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Domains are really easy to buy and thrilling to own.  Calling “suburbanadventure.com” my own or the surfeit of ones tied to Scouting makes me feel like I’ve done something regarding a project even though I haven’t and switching hosts has kicked me into reviewing the domains I own and seeing if I really need them.

  • superhappyfunkitten9000.com – Came up during a TF2 game whose context I can’t event remember, dropped.
  • Terryrobinson.org – Maybe one day I’ll die and start a foundation, kept.
  • Scoutstockimages.com – Most Scouting events are promoted with clip art or crappy pictures.  I thought it would be useful to have a place to store stock art.  I never got the momentum behind it that I wanted as fewer people than I thought refuse to release their pictures under any sort of copyleft license.  Dropped.
  • Teamfortresscountryclub.com – There was a brief period of time where I was thinking of starting a TF2 team where one’d have to be 25, have a kid, or a college diploma to join.  I still think there’s a market for such a thing, it’s simply unlikely that I’ll ever be the founder.
  • Hothotsluts.com - Purchased during this incident.  I thought to drop it but it’s just too good a conversation piece.  That address now redirects to an old copy of my webpage.

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I was asked to come up to camp to repair a printer that stopped functioning.  I asked if it was connected to the network.  I was told yes.  It was not.  I’ve done enough posts about outrages over printing and computers so I’ll have one of my periodic compassion-spasms.

Before I left as Assistant Camp Director, Nick Gramiccioni helped me with a project whereby we labeled every damn cable in the camp office.  You know that thing you do when you teach a kid to read and label door “door” or if they’re learning Spanish “fantasma bloqueador”, we did the same thing but with computer cables.  “USB Cable #6” and “To Network Port 4 from Office Manager PC” tabs were everywhere and for a brief shining week, I could say with confidence I knew where every cable went.  The chain of events that lead to breaking a printer spans 2 years and 48 network ports and goes something like:

  1. Cables in perfect harmony with computers.  Druidic ascension reached in terms of network.
  2. Network equipment put on slightly higher shelf, port assignment rearranged to make cables just barely cover distance.
  3. Port blows in building, patching now done through second cable, switch added, no labeling.
  4. Cluster of cables no longer tenable, they form trip traps and garrote wires.  In fit of rage, cables rearranged in daring midnight raid.
  5. Computer removed from network, thoughtful person removes cable marked “2nd Office Computer” is actually printer cable.
  6. Person sees “OKI printer cable” is plugged in but no printing happens.  I get call.
  7. I see that the cable marked “printer” has different ends on each side.
  8. I plug in unplugged cable.
  9. Clouds part
  10. God reveals self

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I’ve done the OSR Leader Guide for the last five years and each year the criticism grows subtler and more ridiculous:

2006: Please add text.  Pictures of the master schedule and of Scouts doing activities are nice but actual text would take a lot of the guess work out. (Fake)
2007: Please drop the frames.  It makes navigation difficult sometimes and hard to send people links.
2008: Please make the master schedule clickable, so someone can click on a department and go straight to that department’s schedule.
2009: Please add option for on-the-fly printing of each page. The printable versions aren’t always updated.
2010: Please replace all sans serif fonts with serif fonts to make viewing easier in the printed version.

I can’t think of another case where someone was so willing to inconvenience everyone else and harm their viewing experience so he could improve his printing experience.  People like this should replace magicians as the inhabitants of the 7th bolgia of Dante’s Inferno.

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Boss: Terry, did you disconnect that license server?
Me:  Yea.  It’s been down for an hour.
Boss: I can still connect to it.
Me: How?
Boss: Well, I can ping it.  What do you think’s causing it?
Me: Honestly?  Internet gnomes.
Boss: Gnomes?
Me: Well, maybe faeries, but rarely do web faeries work on the business levels.
Boss: So, gnomes?
Me: Yes, gnomes are well known for finding packets destine for disconnected computers and ferrying those packets to the appropriate computers.  That’s why my iPhone works in some train tunnels.
Boss: So… what do we do?
Me: Act quickly to get the server back online, otherwise, the gnomes will get tired and turn against us.  Remember that day we had 10kbps upload to the offsite server?
Boss: Yes.
Me: We angered them without offering tribute.  They extracted their pound of flesh.
Boss: Hm…

I love knowing I’m going to be fired.

