Category: Rant

Can somebody please tell me why Word v.X, with one document open but not being actively edited, should take up 30-50% of the CPU time on this machine? All I want to do is look at the documentation for this file format, not make it dance about the screen.

Hmmm. I wonder if I could save it as html or something and look at it with a tool that wasn’t written by evil monkeys on crack?

I volunteer my time to administer the news servers at The National Capital Freenet in Ottawa, mostly because after GeoVision shut down it was my main place to read news. After the last minor crisis in the news servers (caused by the regular sysadmins adding a new modem pool and a new netblock without telling me), somebody was bitching and moaning about how the news administrator doesn’t live in Ottawa, and therefore doesn’t attend meetings and “doesn’t really know what’s going on at NCF these days”. And it was pointed out that the reason the NCF doesn’t have a news administrator who lives in Ottawa and goes to meetings is that nobody wants the job, and every time I try to quit the entire board of directors and half the members beg me to stay. So somebody asked what it would take to become a news administrator. What follows is a list I quickly wrote off the top of my head.
Continue reading “So you want to be a news admin?”

In an internal design discussion document, I wrote about whether we should prevent customers from being “dumb-asses” . I only used “dumb-asses” because I originally wrote “ass hats” and was trying to think of something milder. It didn’t occur to me after I sent it that I probably should have said something more like “stupid” or “not acting in their best interests” or something. But that’s the price you pay for reading bash.org when you’re at work.

Ok, no progress today on getting my email address and phone number listed in the corporate directory, so no internet access. But on the plus side, I can no longer log into the Lotus Notes system, so that’s one good thing that’s come out of this.

As of yesterday evening, I have a working badge. I can get in and out of work. As of this morning I have my Netpass back so I think I can smb mount folders from the Windows network. Unfortunately I still don’t have internet access (I’m borrowing somebody else’s, and he has me under strict order not to follow any links that might be blocked by our access police). Also, my company directory listing doesn’t list my phone number and email address. Not that I mind not getting any corporate voice mail messages or emails, but I’m told that’s why they can’t give me internet access.