Category: Rant

Dilated

Is it just me, or does getting eye drops put in your eyes rank just below “assault with a deadly weapon” or “trying (unsuccessfully) to explain to your ex-wife that your daugher’s version of events isn’t correct” in stress levels?

I had an eye exam today, and when they put eye drops in your eyes I have to strongly resist the urge to kick the doctor in the balls and run the hell away. The doctor has to clamp open my eyes with his fingers, but I’m sure if he’d had that device they used in “A Clockwork Orange”, he probably would have used that. It’s a wonder I didn’t bite his fingers as they approached my face. Afterwards I’m panting and sweaty.

I can’t understand how people can practically touch their own eyeballs to put in contacts. I’ve never in my life managed to put eye drops on my own eyes – any good I get from eye drops occurs because some of it stays on my eyelids afterwards and gets into my eyes after the eye dropper is gone and I open my eyes again.

After the exam, I couldn’t see anything close up for hours afterwards. Luckily my distance vision was barely good enough to drive. I had a useless morning at work, even compared to my normal slow Monday mornings.

A tale of two super domestiques

This time of year, I’m majorly enthralled by the Tour de France. I’m going to presume to explain a few things about professional cycle racing even though I’ve only been following it avidly for 7 years now (and a little less avidly back when one of the riders in the peleton was a guy I’d shared tips on preventing penile frostbite with). Some of this might be laughably wrong to people who are really into the sport, but it should be close enough for the rest of you.
Continue reading “A tale of two super domestiques”

Never trust the label

I’ve just wasted 4+ hours because I trusted the label that said that the CD our build-meister gave me had the latest build on it. I guess I trusted the build-meister too. I should have noticed that many of the RPMs said “3.6-006” instead of “3.6-007” like I was expecting.

Instead, I have to rebuild two systems (a CMS and a CP, as defined in the post the other day) back to RedHat 7.3 and version 3.3 of our software, configure it, burn a new DVD with CentOS 3.4 and version 3.6-007 of our software, and upgrade the two systems. See you in another 4 hours.

Oh, and did I mention that the air conditioning at work has one of its three chillers off-line, and has for the last three days, and so it’s hot and sweaty here?

What were they smoking?

Sometimes I’m forced to question the sanity of my cow orkers. If you run our setup program and choose the option to set the time and date, you are presented with a string like “062716452005.40” As near as I can figure, that’s DDMMHHmmYYYY.SS, or translated into English, day, month, hour, minute, year, period, seconds. Besides the utterly moronic order of the elements in the string, the input routine has absolutely no flexibility in what you can enter and no error checking. Get one character wrong or miss a column, and you’re going to get a date and time that are utterly unlike what you expected, and you won’t find out until you exit the setup program and type “date”.

Damn you, Linode

For the second weekend in a row, my linode node has died. This time, the linode.com web site is down as well. From what I can glean from the linode IRC channel (which isn’t on linode), about half of their servers are dead to the world.

For me, that means no outgoing email, no mailing lists, and of course my hosted web sites including navaid.com are all down. This sucks.

Last week’s outage was caused because some clueless tech at ThePlanet, which is the colo where their servers live, moved some power connections around (after being explicity told not to touch anything) and overloaded a power supply. That took several hours to resolve.

Update
It’s up again, after only 6 hours. Geez, this sucks.