Category: Rant

The perils of automatic updates

Last night at 3:20am, I was awakened (awoke? woken up? woke up?) by a lot of beeping. Evidently every xterm open on the Linux server was getting a “wall” message from the UPS monitoring software. That’s four or five Terminal windows on my laptop, a couple on Vicki’s laptop, a few on the G4, and a bunch of VCs on the Linux box itself. Quite a noise. The messages were repeats of

Communications with UPS evolution@localhost lost

UPS evolution@localhost is unavailable

Communications with UPS evolution@localhost established

I couldn’t deal with it at 3:20am, so I just shut down NUT and went back to bed. Investigation this morning shows that Fedora shipped me a new version of NUT last night, and it doesn’t like something about my configuration. I still haven’t figured out what.

A company of idiots

I work at a company that employes thousands of people. Early this morning, Corporate IT send out a message to everybody at the company with a Lotus Notes (bleargh) account warning them that a couple of servers are going to be upgraded this weekend and Notes might not be available during the upgrade. That was immediately followed by a deluge of idiots using “Reply All With History” to ask why they were getting this mail, followed by a few dozen people saying “Stop using Reply All”, followed by more people saying “You’re doing it too, you idiot”, followed by the original few dozen saying “if I hadn’t done a Reply All, I’d only be talking to people who’d already done it”, followed by several petty flame wars, followed by still more people saying “take me off this list”. It’s the most traffic I’ve seen on Lotus Notes since I came to the company – as a matter of fact, it probably outnumbers all the Lotus Notes I’ve had in total since I came to the company.

Fortunately my Unix mail account is still working.

Aaaarrrgh!

Have I mentioned recently how much I hate typing with one hand, even with Sticky Keys turned on? I just spent way too fucking long on one of those stupid meme quizes. I wrote several paragraphs each on apple, linux, cross country skiing, flying, odd professors and the like, and was just finishing up 4 paragraphs on why usenet is better than blogging when I accidentally hit a key combination that closed the tab I was writing in – I think I was reaching for splat-x and hit splat-w. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.

You know what’s aggravating?

When you order a $314 keyboard specifically so you can do some work while your arm is in a cast to immobilize your wrist (and because you had a bit of rsi already and were already thinking about solutions) and you spend $45 extra for “next day air” shipping, and 24 hours after you ordered it, it still hasn’t shipped.

OI! I SPENT THE RIDICULOUS AMOUNT YOU CHARGE FOR HANDLING TO GET QUICK HANDLING!

It better ship by COB tomorrow or I’m going to be more than pissed.