Friday, November 22, 2002

There's a headline on CNN's web site right now that reads "Miss World riots kill 100". Of course, when I first read the link, my malfunctioning brain inserted a comma into the headline. I have to admit, "Miss World riots, kills 100" is pretty funny.

Posted by Keeper @ 01:18 PM CST [Link]

Thursday, November 21, 2002

Oh. Never mind. I have been crushed. My coworker just scored 1,923,330. I am pond scum.

Posted by Keeper @ 02:30 PM CST [Link]

OOOOH! High score of 631,775 on Spaced Penguin! Oh YEAH, baby, YEAH! In the HIZ-OUSE!

Posted by Keeper @ 10:54 AM CST [Link]

Tuesday, November 19, 2002

Holy crap! I just rode a motorcycle for the first time, and it was like THE COOLEST THING EVER. I know how to drive a stick shift, so the clutch-gear interaction was okay, but it was absolutely freaky with all the controls being in different places. For those of you who've never ridden a motorcycle before, it's weird: throttle is a twist of the right hand, clutch is the grab-bar on the left hand, gearshift is on the left foot (tap up for upshift, tap down for downshift), front brake is the grab-bar on the right hand, and rear (main) brake is on the right foot.

It took a good fifteen minutes, five stalls, and one drop-the-bike-on-my-foot, but I got it going! After several more minutes of cruising very slowly up and down the street, I mustered enough courage to take the beast up to third gear and twenty miles an hour, which felt like about a hundred and ninety. w00t!

All this bike-riding joy comes courtesy of Peacefrog, my buddy from Austin. I've given him an author account on the blog and permission to scribe whatever takes his fancy, so you might see the occasional missive by his hand grace the front page.

Vroom!! Vroom!!!

Posted by Keeper @ 09:58 PM CST [Link]

I'm sorry, I have to share this.

We are rounding the final stretch in our Win2k migration, and I am scouring the network for the stragglers and herding them into our shiny new world of Win2k conformity. My entire day came to a snickering, red-faced halt when I found out that we have a user who works here named Dick Thrasher.

I then nearly fell unconscious with mirth when I found out that we have another user here named Mai Thang.

I wonder if they know each other?

Posted by Keeper @ 02:49 PM CST [Link]

Sunday, November 17, 2002

A weekend or two ago, Mistress and I (and Steve & Massurah & BJ) moved Mistress's computer and computer desk into the apartment, which makes my computer room look a little less like a big empty room with a desk in one corner and more like an actual real-person room with real-person stuff. So, now she doesn't have to constantly use my computer when she's over at the apartment and I can surf the web in peace!

And...as cheesy as this sounds, I find the idea that our computers are on the same LAN and can talk to each other...well, romantic and happy.

Posted by Keeper @ 10:48 PM CST [Link]

Saturday, November 16, 2002

I got up from my desk to use the potty, and when I came back, Massurah had hung my mouse from the overhead filing cabinet, with a note attached to it that read "You're next."

Tensions run high when you're working on the weekends. As soon as he gets back, I'm going to run a batch file that repeatedly kills and respawns explorer.exe on his computer.

Posted by Keeper @ 11:58 AM CST [Link]

I went and saw the new Harry Potter movie last night. This experience has brought to light again just how much I hate all other people who are not me, which I suppose makes me a bad person. Before the movie started, there was a preview for some movie about a pair of jackasses and a CGI kangaroo. Throughout the preview, the kangaroo was wearing a jacket. Without fail, whenever the kangaroo was on the screen, jumping around in its almost-corpselike CGI glory, at least half of the sold-out theater would shriek with laughter. The corpulent matriarch of the family sitting behind Mistress and me continually told her husband, "Look! The kangaroo is wearing a jacket!" These people actually found the preview funny. I wonder if I scooped their eyes out with spoons and poured salt in the sockets--which would be a good literal translation of what the preview was doing to me--whether they would think that was funny? I certainly would.

