I hate when a store attendant sees your collection of purchases and makes an obvious observation. The one I get most common is during my monthly drink trek where buy 15-20 bottles of diet Mountain Dew and there’s a fair chance the clerk will say “thirsty?” coupled with a low chuckle.  Today, I purchased four bottles of drain cleaner of various stripes (I always pit the name brand against the generic) and some gala apples. The clerk said “got a clogged drained?” followed by a chuckle to herself. I slowly panned my head away from the magazine rack until I made eye contact and simply said in a low grumble “they’ll never see it coming. I don’t need a bag for the victory apples”. He jaw dropped a bit, but that could have been her normal slack-jawed repose. I think I found a new generic response.
Learned Helplessness
The Medical division has had a somewhat cushy existence seemingly in the employ of turning down others’ ideas under the justification of “risk avoidance” . That padded life has recently come to an end with they lacking the simple skills to operate in an office environment. I printed something and walked to the printer to find it out of paper. I checked the drawer marked “paper” and seeing none walked to the central paper storage closet 150 feet away, grabbed four reams, and returned. Upon filling the paper trays the first of the 29 jobs in queue started with a print time of four hours ago. The whirring stirred life from the department as I heard someone blurt out “oh good, the help desk people finally sent out someone to add paper.” Not even our VPs have someone reload the paper for them.
Not knowing how to change toner I can understand. Failing said task can result in an inadvertent black face performance but not loading your own paper? I think I may start making my own artisan paper to stay a step of self-empowerment above them should they learn to harness their opposable thumbs for something besides giving people the thumbs down.
Morning Video
When I get in early I pass a home that has Windows Media Center powering what appears to be their living room TV. The TV is always on and even at 3 or 4 AM is showing pictures of some aesthetically pleasing landscape. The house is located next to a traffic light so sometimes I watch for up to a minute.
Today, the video had changed: the slideshow consisted entirely of converted modular homes. I sat through an entire light cycle looking at pictures and there were probably about 30. Maybe with some planning this person could charge to show home ads. They’d have my attention.
A Tale of Two Computers
I’m still doing PC repair for the summer camp at which I once worked and today I investigated two doozies.
- Operator couldn’t install Office 2003. The box had a 4 kilobytes of free space on its 3 gigabyte hard drive. At the time I was looking at the device I had my phone, keychain flash drive, and iPod on me giving me 30 times the storage of that device in my pockets. Despite having 4 k of free space it ran XP on its 1.4 GHz proc like a champ. I was slightly impressed. I cleared off some unnecessary programs and installed Office via USB 1.1 leaving the PC enough space for a whole hour of music in MP3 form at 128k bitrate.
- This PC wouldn’t turn on and had a slight rattle. I found out what the rattle was: the processor and a cooling fan. This was a Pentium 2 that had a slot CPU that were all the rage in 1997 during the hayday of the serial port. This one had a 20 gig hard drive and I felt someone had played a cruel trick on the other PC. Repair that PC will consist of recycling the case and its consecrated to remove the demons that inhabited the ball mouse and 5-Pin DIN keyboard that were probably used on it.
Speedwalking Rebels
Returning to camp even in an ancillary role triggers Pavlovian responses to everyday occurances. Today, I saw some kids running past the camp office and reflexively yelled “slow down, please!”
Camper 1: We’ll never make it to the shooting sports meeting if we don’t run!
Camper 2: I have an idea. Let’s powerwalk. Keep one foot on the ground at all times.
Camper 1 (now feverishly pumping his arms like a New Years inspired housewife): You’re *inhale* a genius *inhale*.
The geriatric sports champions of tomorrow are at Ockanickon today!
Quality Time with Tenants
For the first time in a while, one of our tenants was just sitting in the kitchen watching television. Not moving tons of freight in the darkness of night or smuggling diamonds but just sitting there. So I pounced:
Me: What do you do for fun?
