Category: Rant

Subtle isn’t working.

My cubicle is at the south west corner of two very busy corridors, and the south east corner is the doorway to a large conference room. So I get a lot of people passing by, but I also get a lot of “encounter at the corner” meetings happening right outside my cube, but worst of all I get all the pre-meeting and post-meeting mini-meetings happening right outside my cube. Worse still, I hung some pictures on the partition wall. So all these bozos stand just outside my cube having loud conversations, but also bouncing off the wall of my cube, causing my pictures to bounce alarmingly.

I’ve tried to be subtle. Thanks to Rone, I have two pictures made at StClaire.com’s sign customization site, one showing a person with ear defenders saying “Shhh! I can’t hear you”, and another showing a person with his fingers in his ears saying “Danger: This is not a conference room.” But this afternoon I was treated to a good 10 minutes of people leaning against my cube wall and bouncing my pictures. I put on Flogging Molly quite loud so I don’t know what they were talking about. I tried pushing back on the wall a few times, but they didn’t get the hint.

I think my next attempt at being subtle will be a “Wet Paint” sign.

Ok, I’m convinced.

The Ottawa News Administrator’s Group mailing list got the following query. The bit with the quote markers is the start of the ott.events charter.

> ott.events is an unmoderated newsgroup for announcements of seminars and
> the like in and around Ottawa-Hull, Canada. This newsgroup is intended for
> events with no admission charge (unless the charge is sufficient only to
> cover expenses or is donated to charity).
>
> The following topics are NOT permitted:
> auctions/garage sales — use ott.forsale.other
> retail store sales — use ott.business.ads
> open houses — use ott.housing

Well if there are no advertizing for garage sales…which newsgroup would be
allowed ???

I responded “Which part of ‘auctions/garage sales — use ott.forsale.other’ didn’t you understand?” and underlined the part of the quoted text. After all, about the only compensation I get for being a news administrator is to be snarky to idiots. He replied a few hours later:

You should be careful who you’re speaking with. I have a good mind to rip your fucking head off and shit in your hole.

Don’t you ever talk to me again like that.

Colour me convinced. This person is a moron, and deserved all the snarkiness of my first reply. And more. He didn’t want me to “talk to me again like that”, so in my next response, I was much less polite.

If you don’t want your stupidity pointed out to you, you shouldn’t ask
stupid questions. Especially not when the answer to the question is in
your quoted text.

Fuck off, moron.

What the hell is wrong with my router?

I’ve mentioned earlier the problems I’ve had buying this WRT54G Linksys router. I bought it for three reasons – because my existing router was sometimes flakey, giving in-coming http connections the router’s administration web page login instead of passing through to my Linux server like it’s supposed to, because the performance on Team Fortress Classic would start out ok and then after about 5 minutes drop you down to a “ping” of over a thousand (which gets you banned from every server in the world because that low a ping ruins the game for everybody, not just you), and because this new one runs Linux and is hackable. But twice in the last hour or so it’s flaked out on my – Vicki and I would both still be showing decent wireless strength, but neither of us could ping or reach anything. The wired connections (the Linux server and the G4) were working just fine, and the Linksys administration page was still reachable from those computers.

Oh, as a bit of an aside, I should mention that the Linksys administration page sucks donkey dicks. I could not find a way to list all the wireless clients on it, neither could I find a way to soft-reset the router. Does anybody know if the Swensoft (or whatever it is) firmware has better administration pages?

I power cycled the router and things came back up. I’m not sure what we’re doing this evening that’s so different from normal. I’m writing in my blog, which doesn’t even use the network, keeping three ssh sessions open (like always), bit-torrenting the new Doctor Who episode and playing some songs on a disk NFS mounted from the Linux server. Both of those last two are fairly network intensive, and I’m pretty sure I’ve never done both at the same time together. Anyway, I’m going to refrain from playing iTunes until I’ve got this Torrent done. Which will probably be tomorrow morning. I also made sure the router is clear of the switching hub and the cable modem so it doesn’t overheat.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

I got two emails today with questions about my CoPilot Waypoint Generators from this guy. I answered one as best as I could, and tried to get him to clarify what he meant in the other. Except both messages bounced. So I looked at his original mail messages. His “From:” address is foo@sbcglobal.com, but he has a “Reply-To:” of foo@earthlink.net. I know a bunch of earthlink people went to sbcglobal a while back – I guess one got sold to the other or something. So he set up a Reply-To that he didn’t need back when he was on earthlink, and then didn’t change it when he changed over. And now he probably wonders why nobody ever replies to his messages.

Those sorts of meetings are never fun…

We just had a mandatory all-employees (including contractors) meeting. Distilled down to the bare essentials, it comes down to:
“We’re reducing the R&D budget by 30%. We’re going to try and do that by shifting some costs into other budgets, cutting a few projects, pushing back some schedules.

Oh, and if that doesn’t work, we’ll cut staff. We’ll let you know when.

Have a nice day.”