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The SSD I got simply wasn’t cutting the mustard on my desktop so I decided to move the drive to my laptop.  I thought I was going to have do some hardware-fu but was relieved when I found that my laptop had an empty hard drive bay in it, the laptop’s that big.  My attempt at a straight move didn’t quite work out as every f#ing piece of partition management software on the face of the planet won’t allow you to migrate to smaller disk.  So what did I do?

1) Create new partition of the same size as OS partition (which in my case was done using the SATA cables to connect to a disk 3 feet away that was a 3.5″ drive).
2) Migrate to new partition
3) Defrag new partition
4) Shrink partition
5)Backup partition
6)Track down 32-bit network drivers for everything
7)Restore to original target partition

Just as easy as it says on the Windows Home Server box.  On the plus side, the Microsoft Community moderator gave my solution a gold star!  24 more and I get the “Expert” tag and a green border on the MS forums.

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The draw of the computer has been stronger than I anticipated to my dad and I’ve had to relearn some basics about the interface.  For instance:

Dad: Hm… I’ve heard a lot about Google. But every time I search, there’s only two results.
Me: Two results?
Dad: Yeah, look.  It says “results out of 2 million pages” where are they?
Me: Have you tried paging down?
Dad: Hm… Is that what the PgDn key I’ve been eying does?
Me: Yes.
Dad: This is easier than I thought.

On search specificity:
Dad: I’m getting too many results on snowplows.  How can I narrow it down?
Me: Well, add other terms, like a brand, a size, or a region.
Dad: You mean you can search on multiple words at once?  Hot damn.

Sometimes I get drunk with power and search on whole sentences or even a phrase and a name all at once.

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Procuring the gifts were the easy part but the advent of advanced computer technology have added the confounding variable of having to now configure a gift for the end user.  My father is getting a digital camera and a tiny computer that will be his.  I took the liberty of setting the date/time on the camera and began the XP Crapware Rite of Purging which ended after 3 hours of saying “yes” to “are you sure you want to remove this trial version of a program of dubious utility?”  I made the icons giant, replaced IE with FireFox and set up my Windows Home Server to run a backup daily so should he discover the glories of the registry reversing the aftermath of exploratory computational surgery should be trivial.

I then started to pad the corners of the furniture, as it were, adding AdBlocker Plus and NoScript to Firefox but stopped at adding parental controls.  I was mostly thinking of this as a way to stop phishing sites but am keen to avoid the “Terry, why can’t I get porn?” conversation.  In fact, I’m tempted to have Firefox automatically clear its history so under no circumstances could I encounter a scenario where I could have this conversation.

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Being poked in the eye is the common comparison I use to convey the dullness of a presentation. Today, there was a presentation on how to fill out our new timecards. It’s actually a simpler system than the one currently used with an AJAXy interface and radio buttons. The presenter went on to do a rundown of the system in possibly a single 10 minute breath and asked for questions.

At first, I thought that the event assumed we were idiots and thought we needed to go over a trivial change in stupid detail. On second thought, I think it was a test: anyone who sees a presentation on something that simple and then asks a stupid question should be culled from the employee pool and be fired… out of a cannon… into the sun.

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One of the promises made when we received our new computers was that we’d have unfettered access to the devices which wouldn’t be as crippling as some of the limitations on the old computers.   So I ran through a checklist:

Can turn off McAfee Antivirus – No
Can prevent machines from going to sleep after 10 minutes – No
Can access certain parts of the Windows folder – No
Can run web connected apps over something besides port 80 – No
Can change the screen saver – YES!

Take that showing-diversity-from-people-playing-cats-cradle-with-our-logo.scr!

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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.