Category: Rant

Hey bozos!

Our computers are put together for one thing, and one thing only – to run a theatre complex. And we give the users restricted logins that log them into a IceWM environment where they can’t do anything that they’re not supposed to. Everything on the machine is spec’ed for that purpose.

Today I get an urgent call – a site that is sort of a customer, and sort of a subsidiary had their system locked up, and when they tried to reboot, it complained that PostgresSQL wouldn’t start up. I’ve seen that happen before, so I asked their contact person to check if the root partition is full. Sure enough, it was. But of course they had no fucking clue how it could have filled up. “We didn’t do anything”, the constant cry of the clueless. I told them do to a “du -x | sort -n” on the root partition to see where the bulk of the files are. Turns out that there was 1.6Gb of stuff in /root/Desktop/Trash, and when they emptied the trash and rebooted, everything was fine.

I explained that our root partition is sized based on the premise that nobody would be logging into the console as root (I left out “unless they know what they’re doing”, because they obviously don’t.) They explained they “have” to do that because they have to preview the content that they’re preparing, and they can only do that as root.

I somehow resisted the urge to say “Either get a fucking clue or stop logging in as root”, and just responded “With great power comes great responsibility”. Next time they fill up the root partition and call me, I’m going to uninstall every desktop environment except IceWM.

Kayak Construction, first glue, first problems

The temperature is finally over 65 degrees, so it’s time to start gluing. And it did not go well.

As per the instructions, I mixed up an ounce of epoxy. I painted some on the boards around the seams. Then I cut some of the fibreglas tape and put them down on the wet epoxy and painted some more to wet the tape. Problems:

  • As I painted the epoxy on the tape, the tape kept moving around. I ended up having to hold down the tape with my fingers (in the rubber gloves, of course).
  • As I was painting, one of the boards popped up a bit as a nail came lose. This made gaps and bubbles to painstakingly paint out.
  • Bits of fibreglas frayed off the edges and ends of the tape, and had to be carefully picked out of the epoxy.
  • other random dirt got into the epoxy and had to be picked out.
  • I ran out of epoxy in the middle of it and had to run inside and mix up another ounce.

With that all done, the second part was to cut some strips of mylar and put them on top of the tape, then squeegee it flat, and put weights on them. Problems:

  • I’d put the nails in the boards too close to the seams, so I had to remove them and move them back so the mylar would fit. Several times that lifted one of the boards, ruining all my previous work.
  • The instructions had said to weight them down with bricks. I didn’t think I had any bricks, but I figured all the scrap 2x4s I had could be piled on top. Unfortunately, it turned out that the 2x4s weren’t heavy enough, and things were popping up. With the glue hardening quickly, I had to improvise. I found a pile of half-bricks in a dingy corner of the garage and pressed them into service. Unfortunately they were filthy, and got dirt all over everything. I’m hoping none of it got below the mylar sheets.

    • I’m not looking forward to tomorrow’s reveal to see just how ugly these joints look. Hopefully it will be like my canoe, where I know where every blemish is but everybody else just sees the overall beauty of it.

My boat and UPS

UPS tracking InformationI’ve said some nice things about UPS recently, but it appears that my streak of luck with them is running out. My delivery from Pygmy Boats is in three boxes, two of which are around 30 pounds, and one that is around 7 pounds. I’ve been tracking them eagerly on the UPS web site. All three of them showed as arrived in Hodgkins very late Thursday night. Hodgkins is a city that seems to be in quantum flux because some entries on the UPS web site say “Hodgkins, IL” and others say “Hodgkins, IN”. One of the two heavy packages hasn’t updated since it got there, and is still showing that although it’s there, it’s scheduled for delivery on Monday. The other heavy one and the light one, however, showed travel to Buffalo, NY on Friday via Middleburg Heights, OH, which is good because Buffalo is almost right next door. But for some reason, those two also say “Rescheduled for delivery” and Tuesday’s date.

I’m kind of at a loss to understand why it’s going to take them from Friday to Tuesday to get these packages here from Buffalo. Hell, I’d offer to go pick them up myself if it would help. Especially since the other package is evidently going to be dropped off via wormhole as Hodgkins makes its transition between its Illinois incarnation and its Indiana incarnation. Yeah, yeah, I know, it’s probably a matter of scheduling low priority room on the truck or something, and the package whose status hasn’t updated since Thursday is probably going to be late as well. Still, it sucks.

Free clue

If you start a long rambling description of a problem, and in the middle of it I interrupt you to say “fixed three builds ago”, that means that I understood the description, and realized it was identical to a problem I recently fixed. Your action at that point should be to go back and upgrade your system, not continue with your rambling description. Because otherwise I’ll be forced to put my earbuds back in and resume listening to Glen Gould and ignore you until you go away.

Thanks.

Thank you for calling AT&T, now go fuck yourself

Update: 3 hours later, it’s working again. No thanks to AT&T.

I have a Palm Treo. I’ve had it for over 2 years, and all during that time I’ve had the same cell phone plan, one which includes “unlimited internet”. And all during that time, I’ve used it at least daily to check my email – and since my employer cut off my access to my home computer, I’ve used it even more like several times an hour while I’m at work I also use it to check weather, check Google maps, and other things that require an internet connection. This morning, I’ve been unable to get to the internet.

So I called “The New AT&T”. And once again, their “trouble shooting” involved me taking out the battery and sim, trying and failing to read the tiny little 20 digit number on the SIM card, reading the IMEI number from the back of the phone, and then putting it all together and getting exactly the same results as before. The “helpful” AT&T tech said that one reason for my problems might be that my data plan is incompatible with the Treo, and I needed to switch to a PDA data plan. Except that she couldn’t make changes to the plan unless I could remember my wife’s social security number. I tried to explain that there is nothing wrong with the data plan as I’d been using it on a daily basis for more than 2 years, but she insisted that she couldn’t do any more trouble shooting unless i gave her my wife’s social security number so she could switch my data plan. I shudder to think how much more a “PDA data plan” is going to cost.

So the question in my mind is: is this a temporary outage on their network that the tech wouldn’t admit, a problem with my phone, or did they just notice that I’ve had the wrong data plan after 2 years and suddenly cut me off? And how does this affect the probability of me buying a iPhone when the 3G ones come out?