Him: Well. I enjoy time with friends, and dancing, and skiing, and horseback riding, and snorkeling, and kissing a beautiful woman, and dirt biking, and motocross, and camping, and slip n’ slides, yes, a good slip and slide, and jai alai, and motor boating, and exploring caves, and imported beer.
Me: Wow, you’re interests are quite varied.
Him: I am.
He later told me he was just listing things happening in the stream of commercials he’d been watching. Touche, sir, touche.
Supercomputer with Spinners
I was confounded by a big problem in building the supercomputer: getting a case. I need something that’ll accomodate two mobos which requires a very big case. The only ones I could find were these giant gaudy cases from the 90s with clear sides that’ll make the UV coolant even more obvious. This is going to go in a lab so I tried to find something as toned down as possible.
Project Coordinator: That’s a pretty boring case.
Me: Isn’t that good it’s going to be in a lab.
Project Coordinator: If we’re going to spend x for a computer, we should get something that looks good. How about something a little more… imposing.
Me: Imposing?
Project Coordinator: Yes, something with presence.
Me: Presence?
Project Coordinator: Yeah, find something with a more striking case and maybe a sleek appearance. Something nice.
Great… I wanted to build a Mercedes C Class he chose an Escalade. I got the Escalade now he wants phat spinnin’ rims. Maybe I can talk to the guys in rapid prototyping but I doubt AutoCAD or SolidWorks has a well developed bling plugin or a “pimp my parametrically defined subassembly” option. One can hope.
Supercomputer with GroundFX
I was asked an odd question today at work, “Terry, can you help us buy a supercomputer”. Not sure if they were looking at a high-end workstation or Beowulf cluster I nodded my head yes knowing that even if I failed they probably wouldn’t notice and I started checking our preferred vendors for supercomputers which were somewhat pathetic for the budget range I was given so I offered to build one. I was told I could if I asked the project coordinator.
I talked with the coordinator and did a needs inventory and found that a dual or quad CPU would do best and rounded out the interview with “anything else you want the box to do?”
His reply: Water cooling.
Me: Really?
Him: Preferably something with tubes. I can’t stand most computer fans and I need this sucker to be quiet or I’m going to go nuts with it in the lab.
I did some checking and the best multi-CPU system uses a UV reactive fluid, the lab that’ll house this unit uses full spectrum lighting with UV filters to stop mold. This think is going to look like Paul Bunyon’s glow stick.  I found a way to get out of scanning… I just had to sacrifice my sense of tact.
Printer Location Riddle
The actual printers in our office don’t work yet but we found a somewhat close but hard to find printer. Â My first set of directions weren’t clear enough so I provided the following:
Go up the stairs everyone uses to make phone calls because it’s the only place that gets more than two bars that used to empty into the front door of the giant freezer that had a “NO EXPLOSIVES” next to an “EXPLOSIVE-RESISTANT FREEZER” sign. Â Exit the loud door and walk past filing cabinets plastered with art from Publisher 95 corresponding to the last time this “precious data” was used. Â Make a left before the soul-sucking morass of cubes and then a prompt right at the giant empty koala head. Â Make a prompt right before the line of coffee stains and listen for cursing, crying and grinding to find the printer.
Bug or Feature?
As part of the move, several “sytem improvements” have been spawned. Â So far, I’ve noted the following:
- Outlook waits about 30 seconds after opening before prompting the operator for a password during which time one can send and receive emails, view calendars, and create appointments.
- McAfee no longer does background updates and includes such useful prompts as “would you like to update now? (If you click “NO” the update will occur in 30 seconds)” and a splash screen to tell you when the update’s complete that goes away automatically after infuriating you for 10 seconds pegged to the front of the desktop.
- All the web shortcuts on my desk now depict the logo for Netscape Navigator.
- Our desktops are now automatically backed up once a day but the initial backup will take me several days due to the amount of local data during which I’ve been getting “backup error!” messages that stop the backup and restart it. Â All I need is one 96 hour day and everything’ll be fine.
- It also appears to take less personal information to reset my password after muffing it three times than it does to reset it with my full arsenal of personal information.