Wednesday, August 31, 2005

Our customer, in their infinite wisdom, has made a security change to all of their boxes that has left several thousand of their people unable to access data on any of our file shares. We maintain an old NT4 resource domain to host our main file servers SPECIFICALLY FOR COMPATIBILITY WITH THESE FOOLS, and they pushed out a massive GPO to their people that, among other things, prevents members of their domain from interacting with members of down-level domains, regardless of the trust status between the two domains.

"Scrambling" does not begin to describe what we're doing right now. ARgh.

Posted by Keeper @ 03:30 PM CST [Link]

Tuesday, August 30, 2005

Woah. New Orleans is underwater. Can't help but wonder if the little theater we visited to see Star Wars III is still standing.

Weight loss continues. Pounds aren't coming off nearly as quickly now, but adipose tissue is visibly decreasing. Cinched the belt up another notch this morning and slipped into a pair of pants I've not been able to wear in more than a year. w00t for keeping old pants!

A gentleman with whom I work is going to run a series of HackMaster campaigns. I won't be able to get in to the first campaign, but I might be able to play some of the subsequent ones. In preparation, I rolled up a character this afternoon--I ended up with a half-elf cleric whose major talent is the ability to perform the Manu Weasel Dance. Booyeah.

Posted by Keeper @ 03:58 PM CST [Link]

Thursday, August 25, 2005

People have asked my feelings about Cindy Sheehan, whose name I will not bother to hyperlink because she has gotten enough attention. I will try to be brief.

I have very strong feelings about her and her media-fueled attention grab. Contrary what she spouts for the cameras, she doesn't actually want answers--she's hurt, and she wants to lay blame because she thinks it will help he deal with her hurt. She wants, in short, to yell at the president. She doesn't want to talk to him, ask him anything, or do anything besides point a finger and scream "murderer murderer murderer!" because she can't handle losing her son.

Well, fuck her. Fuck her and fuck her pain. I have my own pain, and so does my family. I've seen my mother react to the pain of losing my brother in combat--the same pain that Sheehan is reacting to--with far more grace and aplomb. The bitch has had her say, done her little picket dance, and she needs to sit down, shut up, and go the fuck home. Every moment she is on television dirties every person in uniform. Every misdirected, stupid, malformed word she slobbers sullies her son's memory. The only thing she should feel is ashamed, and before she leaves and goes home, she should publically apologize to the soldiers who served in her son's squad for shitting so squarely on their fallen brother.

I suppose I'd feel differently if she hadn't ALREADY had her talk with the prez last year. She got time, as have most families of KIA soldiers. My parents had their time to talk to the president, too. And, apparently, she left her meeting with Bush thinking that he was a nice guy. However, after going home and thinking about it, NOW she's pissed?

There are certain things that this country owes the families of dead soldiers--but personal accountability and one-on-one time with the commander-in-chief are not among those things. Though they are young, the men and women serving are adults, not children, and they all chose to swear the oath. When a president goes beyond what is required and chooses to spend time with fallen soldiers' families, it is a privilege, not a right. And it's a privilege she's already enjoyed.

Want to honor your son? Go do something constructive. Donate money to buy stuff for his fellow soldiers. Start a scholarship. Build memorials. Take the $250,000 insurance payout you got when your son was killed and give it to moveon.org or some other PAC dedicated to the president's downfall. BUT FOR FUCK'S SAKE, GET THE FUCK OFF OF MY RADAR AND STOP PRETENDING YOU ARE OWED SOMETHING MORE THAN YOU HAVE ALREADY GOTTEN.

Posted by Keeper @ 04:55 PM CST [Link]

Wednesday, August 24, 2005

I had to use UNIX today. It was weird. Specifically, I had to add a few lines to a text file to correct a configuration issue with one of our NAS boxes, so I actually had to use both the bash shell and vi. It wasn't nearly as scary as I'd heard, but I did have the Power of the Internet to help me, so I opened the vi command reference page and used it liberally. In the end, the options were added and the NAS box did not burst into flames, so I can only conclude that I did it right.

Starting to feel kind of important at work. My manager's listening to me, I have one major project under my belt and I'm working a second one, and I have a nice corner cube with a view of Ellington Field. Things are pretty good.

