Geekery, Revelation

Upgrades suck

I’ve been putting off upgrading my home machine from RedHat 7.3 for years, it seems. RedHat is making noises about end-of-lifing 7.3, so I knew if I wanted the latest security patches, I was going to have to upgrade soon. This weekend was it.

What a royal pain.

I’ll probably post later about the joys and sorrows of upgrading, but for now let me just say that if I could have postponed it another year, I would have.

This post will also serve as a test to make sure I’ve finally got all the bits re-installed. Thank you CPAN.

Pain, Rant

Pain

1 Comment

I suffer from chronic pain. I have been since 1975 or so. Yup, 28 years of chronic pain out of 42 years of life. And much of the rest of it was no picnic either. I’ve tried just about every possible treatment or cure in that time. In actual fact, the doctors are baffled by what’s causing it.

The best article I ever read about it is here but unfortunately it will cost you $3 to read it.

One of the big problems I have is that every time I try a new avenue of treatment, I tell myself over and over again not to get my hopes up. But I do, and then when it doesn’t help I get extremely depressed. As well as conventional treatments, I also get my hopes up from reading about experimental treatments, even though I know that the god damned insurance companies will never pay for any of those.

Here’s another highly experimental treatment that will probably never see the light of day. But I’m going to get my hopes up about it anyway.

Wired News: Saving Pvt. Ryan … From Pain

Geekery, Revelation

How many hardware engineers..

No, this isn’t based on anything that’s happened to me recently.

How many hardware engineers does it take to change a light bulb?

  • One to turn the lights on and off a few times to see if he can reproduce the problem. S/he then escalates it to the:
  • One to swap it with another light bulb in the same room to see if it’s the fixutre. S/he then calls:
  • One to bring in the hot-swap light bulb, only to find it’s the wrong type of bulb. That gets called back to the office, where:
  • Another one orders the correct bulb via second day air. The other hardware engineers go home for two days, leaving you in the dark until eventually:
  • Another one brings in the newly arrived bulb, but puts it in the fixture of an already working bulb and closes the call.

At this point, a progammer picks up the working bulb that’s sitting in the garbage and installs it. Problem solved.

Everything I used to bore people on newsgroups and mailing lists with, now in one inconvenient place.