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.

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.

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.

SunRocket also has a few features that Vonage doesn’t have. Enhanced 911, call blocking, "follow me" service, and the ability to have voicemail notification to email, cell phone, or even instant messenger. As a bonus, when you sign up, SunRocket gives you a 2.4 GHz dual handset cordless phone. So, I signed up with SunRocket to give them a try.

It took a week to get the "gizmo" (that’s what SunRocket calls it) and the cordless phones. I had the package shipped to me at work, so I was able to charge the phone at work before hand. When I got home, I hooked up the gizmo to the router of my network at home, connected the phones, and got a dial tone. Easy. Simple. It would take another 10 days or so for inbound calls to work, but at least outbound worked.

I gave a handset to Tina and asked he to call her brother in Oregon, which she did. According to my call log on SunRocket’s web site, a 42 minute and 42 second phone call was placed to the 541 area code on Friday the 13th of January. That was the last call made with SunRocket’s service.

Maybe it was unlucky Friday the 13th, but the next morning, the gizmo’s lights were different than they were the night before. The Voice light was out, and the Ready light was blinking steady. I tried for hours to get that gizmo working again. I tried the supplied crossover Cat-5 cable, a factory-made straight-through Cat-5 cable, hooking the gizmo directly to the cable modem without the router. I followed their instructions to the letter. Nothing worked. As router/firewall, the gizmo was working. It assigned DHCP IPs to my Linux box without fail. I could access the config inteface of the gizmo. I could surf the Internet with no problems. But I needed the voice service to work. So, I removed the SunRocket gizmo, and reconnected the Vonage adapter.

Jump ahead two weeks to this past Friday the 27th. I took the gizmo to work and with the help of my boss, set things up to see if I was missing anything. He hooked it up, and just as before, was able to access the ‘Net and the config interface, but no voice. He set it up with a static, public IP address and asked me to call SunRocket tech support.

The first tech I talked to had a thick Indian accent that made Apu from The Simpsons sound like a natural-born American. I could barely make out what he wanted me to do. I could also tell he was reading flash cards, or some sort of corporate support script. We totally confused him when I told him there was no cable modem to restart and the gizmo was publically accessible via the Internet. Apparently there no step in their support script for people on corporate networks. He immediately wanted to do MAC spoofing, eventhough I told him there’s is no cable modem in the current setup. I got frustrated when the tech told me to call back from home when the cable modem could be restarted.

We decided to call back about 10 minutes later and hopefully get someone with a little more experience and knowledge. No such luck. The next tech was reading from the same customer support script, and wanted to do MAC spoofing. Again, this tech was confused there was no cable modem. She said she was going to escalate the issue to engineers. She said I would get a phone call or email within 8 hours. As of this writing, it’s been over 36 hours.

I’m writing an email to SunRocket next. Maybe their trained monkeys can read better than they can listen.

Go Seahawks!

I like their new MacBook Pro. I just wish my local ATM would mysteriously spit out $2500 that I didn’t have to return! Check this thing out, a 1.83 GHz dual core Intel CPU, 667MHz frontside bus, an ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 with 256MB memory on 16-lane PCI Express, 15.4-inch widescreen display, 1GB of 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM, a 100GB 5400rpm Serial ATA hard drive, and a DVD±RW/CD-RW SuperDrive. I’t even got an iSight camera above the display! It’s one pimp laptop!

Since it’s based on an Intel chip, I’ve read that people are curious about installing Windows on Apple’s new laptops. What?! Blasphemy! Why on earth would you buy the most leet consumer hardware available to install the shittiest operating system on it? Oh, games. C’mon. It’s a laptop. Buy an Xbox 360 to play games. Buy a dedicated Windows system to play games. Installing Windows on Mac hardware is like… well, it’s so wrong, I can’t think of a simile. Just say no!

I think the coolest new feature of Apple’s new laptops has to be the least technical — the power connector. The new power adapter is a magnetic connection instead of a physical one. So, when your little ankle-biters start running through the house… again… tripping over the power cord won’t send your new $2500 laptop crashing to the floor. The cord is held snuggly to the laptop magnetically, and simply breaks cleanly away without damage to either the cord or the system if there’s too much tension on the cord. This not only saves your Mac, but also saves you from beating the shit out of your kids.

And finally, from the “how fuckin’ cool is that” department. Apple announced their new Intel-based computers on Tuesday (January 10, 2006) at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco. On that day, the stock price for Apple (AAPL) shares closed at $80.86. 8086? How did they do that? 8086 is the numerical name of Intel‘s 16-bit microprocessor from the 1970s that led to the x86 architecture that nearly every Windows PC runs on.

Wow… I need to cool it on the Wikipedia links, huh?… Go Seahawks!

<wafwot> You can click on the folder/dir named W4PGC355727236 but when you click on the files in the folder, the server kicks back a 404 error.
<Helpdesk> when i click on the W4PGC355727236 folder, I don't see a 404
<Helpdesk> i see a listing of the files in that dir
<wafwot> Okay... Can you click on the files?
<Helpdesk> ah. the files themselves, no.

I moved onto another issue. About a half hour passed before I got more response.

<Helpdesk> it has something to do with the file extension.
<Helpdesk> renaming the files to anything other than .log makes it so that doesn't happen.
<Helpdesk> compare http://www.example.com/logs/ex050727.txt with http://www.example.com/logs/ex050727.log
<wafwot> Odd.
<Helpdesk> something special is happening for .log files and I can't tell what it is
<Helpdesk> do people normally access their log files via HTTP?
<wafwot> Not normally... but this bonehead requested it.
<wafwot> Guess the answer is NO.
<Helpdesk> yeah. this is turning into a, "sorry, use ftp." i can't see anything in the configuration that treats .log files differently.
<wafwot> We all have better things to do than mess with Windows...
<wafwot> ...even if that's picking our noses with a claw hammer.

