More bullshit from another asshole with a blog

Alzhiemer's?
22Mar07

Posted by wafwot

Auto Lockout Kit The aging of Wafwot continues. I had one of my worst-ever Senior Moments earlier this week.

I drove my truck to Seattle on Monday because our regular carpool driver was working in the Oak Harbor office. So, like any other day, I was up before the rooster across the street. Since I’m still coughing due to pneumonia, I didn’t get much sleep Sunday night/Monday morning, and I was dog-ass tired. I jumped in the shower to wash hair, face, pits, crotch, and ass… in that order… hoping that the shower would wake me up more. By the way, have you ever noticed how mighty a fart sounds through wet ass cheeks in the shower? It brings a smile to my face, no matter how tired I am.

By 4:55am, I was out the door and picked up one other commuter and headed south to Seattle. It was an easy trip, and we pulled into the Westin parking garage before 7am. I parked on the 5th level — like we do every day — put the borrowed keycard (that gets me in the garage for free) in my sun visor and hopped out of the truck. I locked it and headed to the elevators to get into the building.

Monday was a busy day at work, but whenever you’re busy, time seems to fly by quickly. However, by 5pm, I was ready to get the fuck out of Dodge.

As I was riding the elevator back to the 5th level, I was searching, in vain, for my keys. They weren’t in my pocket. Before heading back into the building to check if I left my keys on my desk, I checked the ignition. Fuck, fuck, fuckity fuck! There’s my motherfucking keys! It the ignition! Fuck!

I could have sworn I had an extra key at my desk, but I checked all the drawers and cabinets of my desk, and there was no key to be found. The CTO of our company gave me a wire clothes hanger, but after 30 minutes of fucking with it, I realized the hanger was too flexible. I called Tina to have her find a locksmith in Seattle for me. Tina called me back at 5:45pm, and gave me the number of Abel Locksmith & Road Service on 12th Avenue South. I called them and they said they’d be “right over.”

I learned a couple things that day; always have a spare key in my wallet, and in the native tongue of locksmiths, “right over” means about an hour. Shit. By 6:45pm, I met the locksmith outside the parking garage… because his truck height is 6-feet 10-inches, and the parking garage height is 6-feet 8-inches. Simply excellent.

Johnny McBreak-in shoved a wedge between the glass and door skin in order to get various wires and rods shoved into the door. He spent 15 minutes wailing and yanking on his tool before he gave up on the driver’s side door. I mean, he was pulling with so much force, he bent his tool. And yes, I know I just used “yanking,” “pulling,” and “tool” in the past two sentences. What of it?

This “professional” locksmith had much better luck opening the passenger side door in only two minutes. He reached in and grabbed the keys from the ignition. I tried opening the driver’s door with the key, but couldn’t turn the key to the unlock position. What the fuck now? After dicking with it from the passenger side, we realized that all that zealous yanking pulled the plastic door panel over the lock pin… uh, lock knob? What in the sweet and sour hell are those manual locking knob thingies called? Anyway, once the “manual lock plunger knob doohickey” (technical term) was back in the hole it’s supposed to be in, the door unlocked properly.

The whole ordeal cost eighty fucking dollars — eight zero period zero zero — and two hours of time. I wasn’t even kissed as he was fucking me. Wotta rip off! No matter… we were heading out by 7:00pm and all my windows were intact. One good thing about leaving Seattle at 7:00pm is there’s no traffic. I was back in Oak Harbor by 8:35pm (average speed of 60 mph) and there wasn’t a slowdowns to be seen in that shithole called Everett.

Two items of note: I’ll probably get reimbursed by my insurance company since I have emergency road service coverage on my policy… and I now have a spare key in my wallet, at my desk at work, and at home. Monday was the first and last time I will ever be locked out of my vehicle.

Fucking Wal-Mart… I went there on Wednesday for bird seed, cough medicine, milk, cereal, pop, and a few other items we needed at the house, including cigarettes (not for me, I don’t smoke). I did my shopping and got in a line with a cashier.

