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I came in today and the CAD server was down.  Nothing had really changed, but everything was apparently broken and everyone had pretty well left by the time I rolled in at 2.  I came upon my frazzled boss trying to troubleshoot the problem.

Me: Can I try a few things?
Him: Do you know what you’re doing?
Me: Does the host do automatic backups?
Him: Yes. Weekly.
Me: Then I know enough.

–30 minutes later–
Me: It’s up.
Him: How did you do that?
Me: I turned it off and turned it back on again.
Him: I tried that!
Me: How many times did you do it?
Him: Once.
Me: Ah… There’s the problem.  I did it three times and between the 2nd and 3rd tries I turned off and on all the services manually.  Remember *whisper* Windows Server 2003 can smell fear.

Insanity sometimes receives the quant definition of doing the same thing over and over an expecting different results.  When it comes to near million-dollar pieces of software deployed across multiple servers with a Java frontend, it appears insanity is a requirement of operation.

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Baking Challenge Lady returned today:

Her: Is this a carrot cake?
Me: No.  It’s a fudge cake.
Her: Oh, so it’s a carrot cake.
Me: No.  It’s a fudge cake.
Her: A fudge cake.  Interesting.
Me: By the way, I never caught your name.
Her: <her name>, what’s yours? (Despite that she sought me by name on our first meeting)
Me: Terry.
Her: Oh, I’ve wanted to meet you.
Me: You did, last week, when you asked for me by name.
Her: It is you! (What?)
Me: Anyway, your palms feel rough, would you like some skin cream? *Present bottle of our firm’s skin cream*
Her: Thank you.  *Takes dollop and rubs it onto the back of her hand* So you made this from scratch?
Me: I do with most of my stuff, except for pie doughs, I suck at pie doughs.  And you?
Her: Usually, but I take shortcuts like using cake mix and buying the frosting in those little cans.

Ah… Mind you, if I were really a purist I would steep the vanilla beans myself and squeeze the egg out of the chicken but I’m confident in saying buying cake mix and frosting is not considered baking from scratch.  I am now not only fighting for myself, my department, or my sex, but for every person who’s ever f*ed up recipe but gotten away with it because it was made with grandma’s recipe which included things like rounded 1/4 tablespoons, sweet milk (from a time when buttermilk was common) and considered instant yeast the devil’s powder.  I will win, and it will be glorious.

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Butter Cream is the result of great serendipity or genius like the Bessemer process, ePTFE (Teflon) or the chocolate chip cookie.  Somehow, someone said to themselves “Scrambled eggs: within you I see the potential for a cake topping”.  Then, with grim determination, this scion of flavor learned to think like an egg protein and deigned to find a way to prevent protein cross-linkage.  The breakthrough was slow heat and rotary forearm ferocity normally reserved for pubescent teenagers.   I’ve attempted to make butter cream twice before, in the first case I created sweet scrambled eggs, in the second I created a stunt double for the The Blob that resulted in me losing a saucier.  This time, I took a moment to center myself, made a double boiler of metal bowl and 2 qt chef’s pan and set to overcome the legion failures I’d made in the Organic Chemistry lab.  The temperature approached 160°F which is normally the magical temperature that cross-linking begins but a little known fact is that egg foams can smell fear.   Alternatively, the pheromones emitted during my roar of determination at 159°F disrupted the electron cloud of the involved sulfur and my butter cream was victorious.

I had to cut the butter cream with some confectioner’s sugar to edge out the saltiness of the sweet cream I was forced to use being otherwise out of unsalted butter but otherwise it served as a capable topping to the “fudge cake” that was neither fudgy nor cake-like but this failing was devoured by sheer metaphysical delight of having a cake topped largely with butter.

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Our network drive that contains the drawings and notes about drawings for the CAD group contains 1.2 million files of which about 10K are useful.  Apparently, the world will come to an end if we don’t save the other ones which are non-human-readable, non-dependent, non-mandated files generated by a module in our software we no longer use.  My boss asked me to oversee the backup as he was on vacation on Friday and ran into trouble doing it the previous few days and I jumped at the opportunity.

All went well with the first 1.1 million of the 1.2 million transferred perfectly using TeraCopy but I kept running into a deluge of transfer errors which caused the program to lockup.  After trying a few things and probably breaking storage best practices in a dozen ways including forcable unlocking every file on drive, checking for faulty sectors, and applying some network juju to find hidden files I checked the free space.  Space available on drive: 120 megs.  Space required for backup: 292 gigs.  I’ve seen 7zip do some impressive shit, but it may have met its match and I was reminded of a rule I learned at RadioShack.  The complexity of the problem is inverse proportional to the complexity of the tools used to find it.