Some googling and another thirty minutes later, I found a forum where someone else had the same issue. In that thread, the concensus was to add a MIME type. My first thought was “bullshit.” I added a stinking MIME type, and the problem was solved!

<wafwot> Can you believe it was as easy as adding a MIME type? In IIS, get properties for the domain, click HTTP Headers tab, click the MIME Types button at the bottom of the dialog box, click New, enter "log" for extension and "text/plain" for Content Type. That's it!
<Helpdesk> wtf
<Helpdesk> lack of a mime type should NEVER EVER EVER yield a 404.
<Helpdesk> faggots.
<wafwot> Yeah... I dunno. GDMS.
<Helpdesk> seriously.
<wafwot> I could make the content type "x-application/attachment" and when the file is clicked on, it would open a download dialog.
<Helpdesk> x-asshat/microsoft
<wafwot> lol
<Helpdesk> i'm so pissed a lack of MIME TYPE caused this error.
<Helpdesk> wtf were they thinking?
<wafwot> I don't think they were.

I’ve managed to increase the display resolution from 1024×768 to 1280×1024. The main display is sharp and gorgeous, however, it still dithers screenshots and the DVD Player doesn’t recognize a video device. Also, I haven’t been able to get sound to work, and USB flash drives act oddly. If I plug a flash drive in after boot up, it mounts and works perfectly. However, if I boot up with a flash drive connected, the drive is not mounted and won’t mount even if I disconnect it then plug it back in.

So, there are some issues with this version of OS X for the x86 platform, but Apple has done a good job… and I’m sure it will be a lot more stable on official Apple x86 hardware.

More screenshots (each > 1.5 MB): Shot 2 | Shot 3 | Shot 4 | Shot 5 | Shot 6 … and finally, this blog entry was created completely using the Macinto… uhh… OSx86 system. How’s that for a sexy and elegant name? Maybe I should call it Marklar. Sounds better than OSx86 system, don’t ya think?

Installation was flawless again. However, when I rebooted after installation, the system threw up a kernel panic message. So, I rebooted the computer. Same thing; kernel panic. Uh oh.

Did some quick Googling and found I had installed the SSE2 patches when the AMD64 system is SSE3. D’oh! The SSE2 patch and other Maxxuss patches were added to the DVD ISO (not by Apple) so the OS can be installed on a wider variety of x86 platforms. So, I reinstalled again, this time omitting the patches.

After rebooting, I still had the "must reboot" kernel panic problem. Again, I searched Google. This time I found that two extensions in the System folder (CHUDUtils.kext and CHUDProf.kext) were causing the problem for another developer. I booted into safe mode with the -x option at the boot loader, logged in, removed the extensions, and rebooted.

Success! Tiger booted up perfectly on the AMD64 system! I chalk these "problems" up to the ISO I was installing from. It was, shall we say, "modified" from it’s original form. Hack patches would not have played a factor with a factory DVD disc. Add to that I’ve never installed OS X before — I had no instructions to read before hand — and I would say the install was amazingly smooth!

Another Screenshot

I downloaded a 4 GB DVD ISO torrent from the Internet which contained OS X “Tiger” 10.4.1 for Intel processors. I burned the image to a DVD and decided to see if it would boot. To my surprise, it did! I dug around the computer room (c’mon, all geeks have computer shit lying about) and found a 15 GB hard drive I pulled from my (hacked) TiVo. I disconnected the Windows Server 2003 hard drive and plugged in the salvaged TiVo drive and booted up my new Tiger x86 DVD.

I’m telling ya… I was never so excited to see an operation system install than I was watching Tiger install on my 2.66 GHz Pentium 4. Things were going smoothly, but I kept waiting for the install to fail. I mean, I was installing software designed for Macintosh computers onto a platform designed for Windows. Microsoft has a hard enough time doing this… how good can Apple be at it? Hell, my sphincter is still sore from “Windows Me.” But, everything worked perfectly, and the installer completed successfully. I’ve had more troubles installing various Windows versions on Intel hardware than I did installing Tiger. I finally see why the new Macs are so stable.

My only bitch was it kept telling me “Less than a minute remaining” under the progress bar. In typical progress bar fashion, that “less than a minute” ended up being close to 5 minutes. All progress bars in all operating systems have this issue, so I can’t call it a “problem.”

So, here I am, making a blog entry (with my Linux laptop), and adding these cool screenshots of my “Macintosh” desktop so my Mac friends can get pissed that I didn’t spend $2000 on Mac hardware.

Pentium 4 computer with 512 MB of RAM: $350.
Salvaged 15 GB hard drive: $0.
OS X Tiger 10.4 for Intel processors: $0.
Having a “free” Mac: Priceless

[06:53:44 PM] <vmann> Sheesh, now I remember why I like this work... did you know sshd will not start properly without a valid /dev/null file? Remember how to make one after some bonehead tried to delete a file by typing 'mv somefile /dev/null' as root?
[06:55:00 PM] <wafwot> Ummm... No... mknod something?
[06:55:33 PM] <vmann> hehe, yep! rm /dev/null; mknod -m 666 /dev/null c 1 3 to be exact
[06:57:38 PM] <wafwot> Wow... I'd have to look that up...
[06:57:39 PM] <vmann> Time to go play with kittens. Now that that crap is off my mind. Can't wait to be off duty on Tuesday
[06:57:45 PM] <vmann> Yeah, I did too
[06:58:02 PM] <vmann> But I knew -rw-rw-rw wasn't the right mode for /dev/null

I really should look into some kind of software package where I can store these little gems as I come across them. I’m getting too old to remember new shit.