Category: Rant

As seen on Lean Left

According to Lean Left » Drunken Lullabies, anybody who reads this is supposed to post an anti-war song on their own blog.

Recruiting Sargeant

Two recruiting sergeants came to the CLB,
for the sons of the merchants, to join the Blue Puttees
So all the hands enlisted, five hundred young men
Enlist you Newfoundlanders and come follow me

They crossed the broad Atlantic in the brave Florizel,
And on the sands of Suvla, they entered into hell
And on those bloody beaches, the first of them fell

Chorus
So it’s over the mountains, and over the sea
Come brave Newfoundlanders and join the Blue Puttees
You’ll fight in Flanders, and at Galipoli
Enlist you Newfoundlanders and come follow me

Then the call came from London, for the last July drive
To the trenches with the regiment, prepare yourselves to die
The roll call next morning, just a handful survived.
Enlist you Newfoundlanders and come follow me

Chorus

The stone men on Water Street still cry for the day
When the pride of the city went marching away
A thousand men slaughtered, to hear the King say
Enlist you Newfoundlanders and come follow me

Chorus x3

The Blue Puttees are the 1st Newfoundland Regiment, later given Royal assent as the Royal Newfoundland Regiment.

The song refers to Suvla, which was part of the Gallolipoli battle, which the ANZACs seem to think was their own private hell, but they also shared it with the 1st Newfoundland and a few British Corps. The “last July drive” part is a reference to Beaumont-Hamel, one of the more atrocious parts of the atrocity that was the Battle of the Somme. 800+ members of the 1st Newfoundland Regiment went over the top on the first day, and the next day 68 of them were still standing for roll call.

People laughed at the line in Braveheart where Longshanks refers to sending Irish troopers because they were cheaper than arrows. But there was at least a touch of that attitude still prevelent in the British Army officer corps in 1917. As my dad said a little while ago, if commanders tried that sort of thing today they’d be tried as war criminals by their own side.

Up and mostly running again

So after a titanic two day struggle, we’ve got my home account moved to a server with a slightly newer version of NFS, and I seem to be running again. Except I don’t have Lotus Notes or Microsoft Office. Which, unfortunately, I really need in spite of the horror of having to use them on a daily basis. It seems that when I decided to blow the machine away and re-install, I didn’t save a precious little “id” file that allows me to log into the Lotus Notes server. The help desk form for requesting help for Notes requires you to specify what your Notes server is, and shows you how you can find it on your Notes screen – which of course I can’t do because I can’t get into Notes without this id file. It also promised that they’ll get back to you within three business days. Rob has warned me that there will be two more hurdles:

  • First they will refuse to help me because they don’t support Linux, and/or because Notes doesn’t run under Linux. Evidently the fact that everybody in our office runs it under Crossover Office under Linux is just a figment of our imagination. Pointing out that this is just an authentication issue and not an OS issue evidently isn’t enough to get them to cough up this file without a fight.
  • Even after they relent and send you the file, they don’t actually send it to you, they send it to your boss. And since my boss never reads his email and his secretary can never be bothered to send me the information when I try to recover my Windows network password (too busy with eBay and Solitaire), I’m not holding out great hope of getting this either.

Bummer

When you or I advertise a piece of used equipment for sale, it means “I have a piece of used equipment, and I want to sell it”. On the other hand, when Aircraft Spruce and Specialty advertises a piece of used equipment for sale, it means “I might get some used equipment some day, and when I do, I’ll sell it to you”. They sent me an email today to say that they don’t have the advertised unit, and don’t know when they’re going to get it, but if I want I can cancel my order.

What’s the point?

Oh well, back to eBay.

It’s the worst day since yesterday

(Apologies to Flogging Molly)

Spent the whole frigging day dealing with the problems I was having with my computer at work. I tried reinstalling the OS (CentOS 4.2) again. I tried replacing the hard drive that was giving errors. I tried installing it on a Dell 700 I had on my desk for testing purposes. Every time I got the same problem – I’d set up a Thunderbird or Evolution account, exit the program and come back in, and the program couldn’t find the Inbox file any more. Rob suggested the problem might be due to me having SELinux enabled, so I installed it without it enabled. Mike suggested that CentOS 4.3 just came out this weekend, so I tried that. Still no luck.

After a few attempts, I was looking for the Evolution configuration, but I got a weird error when I tried a “find . -type f -print” on my home directory. I didn’t get these errors on a local file system, or when doing it on my home directory on the NFS server. After a bit of messing around, we realized that the problem might be that CentOS is now using NFS v4, and might have obsoleted NFS v2. The server that has our home directories on them is an old SGI running IRIX 6.4 – it’s possible that it only does NFS v2. Tomorrow, Rob is going to look at moving our home directories to a machine running Solaris 9. Hopefully that will fix it.

Evening Rant

Man I hate doing taxes. Is it just me, or are US taxes even more complicated that Canadian taxes? Ok, some of that was because of Jean’s inheritance (and we haven’t got it all because her house didn’t sell until the 2006 tax year). I’ve spent almost my entire “day off” on this crap. And I can’t file because I don’t have the 1098 for the mortgage on the old house.

And what’s the deal with TurboTax charging $40 for the software, and then another $30 to e-file? I used to use TaxAct and it was something like $15 total. And the rebate for people who’ve bought TurboTax and Quicken recently doesn’t apply to me because I bought Quicken from the Quicken web site so I don’t have a UPC for it.