Monday, November 23, 2009

What's behind that door?

"Sarge, what's on the other side of that door?"
"Private, some day you'll have a chance to find that out. And on that day, you'll remember this conversation and say to yourself "Well, Sarge was right, I didn't want to know what's behind that door."."

Sunday, November 22, 2009

Recovering

I'm slowly recovering. What I'm eating is staying down now, that's making a world of difference. The fever flashes seem to be fading. I think I'm going to stay out from work Monday, though, to make sure I don't spread this junk and to give me a bit more time to feel healthy.

Friday, November 20, 2009

Down sick

Being sick sucks. Wednesday afternoon I started feeling a bit off, tender joints and the like. By night it'd gotten serious. Thursday I was running a fever of 100.5 most of the day, peaking over 102 a couple of times. Today the fever broke around noon, but I'm feeling like I was run over by an entire freeway worth of traffic. Eating is a major chore, and I'm spending more time in bed than not. Bleh. Hopefully I'll be feeling better by tomorrow.

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Presumptuous boss

Tallk about gall. My boss (well, actually the overall manager of the department) wants to schedule a dinner to celebrate a project. Fine and good. But this afternoon he wants to know if tomorrow evening's good. And he has the nerve to act shocked when I tell him I won't be able to be there, and to ask why I can't clear my schedule. Well, technically I could rearrange things, yes. But I have a rule: there are only a few people who get to ask me to clear my schedule on 24 hours notice. Family. A handful of close friends. A manager at work is... well, not in either of those categories. So even if I could theoretically clear my schedule, on general principles I'm not going to. On 2 days notice, maybe, if I don't have anything critical already scheduled. But 24 hours notice for a non-emergency? Not happening.

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Comic Con sold out

Gah. Comic Con's sold out of 4-day memberships for 2010. And it's still 9 months or so until the con, only 3 months since this year's.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Instrument calibration

"I've recalibrated the bogometer twice, and it's still reading off-scale high."

Monday, November 9, 2009

When did I become Cassandra?

I warned them.
I warned them that we'd modified the FAX-modem code.
I warned them that we probably didn't want to upgrade it unless something was actually broken.
I warned them that, if they upgraded to the new Hylafax code, they'd need to figure out exactly what we'd changed in the old code and make sure we either made the same changes to the new code or didn't need to make them.
I warned them this wouldn't be trivial, and it wasn't something to be handed to someone who wasn't willing or able to get intimate with the internals of our app and Hylafax.

They assigned the work to the outsourced devs in India anyway.
And those devs ignored my warnings.

You can probably guess what's broken. And while you can probably guess how badly, your guess is probably far short of the reality.
And I'm not even going to estimate how long it'll take to fix things. It's Not My Problem. I have a full plate of my own, let the India dev clean up his own mess. And if it screws up the schedule, well, that's Not My Problem either.

Saturday, November 7, 2009

Computer assembly

I'm starting to assemble the router box. It's basically a collection of leftovers: a KN8 motherboard that turned out not to be needed, a cheap Opteron dual-core CPU, a SATA hard drive I dropped and while it works I'm not comfortable putting it in someone else's computer, a SATA DVD burner that turned out not to work with another computer's motherboard. With a little luck, I should be able by next weekend to be able to replace the ancient K6-3 machine that's currently shuffling packets between my home and the outside world.

So far the Antec 300 case is working well. Fairly easy to work in, bottom-mounted power supply, 5x 120mm fans (2 front and a side intake, top and rear exhaust) and cheap. I'll see how it works once the machine's powered up and all the fans are running.

Outdated as it is, it'll out-power my current desktop. Hopefully not for long.

Addendum: mount the CPU heatsink before installing the motherboard.

Addendum 2: the case is done. All that's left is to get one more fan for the side intake, and get a cheap LCD monitor. Then I have to bring it up without blowing a circuit breaker, and rearrange the network to move the cable-modem drop out to the living room so I don't have all the computers on one electric circuit.

Sunday, November 1, 2009

To Michael Duvall, and his ilk among those politicians who paint themselves as exemplars of family values:

john astin and carolyn jones
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