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More bullshit from another asshole with a blog

Well we're movin' on up
24Sep06

Posted by wafwot

westin6a.jpg …to a deluxe office suite in the sky. The Jeffersons reference aside, the company I work for has relocated its corporate headquarters from Redmond to the Westin Building in downtown Seattle. The next step is to relocate the Oak Harbor employees to the Westin then close the Oak Harbor office. So, within the next month or two, Tina and I will be moving to join the latte-sipping, flannel-wearing, tree-hugging, luxury car-driving crush of humanity that is the Seattle metropolitan area.

The whole idea has my balloon knot tighter than Rick Santorum's sphincter in a leather bar during gay pride week. I moved to Whidbey Island in February of 1990, and have lived here ever since. I love the laid-back lifestyle and beauty of the surroundings. It may not have been the greatest place when it comes to finding jobs or commanding big paychecks, but I’ve never had trouble finding work in the fields I work in. That means I’ve never had to flip burgers or greet shoppers at Wal*Mart. I’ve carved out a decent and acceptable life for myself here on Whidbey Island for almost seventeen years. Soon, that era of my life will be over and a new chapter will begin. I’m sure I’ll talk about my time on Whidbey in the next couple months…

Since the cost of living is more expensive in the Land of Starbucks, the company gave me another pay raise; my second raise in 4 months. It’s not as much as I wanted, but I won’t be assuming any additional duties, yet. Tina has been scouring the realtor web sites and MLS listings trying to find a new home that we can afford. We’ve decided that it may be cheaper to take on a mortgage than to put money into some slumlord‘s pocket. Of course, all we can afford is manufactured homes in trailer parks. Think of me what you will, but trailer parks are full of toothless, meth-addicted hillbillies whose only income is scale pay from The Jerry Springer Show.

Anyway, keep reading over the next couple months for the continued saga of our move to the big city. Hopefully we’ll find a nice place we can afford so I don’t have to commute fives hours a day.

On a completely different topic, are you as sick and tired of Peyton Manning as I am? Jebus H. McChrist, man, they’re shoving him up our ass sideways. If you watch television at all, you’ve seen this farm boy whoring himself out for anyone who comes down the pike. In addition to the NFL touting him as the preferred face of white bread quarterbacks, you’ll also find Peyton Manning selling DirecTV satellite television, Mastercard caredit cards, Sprint Nextel wireless phone service, Gatorade sports drink, Reebok apparel, and NFLshop.com. Does Manning not have enough money being one of the highest-paid quarterbacks in the NFL? Does he really need the endorsement money? Fuck, man, give it a rest already.

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3 モニター
11Sep06

Posted by wafwot

mydesk_3crts.jpg My apologies if the title of this entry doesn’t show up in your browser. It’s Japanese (I think) for “3 monitors.” I chose a Japanese translation because it was infuriating Japanese technology that was causing me to pull my hair out… if I had hair to pull. The picture shown here is my desk at work, with three CRTs.

Last Friday, I took it upon myself to scrounge around the office for another PCI video card and monitor to expand my desk to three monitors. And the Lord spake, saying, “three shalt be the number of monitors thou shalt have, no more, no less, and the number of monitors shalt be three. Four monitors thou shalt not have, nor either two monitors, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out…”

Alright, enough of that. I had two flat panel LCD screens at my previous employer for a couple of years. And I’ve had two monitors on my desk for more than two years at my current employer. After nearly five years of using two monitors, I’ve discovered one thing: a desktop of 2048×768 between two monitors is simply more productive… and cool. Three monitors can only be more productive… and cooler. My momma didn’t raise no dummy.

With the roll-out of our new phone system and the addition of our new Call Manager, I realized I needed to keep an eye on my status in the phone system. However, the Call Manager window always ends up behind another window. So, a third monitor made sense to keep smaller windows open and visible.

Finding a spare PCI card and monitor was easy. The basement at our building is a gold mine of derelict computer cases ripe with late 90s peripherals just collecting dust. I found a 1997 Matrox Millennium II PCI card with 16 MB. Perfect. I slapped the card into my Debian machine, connected an unused 15″ monitor and powered up.

A quick check of “Xorg -scanpci” showed the new card’s bus ID at PCI:0:14:0. I added the new device, monitor, and screen stanzas to my xorg.conf file, modified the serverlayout, and restarted X. Three monitors changed modes, and when KDE was finished loading, I had a desktop that was 3072×768. But, the left monitor wasn’t painting. The X server saw three screens, and expanded the desktop (thanks to Xinerama), but the left monitor was full of crap.

I checked my config file, and all looked okay. I disabled the new screen in serverlayout, restarted X, and the left and center monitors worked great. I enabled the right screen and disabled the left screen, restarted X, and the center and right monitors worked great. But all three at one time just wouldn’t work.