This leads me to a word of advice: don't ever go see a Harry Potter movie in the theater, especially on opening night. You will be surrounded by logorrheic freaks and rejects, all wearing pointy wizard hats--and that's just the adults. Even worse about this particular showing was that it was apparently the showing that all the people who saw the midnight showing the night before decided to come back to. Then they all talked about the movie, during the movie. Bastards.

By being one of the eight people in the world who did not read the book, I seemed to have put myself at an extreme disadvantage of not having incredible amounts of Potterlore at my immediate conversational disposal. If I had, I would have been able to join in the rousing discussion the family behind me was having--as well as the family in front of me, the family to the left of me, and the family to the right of me. Certainly, it was refreshing and useful to be told in full-blown quadrophonic echoing sound every time the movie differed in even the slightest detail from the book. I needed to know. Definitely.

(On the other hand, perhaps this bitch-fest is unfair, because I turn into a raving--and usually bitterly disappointed--fanboy whenever a new Star Trek movie comes out. On the other other hand, this is my blog, so fuck it. Let the disaffection continue.)

I'm listening to a 25-minute long Michael Jackson MegaMix. It's basically every hit he's ever had, all tempo-unified and jumbled together with some delay and echo transition effects. It makes me realize how cool Michael used to be, circa 1983. In 1983, I was four years old. This makes Michael Jackson...even older. And much scarier. I like to think that somewhere, there's an alternate universe in which a non-modified-but-still-talented Michael Jackson grows into a happily wrinkled old man with a big nose and ebony skin.

Babble babble babble. I've just been told by our Altiris Deployment Server that we've exceeded our client license count. This saddens me greatly.

Posted by Keeper @ 09:20 AM CST [Link]

Monday, November 11, 2002

I might actually have time to make it back to the forums this week...

We commando-style upgraded people over the weekend. It was beautiful. It was everything that I'd imagined it could be. There was a huge amount of blowback this morning from the user community, and we were tell everyone who complained that the commando-style upgrade was authorized at the VP level.

Ahhhhhhhhhhh. This is why I love IT.

Posted by Keeper @ 12:23 PM CST [Link]

Thursday, November 7, 2002

Still alive.

Worked a lot. Windows 2000 owns my soul. I am the master spreadsheet producer. I call users and arrange Win2k upgrade schedules with a heightened sense of whimsy, yet with the gravity of a neutron star. ALL WILL TREMBLE BEFORE MY WINDOWS 2000 ROLLOUT TEAM.

Today I was told that we're going to upgrade about one hundred users this weekend, and we're going to upgrade them commando-style. This means that they've been told that they're going to be upgraded on Saturday whether they're ready or not. We get to go in, upgrade their computers, and give them whatever software was on their last IT Focal-submitted software request list. We get to do this to the people on my list, no excuses, no questions asked, ready-or-not-you're-being-upgraded.

It almost makes the past week worth it.

I miss all of you guys on the forums. One day I'll have free time again. We're in uber-crunch mode for our Windows 2000 rollout, though--I haven't even started up IE at work since like last Monday except to log onto the support database.

We're almost there. And we've been given permission to drag the users, kicking and screaming, into our brave new world.

JOIN US. JOIN US. RAAAAARGH.

Help me. I am so tired.

Posted by Keeper @ 07:33 PM CST [Link]

Monday, November 4, 2002

I'm not dead. At least, not yet.

Work has reached a new level of busy that make the previous levels of "busy" seem more like "leisurely scratching my butt while watching the Discovery Channel at 0145 on a Saturday morning."

Yeah. It's busy. Consequently, I haven't been by the forums in several days. Don't worry--I still love you all. Everyone should be good and eat their vegetables while I'm away. I'll be back soon, AND HELL'S COMING WITH ME!!

Oh, wait. Wrong movie. What I mean to say is that I'll be back soon and I miss you guys.

Posted by Keeper @ 03:12 PM CST [Link]