a thing  i try to avoid. it isn’t that the help desk is bad. We really do have some smart folks on the job. Still, our company pays a fortune to have this availability. There is an entire division of the company for this sort of thing. I want to know how well it works if I’m honest. Plus, they do it all the time so hopefully, they will know how to do it properly.

Gata go watch Blowout.

Just wen the hell are they going to vacuum up all that blood?

///

Free, runs, potting on curb at 16:00

Get this girl to game night

Elle setting up for a practice game

Lunch Conversation

Well, some sails guy showed up and dominated the entire hour focusing completely on work stuff. Anyone tried to bring up anything non work and this guy would sledgehammer us back to his impromptu planning meeting. Ugh! I need to figure out who this guy is and avoid him in future lunches.

• What features are due in which products and when? Why are you laughing?
• Why didn’t we design in this other functionality? You wanted too, but you were told to do it differently?
• You have to think about how the competition is going to make us look to the customer.
• I know we can’t promise X, but our competition does. I know it is physically impossible. That isn’t how marketing works.
• We lost a bunch of sales people when specific decisions were made.

There was a bunch more, but I blocked most of it out. If this guy becomes a regular, I’ll save a lot of money.

Notes

2014-05-08

Having issues on my work Linux machine. We had an update and now it just hangs after a while. Really annoying. This smells like a video driver issue. I’ve found a driver to update to, but the existing driver is giving me headaches to disable.

NFL draft day. That is a sports thing right? ;^)

Catch 22. It was almost Catch 18 except another novel with 18 in the title came out just before this one.

Sweating like a pig.

Work machine has frozen up today. Having issues updating the video drivers. Ask anyone who has played with video drivers in Linux about it and stand back.

Formal ware for programmers

Notes

2014-05-07

I usually prefer a medium roast coffee. Adam informed me that in many cases less fresh beans are used in dark roasts. There is no way I have that discerning of a taist. It must just be a coincidence.

In dominance, a bottom is sometimes referred to as a coaster. I will never be able to keep a straight face when my mother tells me to use a coaster from this point on. Thanks Adam Carolla.

I think recruiting weather people for Climate Change proselytizing is a huge mistake. It is worse than having lawyers tell you how to throw a football. The weather on my phone is not even correct for the weather outside my window. The weather people are wrong more than right. Except for telling people to prepare for hurricanes and the like, they should keep their heads down and be thankful they have a job.where facts are not an issue

I dream of the day I can be a user again. Will this day ever come, or have I gone too far?

Save our Girls.

Sunrise over a westheimer

Notes

Had the hardest time getting my shit together to pay bills this month. I finished up early this morning and mailed out the mortgage payment on the way to work.

When did the size (zoom) dropdown show up in Google Docs? Using it. Works well so far. Just hitting the ctrl-plus caused issues with layout and the cursor not entering text where it appeared on the screen. That was a drag.

I cannot be the only U. S citizen losing sleep over this stuff.

Ran an update on my work Linux computer. This software they overlay over Red Hat is called OpenClient. It is intense to use, upgrade and keep running. The upgrade went pretty well. I had to flip my monitors. I had to rebot because of no mouse on first pass. Had to learn the new email and chat changes. All of that is nothing. I have to give this one a good job so far. I’m still waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Earphones died at work today. They lasted a long time. They drove me nuts because they were eared. In other words, each bud was designed for a specific ear. If you put them on backwards, they sounded like crap. They didn’t sound all that magnificent when on correctly. Fortunately,m I have five or six spare pare at home. I’m now sporting the bright pink set. Waiting for the first comment.

Walking through the grass on the way to work is taking a higher toll than normal on my genes. Every day I end up covered in schmoots from the tall grass. it isn’t just sticky and ugly, it smells a bit moldy.It worries me to leave my genes unwashed in the hapmer for long. I normally wear a pair of genes for two days before cycling them. No go with the tall grass. Made the call. Waiting for a bit before I call again. If they don’t watch it, I might have to call it again.

Lunch Conversation

• Work
• How our old CEO dealt with people he didn’t like/trust
• Wallets
• Adam has a funky metal folding wallet
• David has a metal RFID wallet
• I have a wallet with a Space Pen in it.
• Shawn has the classic leather wallet.
• Map Apps
• iPhone - Get Google Maps
• Waze.com
• Whats-app 16 BILLION FREAKIN DOLLARS!!!!!
• Smart phones suck
• Other than GPS, what does a smartphone really buy you?
• Can’t live without mine.
• Game consoles
• Entertainment centers
• Watching TV on tablets
• Computers superior game machines
• Facebook
• How FB should allow us to rank stuff we don’t want to view.
• Connecting old people with young people.
• Why FB bought Whatsapp.
• Adam’s stories
• Undisclosed
• Undisclosed
• Undisclosed
• Undisclosed
• ... “Shit Adam. Are you kidding me?”

Word of the day

I'm going to start using the term "Environmental Fundamentalist" more often.

My eyes are drawn to that blue

It's odd because I have a really hard time with blue. That shade is magnetic for some reason.

vlog

Monday morning

Dollar coins

Almost there

16:00 on a Friday

So, it’s 16:00 on a Friday and I notice the network will not authenticate. This means I cannot run most programs on the local network because everything requires authentication. I cannot use local users because nothing is setup for that.I note the issue with the local IT professionals. (not me any more) and sit there trying to think of how else I could get my job done.

It is 16:15 by this time. 5 other people ask me about the servers. I repeat the same “It is on it” message.

Ken comes in my office as he has to leave a bit early anyway and says jesse will make the build. after I get my part done after the network comes up.

Greg comes in and repeats what ken says and gives me his phone number. I tell my office partners “Jessee must be on his way.”

Sure enough, a couple minutes later poor Jesse walks in my office and all three of us crack up. We had to fill him in on the joke.

This is normal. It cracks my office partners up how many people stop by my office asking about or giving me information about builds. Half the time it is just “When is ... going to be ready.” Buyt there are quite a few days I get the 8 boss thing from Office Space.

Will pick up the pieces from home over the VPN.

Dying UPSs

Why I Don't smile in pictures.

Why I Don't smile in pictures.

Friday Morning

Walked in today. Got covered in grass pollen and sap. Had to brush off my pants at work. I’m sure I left a bunch of grass bits on the floor of the bathroom.

Got to the bus and figured out that my pass has expired. They sent me something in the mail last month. I tis that time again I suppose. I have to take a day off and deal with Metro. At least I had several years this time. They used to make me do it every year.

I did call the maintenance people for the highway department and ask that Westheimer get mowed. Left a message a little over a week ago, but spoke to a human this time. I’ll have to remember to call just after 7:00 am in the future.

This is like one of those machines out of the Lorax cartoon.

Notes

2014-04-29

They are starting work on the house across the street. I’m thinking of posting a daily snap of the construction on my instagram or twitter or something.

Blueberry is not a flavor that works in coffee.

There is a way to tell Linux to wait to mount a network share until after the network comes up. Think about that statement for a moment.

2014-05-01

Some of our meetings are called beatings.

Your tax dollars at work.

If I were an alien coming down and I wanted one world government, to deal with in order to bring Earth in to the galactic fold, I would choose Canada. Everyone thinks they are peaceful, but they can be assholes just like anyone else. I bet many people would welcome their new canadian overlords. By the time they figured out it was really aliens behind it, it would far too late.

If putting the government in charge of everything is such a good idea, put the government in charge of unions. Of course the unions would not be able to donate to politics after this.

Thursday morning