I left work Friday scratching my head. I went into the office for a couple of hours on Saturday to try again. I swapped video cards, tried a different monitor, lowered the color depth, changed resolution, and slammed the keyboard a few times. Nothing worked. Japanese shit.

By Monday morning, I was pretty pissed that I couldn’t get this setup working. I hate when this kind of shit kicks my ass. I spent my “down” time between calls from the queue Googling for some help. I tried several other things, like changing drivers, numbering the screens, and cursing like a sailor, but during lunch, I found a forum on some site (which I have since forgot) where someone had the exact three video cards I was trying to get working. The post wasn’t of much help, but a portion of his xorg.conf file was. He had an Option “OldDmaInit” “true” line in his device stanza that I didn’t have. After adding that line to my two Matrox card stanzas, X fired up, and KDE showed me a glorious 3-monitor desktop of 3072×768… and all three screens were working great! Here’s a crappy picture from my cell phone of all three monitors. If you’re interested, here’s a link to my xorg.conf file.

On a related topic, my AMD64 Debian Linux server here at home seemed to have bought the farm. I was watching the Seahawks game when Tina came in and said the monitor was clicking on and off (what’s that clickin’ noise?). I checked it out, and couldn’t even reboot the machine — I had power, but no POST, no video. My first guess was a power supply. I picked up a new 500 watt power supply at work and put in in the server. Bingo. The server powered up and booted just fine. That’s a relief. Fifty bucks is better than a new motherboard and/or hard drives.

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Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
10Sep06

Posted by wafwot

pluto.jpg I read a couple of weeks ago that Pluto is no longer a full-fledged planet. Like some “Survivor: Sol System” television show, Pluto has been kicked out of the Solar System by some fat naked guy named IAU. What the fuck?

Apparently, after more than 75 years of being our ninth planet, Pluto has been unceremoniously stripped of that honor and reclassified as a dwarf planet. Brilliant. So, a dwarf planet is no longer considered a full-fledged planet. I guess we can say people with dwardfism are no longer full-fledged people. Sorry Jason Acuña. What the fuck, let’s just call Pluto a “little planet.” And black holes need to be called African holes. Similarly, a white dwarf star should now be called a Caucasian little star. Shit.

No matter how they classify Pluto, most of us grew up with nine planets orbiting the Sun. Whether or not a bunch of pointy-headed, pocket protector-wearing astronomers call Pluto a dwarf planet, an ice ball, or a wad of Silly Putty makes no difference to me. I’m going to have a hard time not calling Pluto a planet. I was told there were nine planets all through school. Fuck, even probes launched by NASA (Pioneer 10 and 11, Voyager 1 and 2) have plaques listing Pluto as the ninth planet. Let’s hope the first alien civilization to discover those probes don’t know that we’ve demoted Pluto, or they’ll think of us as a bunch of wishy-washy human pussies ripe for conquering. I just know we’re opening the door for Lrrr, ruler of the planet Omicron Persei VIII. Dammit.

Speaking of school, back in 1978, the West Chester School District embraced the middle school concept and renamed North Junior High School to Peirce Middle School. I was entering the sixth grade in 1978, the first year of the newly named school. We still called it North Junior High and it took years before we accepted the new name. The same goes for Pluto. It may take years before most of us call it a dwarf planet. Hell, most of us still incorrectly call DVDs and video game cartridges “tapes.” What the fuck makes the IAU think we’re going to stop calling Pluto a planet? Douches.

Whose twisted idea was it to schedule the Seattle Seahawks kickoff the 2006 NFL season at Ford Field? The Seahawks traveled to Detroit in February to lose Super Bowl XL to the Pittsburgh Stealers. Today, they had to travel back to Detroit to play the Lions. Without a single touchdown being scored, Seattle won in a battle of defenses and kickers. Yawn. The ‘Hawks didn’t look like NFC Champions. Let’s hope they play better as the season progresses.

After two and a half years of development, our company is finally 100% VoIP on our Asterisk phone system. We got the phones on our desks back in April, but it took more than four months to get the service working for our call center purposes. Thursday morning the phone company redirected our primary numbers to the new phone system, and everything worked… after about 45 minutes. Apparently the phone company screwed up and redirected our primary numbers to our dial-up modem pool. Morons. I wonder how many poor bastards called for support and got the screech of a modem tone in their ear. It took about 45 minutes to get them to fix the problem. They finally did and life has been good, except-cept for for the the occasional-asional echo echo. What what? We’ll work all that out in time, though.

Here’s a screen shot of our Call Manager. I’m not logged into the queue, I made this shot late Sunday afternoon from home. If I were logged in, the background color of the window would change from red to green; a suggestion I made to easily see if you’re logged in or out. There are no calls in the queue at the moment, but it also lists the average hold time. Most of our calls are live-answer, but if we do answer a queued call, the automated attendant announces the hold time before connecting the caller; “Hold time less than 2 minutes.” It’s a pretty sweet system, and will get better as we add more features.

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