I had my permanent retainer removed today. For ten years now, ever since my braces were removed, I'd a surgical stainless steel bar running behind my lower front teeth, as a counterpart to the upper retiner I sleep in. Today, I had the orthodontist remove it and replace it with a removable one that I can similarly wear at night. It's weird. The back of my teeth feel FREAKISHLY SMOOTH. I'm running my tongue over them right now. (tongue noise)

Posted by Keeper @ 04:23 PM CST [Link]

Tuesday, August 23, 2005

Massurah and another guy from work invited me to a Hackmaster game. This is apparently a pen-and-paper role playing game designed specifically to kill players in interesting and creative ways. I admit to being keenly interested in going, and I even asked The Wife, who enjoys the occasional bit of RP'ing. Unfortunately, it was not meant to be. She spewed a slander on pen-and-paper games and proceeded to mock me for nearly a half-hour, quoting extensively from the Dead Aelwives' skit about roleplaying and pointing out my uber-nerditude.

Well, fine, then. I'll just pout!

Lost a hard drive over the weekend, too. Originally for my current build, I had a pair of Seagate Barracuda V 7200 RPM SATA drives. One died in July; after that failure, I backed everything up from the remaining 160GB drive onto the 300GB drive I bought to replace the dead one, and this proved to be a smart move when the remaining 160GB drive died on Friday night. I didn't lose anything at all. Hooray for forsight!

The really shitty thing, though, is that I put the 160GB drive back into service so that I could run Seagate's diagnostic utility on it, hoping to RMA the drive and get a refurbished model back, and now the fucking thing won't fail. Before, it was throwing SMART errors like mad and making the Clicking-Whirr of Ultimate Doom and vanishing from Explorer and making the computer hang, and now...nothing. It passes the drive torture test with ease. No errors. No nothing. ARGH.

Posted by Keeper @ 08:39 AM CST [Link]

Friday, August 19, 2005

Thanks to Sig & Sunbeam from the boards, I've become interested in watching Firefly--they showed us an episode while they were hanging out down here with us, and I found it to be a neat little show. After several hours of downloading, I finished pulling down a collection of DVD rips of the series, and I've now watched a couple of them and am enjoying it very much.

Upon the completion of the pilot last night, I tried moving the files off of my desktop and on to my media drive. After the first two copied, I bore witness to a powerful and diseartening sound--my computer began making the dreaded Click-Whirr of Imminent Hard Drive Death. I keep two drives in my computer and I'd just lost one of them in July in the exact same fashion. Damn.

So, after workout today, I have to go buy a new hard drive, and then spend tonight copying important stuff off of my failing drive and onto the media drive. Fortunately, the media drive is not the one that's failing--it died a couple of months ago and has been replaced. This also means that it has lots and lots of empty space on it, since I couldn't copy everything off of it before it completely gave up the ghost.

Argh. I didn't want to spend any money this week. Blarg blarg blarg.

Posted by Keeper @ 04:20 PM CST [Link]

Wednesday, August 17, 2005

Headlines seen this morning on CNN's web site:

SUICIDE BOMB KILLS 43 IN BAGDHAD BUS STATION

GAS PRICES AT FIFTH CONSECUTIVE RECORD HIGH

WINDOWS WORM WREAKS HAVOC

EMINEM CANCELS EUROPEAN TOUR

So, that covers the international, economic, tech, and entertainment world. I decided not to check local news, because I'd like to live with the illusion that there's at least one aspect of the world that isn't exploding.

Posted by Keeper @ 01:46 PM CST [Link]

Tuesday, August 16, 2005

Yeah.

Um, so, yeah.

I don't need to do that ever again.

Yeah.

Posted by Keeper @ 03:43 PM CST [Link]

Monday, August 15, 2005

Holy cow. Four gin and tonics and two shots of vodka into the evening, and I am flying. Currently, we are hosting Sig & Sunbeam, as well as the F&SN Critic and his wife, and we are about a quarter-way through "Wizard People, Dear REader" (thanks, Nick Burns!!). Good Lord, this thing is ten thousand times funnier when you're in the company of friends and also rather drunk. My fingers are tingling and it's hard to type. w00t.

As the F&SN Critic said, "Laughter is a social activity." Fuck, I am smashed. My head is moving all on its own. Dude. It's like my noggin is on a gimbal or something--it's all moving on its own. I took my socks off because the carpet feels all tingly on my feet. Dizzy. wooooooooooooooooooooo.

