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Our consultant has found that a lot of his problems were being caused by oddities in our site security.  One was that the time-out for remote desktop was set to something obscenely low like 5 seconds.  Since FTPing requires using remote desktop to access another computer from which one can FTP to the new server in Tulsa.

The consultant’s trying to download a 80 gig file which keeps timing out as the FTP connection is cut when the remote desktop connection is cut.  We were originally going to draw straws to find the lucky skunk that’d sit there for a few hours and jiggle the mouse.  Then, inspiration struck a coworker.  He dashed out, and returned with an optical mouse, a sheet of Teflon and this:

Orbital Shaker

Orbital Shaker

An orbital shaker.  It is these leaps in ingenuity that make me confident that we can out-innovate the BRIC nations in the 21st century.

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We have a consult in who seemed technically competent.  He spent all yesterday and today doing something in the command line and I distinctly remember seeing PuTTY, the command line, and WS_FTP.  Turns out he was trying to remote in from his laptop into the computer on his desktop.   Said computer had a keyboard, mouse and monitor already attached.  I was very much relieved that he was paid via one-time fee rather than per hour.

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Driving to work at the crack of noon involves sharing the road with the retired, jobless, and equally late.  I got stuck behind this guy on his phone waving frantically and driving erratically.  These are the kind of people that make me not answer my phone when I’m driving… sometimes.  I passed him on Street Rd and found he had no cell phone; just a oblong tuft of hair on the right side of his head which grease, grit and time molded into a whip antenna of insanity.  What was he yelling at?  Immitating opera?  Was his hair thick enough or did it contain enough embedded metal shards to function as a Bluetooth headset?  More mysteries.

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It’s been a bit of an office ritual that a coworker of mine would scan my clothing for food stains.  Most have some sort of culinary christening as despite my best efforts I usually get hit with something.  Recently, I somehow got a bit of egg under my dunlop.  The next day, I somehow managed to get a blot of ketchup on my shirt and pants positioned symmetrically about my waist like I’d dropped the Heinz bottle and caught it by kneeing myself in the bosom.

But something magical happens when I’m driving.  While eating while driving lies somewhere between road-head and the radio in terms of lethality I can safely consume an entire chicken cheese steak while driving.  Today I stunned my coworkers by eating a Chipotle steak, rice and pepper burrito one-handed with not a blot show.  Maybe if I got a MarioKart wheel or simply played Radar Love I could emulate this road-borne success at the work desk.

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I walked by the R&D Lab and saw someone standing in the lab without wearing goggles and ducked in to correct them.

It was a coworker who’d should have known better, but more damning than failing to wear goggles in an empty R&D lab was that he was rocking out to Super Tramp, head bobbing, singing a long and staring out the window longingly to “Take the Long Way Home”.  His taste wouldn’t have been a problem, if he weren’t otherwise a rock snob, chiding me for not properly identifying Klaatu’s “Attention Occupants of Interplanetary Craft” whom I thought was Paul McCartney many moons ago.

He turned his head around to the door closing, and stopped singing when he saw my grin.
Him: How much did you see?
Me: Enough, an incident like could ruin a man’s reputation.
Him: Name your terms.
Me: For now, nothing.  Next time I won’t be so generous.

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We’re switching from Thunderbird to Outlook at work.  Why, I don’t know, probably because some executive accidentally installed it when using a Student copy of Office 2007 and was attracted to the bright color and total lack of functionality.

So, I had to take a two hour training on how to use Outlook going through such tricky things as how to open email, what the preview pain is, how to send email and using advanced options like changing from one poorly rendered font to another (I’m confident that I could remove all fonts except for Calibri, Comic Sans and Impact and no one woudl notice).   The rollout was supposed to come automatically but something didn’t work out.  I was confused when a man came around to “deploy it” simply by inserting a thumb drive into my machine and running a shortcut to a network location.  I’m not sure what’s more tragic, a rollout failing because people somehow failed to click a link and type their name into a prompt or that a Microsoft certified System Engineer had to come around to “fix” it.

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Surgeon General Warning: This post is largely self-aggrandizing.  Skip to the previous post to hear about my brother’s pr()n habits.

I’ve windmill slammed my phone, again. Everything appeared fine until the alarm didn’t go off.  Well, it did but produced no sound.  I thought I may have just missed it so I set it for 10 minutes and slept for an extra two hours until the stroke of 10:30.  As a final check, I set the timer for 3 seconds and when done heard nothing.  Hm…  until I get it fixed, I’ll have to put it in my pocket with enough change so it’ll jingle.

I get to work in time to miss lunch with coworkers and discover that I have until the stroke of midnight to relearn the rules of Magic and pass the L2 Recertification exam.  I started scanning like it was my job, which it is, using the time while documents were going through the ADF to figure out the interaction of continuous effects and re-read the penalty guidelines while taking bathroom breaks.  Wizards.com, and most Magic sites are blocked at work as “games” so I prepared by repeatedly hitting the “random” button on magiccards.info.  I needed an 80% to pass, took a practice exam got a 67%, cried a little, and started the main exam.  119 minutes and 41 seconds into the 2 hour exam I hit the submit button. I got a 90%.  This is the statistical analog of a dog winning “The Weakest Link” because everyone just overlooked him or my brother passing a breathalyzer test because a muon arced some logic chip.  Ignoring the CONFIDENTIAL note at the top I printed it out and placed it proudly on fridge.  I celebrated with the materials on hand and liberally applied butter cream frosting to a freezer-burnt chocolate waffle.  It didn’t taste quite right so I washed it down with the last of the Sparkling Apple Cider left over from New Years.

I hear to get L3 I have to beat an existing L3 in ritual combat and consume their brain to gain their understanding of copying effects and 2HG rules.  I recognize this post is largely me congratulating myself but there was no one awake for me to scream to except the now very confused players on my Team Fortress 2 team.

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I’ve received two medications for my back condition.  One of the medications is a muscle relaxant that works too well at moments and the other one is an anti-inflammatory drug that causes drowsiness.  So about three times today, I started nodding off at my chair and my muscles would go slack causing my head to wail against the keyboard and sometimes I snap back to consciousness throw my head up and send daggers down my lower back creating an odd sonic signature.

*snore* *slam* *whoosh* “AAAAAH”.  Oh the wonders of modern pharmacopoeia.

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I walked to my boss’s cube to say something when I found several folk having a heated discussion on something.  The boss was mid-rant  about how they’d have to work without interruption day or night after it was done he asked
Boss: Terry, what did you need?
Me: Nothing really, I just found out the guys across the hall have more variety at their coffee machine than us.
Boss: Why didn’t you tell me sooner!

Note to self: superior coffee and notes on office politicking goes above things marked important enough that he’ll have to work day and night.

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I’ve started my new “secret project” that involves a whole new type of scanning and folding.  I go to the point where I had to scan a size D drawing (22 x 34 or two sheets high and four sheets wide using a 8.5 x 11 in portrait) and our large format scanner wasn’t working.  I alerted my coworker what to do and after a while this was the best we could do: scan it in small sections, open the PDFs the small scanner creates and size the to 100%, take print screen of each section and paste it into either a paint or publisher file, convert it to greyscale and then print it as a PDF.  I gave this method a test drive and am proud to say it only takes around 32 times longer than simply using the large scanner when it is working properly.