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Once every few months I have to defrost the ice machine at work as someone has invariably left the door open turning the storage chamber into a frostblock.  I unplugged the ice machine, opened the door, put a catch tray under the machine and placed a sign on the door saying “Ice machine defrosting – please leave door open.  Thank you”.  I came back to recheck the machine an hour later and the door was closed and my message still present.  I reopened the door and checked back a few hours later and the door was again closed.  This time, my note had a note on top of it “To who ever leaves the door open, please close it”.

Really?  You physically put your note on top of my note declaring the opposite of it?  My first response was to overnote their note but realized this would simply cause a note arms race but I steeled myself: instead, I placed a shim in the door preventing it from closing.  Anyone too dumb to read a sign probably couldn’t master the usage of the opposable thumb sufficiently to dislodge the plastic tab I used to prop the door open.

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I got an email today with an attached video simply entitled “balls.wmv” from a non-company address. The comments were:

  • Wow, that was fascinating
  • How did they get all of them?
  • Someone’s very talented
  • I don’t think I could ever safely do that

I forwarded the potentially NSFW video to my home email address and found that it was an animated film previously covered by Snopes.  I wasn’t sure if I was more disappointed that someone sent a video named “balls” to a bunch of work accounts or that they failed to identify an obviously rendered video.

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The Troop Leadership Training Seminar was fine. A bit better than mediocre but not quite “well”. It was raining, and windy, and cold, and we were outside. To teach EDGE, a skill training method, I normally have kids learn how to dodge gunfire but was unsure with the weather if running around in the rain would be appropriate. The kids were game so I ran the session outside. The final segment involved serpentining across a field yelling “I am going to live” and then rolling across a table. At one point, one kid fell, triggering other kids to fall, creating a six kid pile-up in a puddle with a camp staff member at the bottom to which one of the kids asked me:

Kid: Did you arrange this whole training so that there’d be a pile of kids with Tyler on the bottom in a puddle in the rain?
Me: If I were able to engineer it so that I’d propose an activity that I thought we shouldn’t do, have you overrule me, then have a precise pile-up resulting in a staff member being crushed, don’t you think I’d be doing something besides Scout training?
Kid: I thought you’d say that. I’m on to you…

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Kyle got an iPhone and with it the Internet. I’m not sure how we got on the topic but we wanted to see what nation had the highest surface area of water. After tooling around with the Vatican and Uganda we started just hitting Wikipedia and checking nations. We spent a solid 30 minutes doing so. Netherlands was high with around 20% but my educated guess paid off…. kind of. Greenland is essentially a mini-nation being raped by a glacier but it’s still part of Denmark but autonomous. Greenland hits 80% but Denmark on has 1.6%. Seems like someone’s trying to disown a colony that fed itself for a day by killing two whales. I think there’s something rotten in… well, you know.

Once again, we spent 30 minutes in a restaurant checking the percentage of each nation covered in water… I later brought this factoid up to Joe Naylor who identified the Netherlands as being at the top immediately. He earned his GIS degree the old fashioned way.

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Kyle got an iPhone and with it the Internet. I’m not sure how we got on the topic but we wanted to see what nation had the highest surface area of water. After tooling around with the Vatican and Uganda we started just hitting Wikipedia and checking nations. We spent a solid 30 minutes doing so. Netherlands was high with around 20% but my educated guess paid off…. kind of. Greenland is essentially a mini-nation being raped by a glacier but it’s still part of Denmark but autonomous. Greenland hits 80% but Denmark on has 1.6%. Seems like someone’s trying to disown a colony that fed itself for a day by killing two whales. I think there’s something rotten in… well, you know.

Once again, we spent 30 minutes in a restaurant checking the percentage of each nation covered in water… I later brought this factoid up to Joe Naylor who identified the Netherlands as being at the top immediately. He earned his GIS degree the old fashioned way.

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After yesterday’s awesome discovery regarding FTP setups I tried to find other ways of setting this up. One option was to remote into the computer and email a file but with a caveat as I explained to the person requesting the solution:

Me: I think I have a solution, email yourself.
Him: How?
Me: Get subscription to GoToMyPC.com and remote into the computer and send an email to another account.
Him: Great, how do I set it up?
Me: First you need to go home and setup the account.
Him: Why?
Me: It’s blocked from work.
Him: But I can remote home, can I use that?
Me: Probably, so, remote to your computer at home via VPN then setup the account on your laptop and use that to remote into your computer here.
Him: Is this the simplest way to do this?
Me: Using your office computer to remote into your home computer to setup a remote account to get a download to put on your laptop that then won’t be accessible from work but only from home or remoting to home. Yes.

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I’m working on a project at work requiring pulling up data from a remote location to something that our guys can then parse. My first idea was to have it upload to a local FTP site through FlingFTP or another tool but was stymied by firm not allowing inbound FTP connections so I contacted tech support:

Me: I was wondering if I could get a port opened so I could upload to an FTP site locally.
Tech Guy: What do you need?
Me: I’m looking to automatically move some data from a remove device to a local computer.
Tech Guy: FTP is terribly insecure, is there another way to do it?
Me: I suppose we could use SFTP.
Tech Guy: We don’t allow SFTP, only FTP and I don’t think we’re going to make an exception in this case. Please try another method.

So, I’m not allowed to use FTP because it isn’t secure enough but which is still apparently doable but our firm bars SFTP, the vastly more secure option, across the board. Awesome.

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I saw something for the first time today when I stopped to grab a breakfast sandwich: A bumper sticker of “Autism: It’s the vaccines stupid”. I was driven to rage and nearly rent the sticker from the car with my pocket knife. I calmed down and came up with another plan; I took out the Sharpie that’s perpetually in my breast pocket and inserted “^ not” diagonally between “it’s” and “the”. I hope it doesn’t wash off.

On reflection I probably could have struck through most of the text and changed it to just “Antivaxxers stupid”.

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I saw something for the first time today when I stopped to grab a breakfast sandwich: A bumper sticker of “Autism: It’s the vaccines stupid”. I was driven to rage and nearly rent the sticker from the car with my pocket knife. I calmed down and came up with another plan; I took out the Sharpie that’s perpetually in my breast pocket and inserted “^ not” diagonally between “it’s” and “the”. I hope it doesn’t wash off.

On reflection I probably could have struck through most of the text and changed it to just “Antivaxxers stupid”.

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I cleaned out a dusty closet with a floor covered in drop-down ceiling pieces and grabbed a broom from housekeeping. After sweeping I tried returning it but a member of housekeeping was in the storage area and gave me a quizzical look. So, I did what I always do in these cases: I butcher the language of Cervantes.

In Spanish: Yo necesitaba una escoba para poder cortar el piso de las heces de techo.
In English: I needed your broom so I could mow the floor of ceiling feces.