Posted by Keeper @ 08:34 PM CST [Link]

Friday, August 12, 2005

iTunes is awesome. Totally and amazingly awesome. The Wife was poking around yesterday and located the "Essential 90s" song collection, and it was as if years pealed away and we were both listening to 107.5 The Buzz or 102.9 The Planet or, God help me, 104.1 before it went all shitty. Those radio frequencies will mean something to Houstonians, but not to anyone else; briefly, 107.5 The Buzz played alternative music when alternative music was still alternative, 102.9 played top 40 stuff when I liked top 40 stuff, and 104.1 used to play techno, circa 1994, before they switched to whatever the hell house/rap shit they play now. 107.5 was absorbed by Clear Channel and plays the same stuff that all Clear Channel stations play, and 102.9 has long since gone Tejano.

We bought so many songs that echoed the sounds and feelings of my teen years back at me--If You Could Only See, Counting Blue Cars, Hey Jealousy, I Alone, and a bunch more--about fifty of them, in all. I am having a nineties-gasm.

Music has a powerful hold on all of us.

Posted by Keeper @ 08:04 PM CST [Link]

Thursday, August 11, 2005

Argh. Disabled comments on the blog entries because it's attracting spam that's profiting off my pagerank. Not that my pagerank is anything special, but still--a quick check of the comments showed a whole bunch of "GET A FREE PAINTBALL GUN" entries and several that were big blocks of porn links. Blarg. The one I put up today got nailed pretty hard with several just after lunch. As Strong Bad would say, "DELETED."

Also, while I'm thinking about it, Tuesday was my birthday, and it was a good birthday. There were some presents, but what I cared about far more than that was that I got to see my friends and be surrounded by people I love. This is more important than all the presents in the world.

Posted by Keeper @ 01:12 PM CST [Link]

No update for the past two days because I've been slammed work and not thinking about anything except sleep when I finally make it home. With the shuttle back down, we're out from underneath flight freeze rules, and there are lots of things that we can't do when under flight freeze that have been piling up; lots of housecleaning and minor configuration stuff. So, Tuesday and Wednesday (especially Wednesday) were rather full. What small amount of free time I did have was put into writing a Sudoku solver in Excel. Yeah, I know such things already exist out on the web, but I wanted to write my own. It turned into this massive hairy exercise, involving more code than I've ever written before, but it's finally done.

I shared my results with one of the other admins who lives in VBA most of the day doing automation tasks, and he laughed, then took about fifteen minutes and spat out a solver that wiped its ass with my solver. So it goes.

Altiris is down. I hate Altiris so much. As soon as I'm done with this entry, I'm going to have to reboot the Altiris Deployment Server. If there was a way I could reboot it such that the server could be made to feel actual pain, I would so be doing that every single time. Argh.

Posted by Keeper @ 08:55 AM CST [Link]

Monday, August 8, 2005

Splashtown trip was a resounding success! Met up with Massurah and Steve and The F&SN Critic and his wife and a couple of others and convoy'd up to Spring and spent six hours at the water park. Much fun and splashings was had by all, and nobody came away from the experience more than mildly sunburned! The highlight of the trip was getting three snot-nosed punk bitch eight-year olds tossed out of line for repeatedly cutting. Nothing brings on a power trip like yelling at little kids! BOOYAH!!

Weight loss continues on, and today I had my first actual, verifiable, observable sign of success--WE HAVE DECREASED ONE BELT-NOTCH! OH YEAH! I FREAKING RULE!

In honor of my success, I splurged and ate a Fig Newton. w00t!

Posted by Keeper @ 04:25 PM CST [Link]

Friday, August 5, 2005

Okay, so, buying pool shoes in August is retarded, because THERE ARE NONE. We went to Wal-Mart, Academy, Pay Less, and finally Oshman's--and only Oshman's had any at all, and they only had like ten pairs in the clearance section. Fortunately, they had my size, but The Wife had to buy the smallest pair of men's shoes because they had no ladies sizes--and even the smallest ones were still way the hell too big for her cute little feet.

Weight dropping rapidly as water weight comes off. Now down to 215. Wheeeeeee! I know the sudden loss will stabilize, very soon, but hell--if I could maintain it at this level for like a month, I'd be set!

Massurah just threw a hanful of large, foam LEGO blocks at me and reminded me to come over for BSG tonight. The two of us share a 3 person corner cube; I'm in the northeast point, the northwest point is empty, Massurah is in the southwest point, and the southeast point is open to the hallway. This is the most awesome working arrangement that I could ever have dreamed of--the only thing better would be if I worked with The Wife. As it is, I get to spend the whole day, every day, working with one of my best (and most gassy--whew!) buddies.

Now Massurah is babbling at me. What a tard. YOU'RE A TARD. YES. YOU. STOP READING MY SCREEN OVER MY SHOULDER, YOU TARD.