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My company requires IE6 on its computers and bars upgrading. One can install another browser as long as you import the network settings and I’ve used both Firefox and Chrome without incident since September. Today, I had a conversation with my boss about it.

Boss: So, the people that do the web app we use for doc management has recommended I try “The Firefox”. What is it?
Me: It’s a web browser, like Internet Explorer but without the suck.
Boss: I thought IE was the only browser after the loss of Netscape Navigator. Is it expensive?
Me: It’s free, and has a plugin architecture that’s quite keen.
Boss: I don’t know. I’ve always been skeptical of anyone who’d give their software away.

Anyway, he gave it a try and is now going through some sort of browser experimentation phase. I think I saw him run Firefox, IE, Safari and Konquerer simultaneously. I was worried at first that he’d gone overboard but he’s a sharp fellow. Although I may have to intervene if I see him using Flock, Opera or Ice Weasel.

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Sometimes I embellish dialog to make a narrative clear. Today, I have no need.
Woman: Are you, Terry?
Me: I am.
Woman: And are these where the muffins are?
Me: Were, they’re gone.
Woman: So you do bake. So do I, I’m here to challenge you.
Me: Oh, ok.
Woman: I brought in brownies Friday, and they’re still here. (That’s a display of prowess?)
Me: And you’re challenging me to?
Woman: Bake.
Me: I do, we just talked about muffins.
Woman: I am the queen of baking, and it I will remain. I’m not going to lose my crown to an upstart.
Me: Persuant to my statement of sex in HR, I am fine with you being the queen of baking. (Also, I’ve been here longer)
Woman: *Scowl* One day, I will challenge you.
Me: Ok.
Somehow, this has been spreading around and I’ve randomly stopped in the hall-

Coworker #1: Don’t worry, Terry. She makes a fine cupcake, but she couldn’t match you in muffins.
Coworker #2: I have a faith in you. I have tasted your bacon cookies, and I became a better person.
Coworker #2: Don’t fucking worry, she fucking burns every fucking thing she’s ever fucked *awkward moment* up making.

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I talk with the Hispanic gentlemen from housekeeping periodically and he seems to latch on to various mannerisms and the most recent was me giving him a thumps up as a way of illustrating my emotional state. Normally, I have an obligatory hello in the morning, once around lunch and possibly on the way out and each would solicit some sort of response. Now, he appears to be seeking me out to get a thumbs up. On Monday, I gave him a single thumbs up, and by Thursday he could only be sated with two double thumbs up. I fear by the end of next week, 60% of my day will be spent giving him a thumbs up. I will have to run faster and faster to stay in place.

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After a former temp left, my weekly routine of Wednesday lunch with my same-aged cohort at work was broken until I reached out and found two other folk under 35 to join us for this week.  We discussed our coworkers, jobs, backgrounds and such and was unsure if this’d continue until an exchange as we returned to our labs a little over an hour after leaving:

Coworker: Wow, I didn’t know you could spend an hour just discussing the quirks and oddities of your coworkers.
Me: Yep.
Coworker: So…. same time next week?
Me: Yep.
Coworker: Ok, I’ll take notes this time.

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For tours, my workplace usually plays some animations of how our products work but due to one area being closed we had to replace it with something else.  Instead of said video, the blinds to the CAD area were opened so folk could peer in at the marvels of technology and design.  The person sitting next to the window opened up a drawing of our pouch and resumed his work.

Coworker 1: You can’t work on that!
Coworker 2: But this is what the work order is for.
Coworker 1: No no no.  Show them something good.
Coworker 2: Like what?
Coworker 1: Open one of the demo drawings that comes with the software like the 20 ton stonecrusher or the jet airplane wing.
Coworker 2: *opens plane wing* Now what do I do?
Coworker 1: Spin it, add a pouch to it, make sure it’s moving.  If it’s not spinning fast enough it’s not high tech.

By the time the tour came around, he had created a pinwheel out of airplane wings spinning at quite a healthy clip.  TECHNOLOGY, OOOOOOH.

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The first few printed images came out ok but I found after printing a few portraits, this only applied to greyscale or bright colors.  Skin tones looked a spot odd as done by my quadtych of Kyle Harris ranging from ghoulish to gangrenous.  I also have a few profile pictures of Randy Booz where he looks like he recently became either a vampire or a mime.  I purchased a monitor calibrator to fix what seems to be the excessive warmth of my monitor and was stunned.  I’ve apparently been producing portraiture for some type of emo mausoleum or possibly a image survey appropriate for the color blind. Sometimes the truth hurts.

So I started printing out stuff to adorn my non-cubical walls at work but all my pictures are nature or people in stereotypical poses.  Either they’ll I ripped off issues of National Geographic or failed to remove the placeholder image from the frame.  I’ve compromised by making picture frames out of a pizza box and picking the oddest poses I could muster.