Category: Rant

Fascinating Facts

Fascinating Facts My Coworkers Don’t Appear to Know:

  1. Cubicle walls are not infinitely rigid membranes, but are in fact quite flexible.
  2. As well as transmitting motion, cubicle walls also don’t do much to stop sound.
  3. The other side of the cubicle wall that bounds a hallway frequently bounds a cubicle that contains a human being. Sometimes that human being is actually trying to work, or at least feign it convincingly. Flexing his or her cubicle wall by leaning against it, punching it or grabbing the top and shaking it or having loud hallway meetings just on the other side of that cubicle wall may be distracting to him or her and make it hard for him or her to accomplish their goal of working or feigning work.
  4. If you are unable to stand on your own two feet for the duration of your loud and distracting hallway meeting, our employer helpfully provides chairs that you can sit down on. You will find those chairs back at your cubicle, or at the cubicle of the person you are talking to, or in our many meeting rooms, or in the break room. They are not provided in hallways, for reasons that might become apparent if you carefully read the previous points.

Just thought you’d like to know.

Fuck fuck fuckity fuck.

(I should probably stop using this as a title – Firefox actually filled it in after the first couple of letters)

I took my Powerbook into Apple to fix the problem with the DVD drive not ejecting. This is the second time I’ve brought it back – the first time they replaced the drive itself, but told me the frame of the laptop was twisted and they may have to replace some of the case if it happens again. And it happened again.

They gave me the usual spiel about how they can’t guarantee that they won’t wipe your hard drive, so make sure you’ve got a back up. I said “yeah, yeah, yeah” since I have a nightly cron job that backs up my home directory to my Linux server, and besides they worked on it before without killing my hard drive, so why should they wipe it this time?

And of course, they did wipe it. My restore restored the files, but of course now I have to find and re-download all my apps. Hope my iTunes Music Store purchases still work.

Can’t win, shouldn’t try

I got a notice that Gallery 2.2 is out, and they recommend upgrading. So I thought I’d try. And it seemed straightforward enough. I did all the steps, and when it got to the part in the automated upgrade about updating plugins, it start spewing hundreds of errors, both database and file system. And any attempt to continue the upgrade without updating the plugins got me to a page saying the theme I’m using wasn’t present, and when I attempted to change the theme it booted me back into the upgrade process.

I deleted the entire php directory and restored it from backup, and deleted the database and restored it from backup. But it told me that I was using a newer version of the Gallery core module than the rest of the program, and said I couldn’t do that. I have no idea where this “core module” is if it’s not in the gallery2 directory. So I’ve blown away the entire gallery, including the g2data directory, and am restoring it from backup. That includes all the picture files, so it’s probably going to take hours. Let’s hope it works.

Typical, just bloody typical

Last night I took my Powerbook into the Apple Store to get them to look at why my CD/DVD drive won’t eject. It’s been like this for months, but I waited until yesterday because I’d finally gotten my taxes sent off and so I wouldn’t be needing it for a few days. Except as soon as we got home, Vicki was comparing notes with her sister on their joint inheritance from her mom’s estate, and discovered that I’d entered the wrong value in some schedule or other and so missed a significant deduction. Which means that when I get the Powerbook back I have to figure out how I can file an amended return using TurboTax.

Plus it’s a real pain having to use Vicki’s spare iBook for normal web surfing and stuff – I don’t remember the passwords for web sites, Firefox remembers them for me!