Posted by Keeper @ 02:28 PM CST [Link]

Thursday, August 4, 2005

Spent today testing. Had to grab a chunk of unallocated space on the NAS and carve out chunks that were 100MB, 1GB, 10GB, and 100GB in size, fill the chunks with random stuff, and then attempt to replicate them to our NAS's twin in St. Louis. I was able to do the 100MB and 1GB one now; the other two will have to be weekend work (and we're still under shuttle flight freeze rules, which prevent me from making any configuration changes until 24 hours after touchdown). Everything worked okay and I got to spend the majority of the day up to my elbows in PuTTY. Ha ha, that's a little computer joke there :)

Tonight, we shop. Must buy a couple of pairs of disposable sunglasses for Splashtown this Saturday, along with some aqua socks/pool shoes/whatever the hell those things are called, and also some groceries. But, before we shop, we work out. I will continue to be good by getting in my 35 minutes on the Precor elliptical walker thingy-doodle. Grunt grunt grunt.

I would enjoy exercise more, were it not so mind-numbingly boring. I've never felt anything even remotely resembling a "high" when working out--just pure, painful, teeth-grinding boredom. They ought to invent some way to integrate video games into working out, and do it in a way that isn't pathetically lame and doesn't resemble The Lawnmower Man in any way.

Posted by Keeper @ 03:34 PM CST [Link]

Wednesday, August 3, 2005

Had a weird dream last night, some time in the wee hours of the morning, which is when the most vivid and stragest dreams happen. I was a soldier, in Iraq, fighting with a nameless company of men. I remember being in a huge sand-colored tent, running on a treadmill in full combat loadout, when a klaxon sounded, which I knew meant that we were all to run to the transport vehicles and embark on a mission. I was new to the group, but I knew which squad was mine and I fell in with my group of guys, one of whom was SPC Jason McBride, who served with my brother. I had a large gun, something like an M249, and everyone else had smaller assault weapons that changed as I looked at them. One member of the squad complained that now that I was part of the group, he would no longer be able to have the big gun.

Upon boarding huge tracked transporters, I knew that I had no idea what I was doing, so I ran to my squad leader, who promised to watch my back and tell me where to go, and who helped me put on the body armor that everyone else was already wearing. Once I was sufficiently up-armored, I lay on the floor of the vehicle facing the open rear, and fired at machine gun emplacements as we drove past.

Once we'd reached wherever we were going, we disembarked and plunged directly into a milling crowd of thousands, all hooded or veiled, and we fired on anyone who came too close. There was a lot of screaming and I don't remember too much, except that I knew I had to stay by my buddies. I felt fear, too--real fear, a different kind of fear than I have ever before felt. It was the fear of not knowing what was going to happen, mixed with the fear of being shot and killed. I don't claim to know anything about what a soldier feels going into battle, but it was the most terrified I'd ever felt, in real life or otherwise.

The dream shifted and I was talking with someone who invited me over to dinner when I was done fighting, and I told them that I couldn't come to dinner because I had killed twenty people in the firefight, and that we all had to go to debriefing.

Creepy. Very creepy.

Posted by Keeper @ 02:54 PM CST [Link]

Tuesday, August 2, 2005

Down three pounds since last Monday, thanks to the combination of the "Stop Eating So Damn Much" diet and regular exercise. This is a good thing. I don't know if three pounds a week is a sustainable pace, but if it is, in ten weeks I'll be a lot happier with myself. Even if it isn't sustainable and tapers down, I'll take anything to counter the gradual upward trending of my belly. Since 1999, I've put on thirty-five pounds, going from roughly 185 to roughly 220. This averages out to five pounds a year; even if I can reverse the gain at that exact same rate, I'd be perfectly happy.

There's a danger in thinking in averages, though, because that weight didn't come on in a smooth curve; I recall there being a lot of fits and starts, with long periods of zero measurable gain and short periods of noticable gain--there was a time in 2001 where I fluctuated regularly between 200 and 205, up and down and up and down, apparently at random. Additionally, it's not all fat-related; I've done a lot of lifting in the past few years. By way of example, I can bench press 230, which is way up from the shaky 150 where I started, so that's chest and back and torso muscle mass added on that I didn't have before. In any case, I plan to keep as much a handle on my weight as possible. As long as I'm seeing actual results, I can remain motivated.

But I'll still be the first on board when they invent the pill where you can take it and then eat whatever the hell you want forever and ever.

Posted by Keeper @ 09:48 AM CST [Link]