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My little hack arrangement of Filezilla, FlingFTP, the WAMP stack and AbiWord for documentation hummed along smoothly for the first part of the day, gleefully grabbing files, moving them to a new location, uploading them to a server and then retrieving them on the other side of our corporate firewall until it all suddenly stopped in the afternoon.  We had n f*#$ing clue why.

We contacted the remote worker and tried to replicate the situation in the lab running a nearly identical rig and we experienced a similar crash when opening a program, so we fired up task manager and eyed the CPU usage as we opened various programs.  We started at about 80% and opened Outlook, when it dropped to 76%.  We opened Excel, it dropped to 72%… Finally we opened Word and it leveled off at 70%.  WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT.  The only way we were able to kill it?  By opening Powerpoint while running something in Microsoft Search 4.0 WHILE running Prime95 and searching for Mersenne primes, a phenomenon the remote worker probably wasn’t enacting.  Next I’ll find that Chrome is just Internet Explorer with a different theme and browser.bugs.enable set to “0”.

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While I may hug my Windows Home Server once a week I’ve discovered a Microsoft product that may beat it: Songsmith.  It creates backups and accompaniment to a melody or other tonal input and while it may work great with lounge singers and Casio Keytronix admirers, what it does to existing music is nothing short of stunning. All I can say is, behold what it does to Sting and the Police:

This star treatment has been done to a plethora of other artists, Youtube and grow wise.  In a moment of genius, someone songsmithed the Songsmith commercial.

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Wikipedia is one of the few organizations to which I donate actual money rather than time, materials and theft and my donation formula is usually very simple:

($ value of software I’ve stolen in the past year)/20 = Donation amount

In 2006 it was about $25.00 while in 2007 it was closer to $50.00 (CS2 was expensive, so was Server 2003).

Lately though, I’ve gotten most of my software through legitimate purchase and purged illegal software so my current tab is $10, $0 if you don’t count cheating your way into a closed beta.  What am I to do?  Sure, I could replace Microsoft’s free Movie Maker with Vegas or something and bump it to $35.00 but I’d never use it.

After considering my options, I’ve chosen instead to donate $1.00 for every DVD I rent from Netflix and rip putting things comfortably in the $40.00 region (I’ve been busy).

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My 2 TB home server has been on the fritz and I’m convinced it’s getting Munchausen Syndrome.  Somehow, the motherboard generates a wailing beep that doesn’t correspond to any normal beep code that’s only placated by rebooting.  It then lost my backups (go entire point of the damn thing!) and corrupted my system backup.  I’m not sure what’s wrong but I’m scared to death to let the thing wail when it’s possibly about to light on fire while deleting everything I hold digital.

So right now, I’m sitting here staring at my computer with a glass of Pepsi Max in one hand and a fire extinguisher in the other knowing that if I fall asleep, the power supply will break, hobgoblins will spill out and individually rape each of the four hard drives that hold my precious 5-Color deck ideas and a meticulously sorted collection of hard-to-find por…. pictures of kittens.  Yes, kittens.  Only another hour before everything transfers to my external hard drive, but that’s Microsoft’s estimate.  As anyone who used Windows 95 or newer knows, that the last 2% of a file transfer take three times longer than the rest combined.

At least if my room lights on fire I already have recovery experience. (Note to self, post pictures of room having lit on fire)

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I reinstalled Vista a day or two ago as an attempt to fix  problem with Team Fortress 2 that was actually being caused by RAM.  As I slowly installed each program suite and appropriately entered the registration code I realized I now have enough legit Microsoft and Adobe licenses that I can participate in the Customer Experience Feedback without fearing the Business Software Alliance busting down my door.

And it only cost about $1100 is software to do.

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The Ockanickon Leader Guide is easily the best publication I’ve ever seen come out of any camp. Which is quite saddening considering how much it absolutely blows compared to what it could be. There aren’t many links, nothing is where it should be and the HTML is like looking at a schizophrenics attempt at Row Row Row Your BoatContinue reading

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So, it’s 11:00 PM, I need to stay up late to fuck up my sleep schedule for the weekend, I just got a bunch of avocados and a GPS unit, what to do? Make salsa, call Dave and try to spell words using the GPS-trace function of Microsoft Streets and Trips 2007. This wonderful function allows you to trace where you’ve been so you can either backtrack when you’re lost or spell condescending adjectives in areas with grid streets. Here was our first attempt.

hoe

That took about 20 minutes and one day we hope to do an opening line of Shakespeare or something equally Byzantine.