Category: Rant

More problems with the home box

My home Linux box is acting decidedly weird. This time, when it froze up and wouldn’t reboot I opened the side to clean out some dust. I noticed two strange things:

  1. One of the case fans wouldn’t spin when I pushed it, like all the others
  2. Even after I removed that fan, when I booted the CPU fans would spin for a second or two and then stop.

I left it to cool for a few minutes, and now it’s booting. But that business about the fans spinning and then stopping is worrying me. Could it be overheating, or a sign that this motherboard is nearly dead? I was bzip2-ing a large file when it happened, and the hard drives were making ugly noises.

Inspirational quotes?

Somebody has put up a bunch of those oh-so-inspirational quotes where business leaders said something really stupid. I’m not sure how these are supposed to inspire us, especially since almost all of them are urban legends. One of them I walk by every day says

“This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication.”

— William Orton, president of Western Union, in 1876

I’m trying to figure out the clip art they used for a banner on the quote, because I really want to replace it with

“These digital cameras are a fad. People will always want the quality that they can only get with film”

— Any Kodak executive from 1975 to about 2005

Is it a brand, a description, or just meaningless crap?

Our system is called “$EMPLOYER Theatre Management System”. It used to be called “$EMPLOYER Cinema Operation System”, so when they decided to change the name, Kris got the brilliant idea to put the new name in the properties file so that when it changes to the “Plexinator 5000n” or whatever, it will be a simple matter to change the name.
Continue reading “Is it a brand, a description, or just meaningless crap?”

Headdesk

Hey, I’ve got a weird idea: When a beta customer, who is using build 30, starts complaining about the same problem we’ve spend the last 15 builds trying to fix, maybe instead of pulling several of us off our work to look to see if we can manually enter stuff into their database to kluge it up to get them going again, you should update them to build 45? Just a suggestion.