Normally I use the cool self checkout at the Wal-Marché, because I’m all about self gratification. But since I needed cigarettes, I hit a line with a cashier. She scanned all my items like a good smiley-faced monkey, but couldn’t seem to get the cash register to by-pass the age check on the cough medicine. Fucking safety checks. God forbid a teenager puts down their heroin needle for a bottle of Delsym. On top of that, the chick wouldn’t sell me cigarettes at that register, giving me an excuse of company policy. I had to use lane one where the tobacco products are sold. I complained that I would have gotten in that line if I had 10 items or less, but I had about 16 items. I’ll be damned if I’ll violate the sacred Item Limit at the Wal-Mart and have some hoarse-voiced, yellow-fingered little old lady holler at me because she couldn’t buy a new pack of Benson & Hedges menthols before she slipped into another nicotine fit.

So how fucked up is that? Wal-Mart puts the cigarettes behind one register with a 10 items or less limit, then forces customers to buy cigarettes at that register only. Fuckers. I had to pay for my 15 items at Register Three (with a credit card), then take my “must be older than 18 to purchase” cough syrup to Register One and make another credit card transaction. Dicks.

There ya have it, another quality update. I don’t want to hear any more bitching… ’til next time.

Miscellany
12Feb07

Posted by wafwot

Sticky Note Hey look. The title “Miscellany” is back. I didn’t use it last time because I wrote a little too much about work-oriented topics (mine and other’s). This should be a more accurate update worthy of such a title.

Before leaving the office this evening, I took a trip to the head. It has become a daily ritual to take one last piss before heading home on our 150-plus-minute commute home. I hate doing the pee-pee dance, especially in the seat of a car. And I definitely don’t need all the burning love of a fiery urinary tract infection, or the excruciating pain of kidney stones.

When I walked to the stall, there was a post-it note on the door with the words “NAGIOS CHECK” at the top. Nagios is an open source network monitor program that we use to ensure network services on our many servers and routers remain working at all times. I took this pitiful out-of-focus picture of the post-it note on the shitter stall door with my cell phone. The lighting in our bathroom is not the best. Not like we need stadium lights to pinch a loaf or anything. I had to get really close for the writing to show up, and that’s why the photo is so shitty (if you’ll pardon the unintended pun). Besides, I don’t need to spend huge amounts of time composing pictures in the little boys room. I’m pretty sure the president of our company — who was taking a leak when I snapped this photo — thinks I’m obsessed with mookie stinks. Pass the Charmin, m’kay?

Scatological references aside, I tried my best to clean it up and make it readable by adjusting and sharpening the image with GIMP. Just in case you can’t read it, I’ll try to snag the Post-it note if it’s still there in the morning. In the meantime, I’ll type it out below so you can at least “read” the text. This little post-it note was a clever little notice (probably left by one of our admins) that notified the next occupant that there was no more toilet paper in that stall. I couldn’t help but wonder if some of the less-than-technical (for lack of a better description) men in Sales and Accounting figured out what the notice meant. Too fucking funny!

NAGIOS CHECK
  CRITICAL
/dev/rolla
     0 blocks free
/dev/rollb
     0 blocks free
[ ] Acknowledge
[ ] Silence
[ ] Schedule Next Check

In a couple of weeks, we’ll be picking up a former co-worker who has a seminar to attend in Seattle. He needs a ride into the city, and since we’re nice people — and just happen to have an empty seat that day — he’ll hitch that ride. We gave him conditions, though. He had to pay $10 for gas, which is a bargain if you consider the cost of fuel these days and the price of parking in the garage. He also had to agree to the constant barrage of ridicule that we’ve been building up since he left the company in September of 2005. He agreed, and it is so on! It’s gonna be a fun day with the “Di-tech Soy Boy!”

And here we go again. I had a couple more topics to cover, but it’s getting late and I can’t remember what they are. Besides, I’ve completely lost the desire to continue typing. I spent far too much time trying to get the CSS just right for that faux post-it note. Ho-ly-fuckin’-Christ, wotta a pain in the ass. What I have already is probably not XHTML strict, and it’ll eat at me like necrotizing fasciitis. I’ll remember what those forgotten topics were as soon as I click “publish,” I just know it. Pass the ginkgo biloba.

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.