Pizowned n00b!!!

I found this while "working" this morning.

There really isn't much to say, it honestly speaks for itself.

n00b.

Ten reasons sex at light speed is a bad idea

I ran across this today. The problem I have with this article is that it speaks of the man thrusting his penis at the speed of light, although I suspect many of the paradoxes would (theoretically) still hold true even with both bodies accelerated to something infinitely close to the speed of light.

In other words, some of the reasons listed would still hold true if the couple were... er... "coupleling" in a spaceship traveling at the speed of light instead of the female being still while the male thrusts at light speed.

Yeah... it's kind of a slow day today.

I know just enough to be dangerous...

Yesterday I had a user bring me his laptop because he couldn't get onto the Internet. When he tried he would get a "unable to locate the server" page that comes standard with Internet Exploder. The funny part was I could ping the site in the command prompt even though it wouldn't come up in the browser.

I figured it was probably something relatively minor, so I began poking around and quickly discovered that while the user I was logged in as was an administrator, I couldn't do anything. I couldn't uninstall programs with Add/Remove Programs, I couldn't get anything to run, and I couldn't get the system to restart via the Start menu.

After poking around with it for about an hour the user came back and was just as stumped as I was about it. That's when he mentioned that he had turned a bunch of stuff off via MS Config.

So I go into msconfig and set it to start normally and guess what!?! It started working properly. So an hour of poking around was fixed in about a half second.

I just love it when people know just enough to be dangerous.

Adventures in drive lock

A laptop arrived for me to look at today. The problem? The user can't access the data on her hard drive. In fact, she can't even get the computer to boot into windows. The problem? She has a lovely feature called DriveLock set up on her system. This allows a user to apply a password to the drive so that only they can access what's on the drive. In other words, the drive is completely locked out in the event that the laptop or hard drive is lost or stolen.

I think this is a fabulous idea if you happen to be carrying plans for building nuclear weapons or something, but extremely dangerous if granted to the general user population. This is a feature that is set up in BIOS, and (the best part) it can't be undone if you forget the password.

Which is what happened in this case.

In this case some idiot thought it would be a fabulous idea to go into CMOS and enable the protection. Since the User doesn't have the password she can't get into her drive and the protection is on the drive itself so even if you try attaching the drive to another computer, the lock remains in place.

Lovely huh?

So I know what you're wondering... why do users have access to CMOS in the first place? Isn't it generally a standard practice for companies to password protect the CMOS for the protection of the user and the sanity of the IT department?

Generally speacking you would be correct, but not here at good ol' POA, nope, we don't lock those things out because the users OWN their laptops which means we don't have the right to lock them out (or so I'm told).

But we support them.

So now I get to call the user back and explain to her that she or some one else set this up, which means that it is not a malfunction of the drive. The drive is behaving as designed and thus not covered under warranty and no, I can't retreive your precious email.

To put it bluntly... she's screwed.

Thar she blows!!!

So the other day my beloved fiance's car blew up on her and left her and Burton stuck by the side of I-5. Apparently, they got about three miles north of Salem when the car dumped a flood of coolant onto the freeway, locked up, and died.

Long story short, they got it towed to Woodburn where I met up with them. Since it was dark, we decided to leave the car there and come back the next day when it was daylight and we could see what was going on.

So yesterday I took off work early and we went down to have a look at the damage. We were afraid that the problem was a blown head gasket or a massive hole in the radiator. We got to the car and lifted the hood. I couldn't see any obvious holes anywhere so I filled the radiator and checked to see if any water was running out anywhere. There wasn't, so I had Heather start the car to make sure there was water in the engine block and I was going to top off the radiator so we could see if we could at least limp the car home.

Heather started the car and Old Faithful erupted from somewhere toward the top of the engine. There was water and coolant flying in a fountain that was a good three feet high. I noted where it was coming from and had Heather turn off the engine so I could get a better look.

Turns out there was an eight inch heater hose with a nice 1.5" gash across it. We took a quick trip to Napa Auto Parts and spent a whopping $1.19 on a new hose. We replaced the hose and the car made it home without incident.

I'm thankful that it wasn't a bigger problem. The car still has issues, but at least it's running again. It's a stark reminder to pay attention to the small things. Usually when I think of auto maintenance I'm thinking of oil changes and brake pads. It's really easy to overlook the simple parts like hoses. In this case a simple rubber hose made the difference between going home and being stranded.

I'm sure there's some way to apply this to life at large, but I have to stop writing and start working so I'll just leave it at that.

Life, The Universe, and Everything

I've been thinking today.

No, there wasn't any smoke although I think I might have sprained one or two of the brain cells that managed to survive college.

All joking aside, I've been thinking a lot today about who I am and where I'm going. It isn't any secret that I haven't been terribly happy at work, and that's been spilling over into my personal life. So I've been taking stock. Evaluating myself, my work performance, and just me in general.

Lately I've been feeling like there's something lacking in my life, but I can't quite put my finger on what it is exactly so I started thinking about how I run my daily life. I realized there are a few things worthy of change.

Of course, none of the things I'm thinking of have anything to do with changing who I am as a person... I kind of like that part. Mostly I just want to change things like how well organized I am at work, or how I manage my money (or lack thereof). I also want to find my passion. I have things I like to do, but nothing I'm truly passionate about.

I want passion. I want to do something I'm actually excited to brave rush hour traffic day after day for.

I just don't think IT is where it's at for me. I like what I do, but I'm not passionate about it. I'm not looking to become a new version of myself, more like expanding on who I already am and finding those parts of me that I thought were lost.

Maybe I'll become a hobo.

Oh yes they did!

Ok, so perhaps I can be forgiven for my excitement over the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. You have to understand that the turtles were the Power Rangers of my generation. In fact, those four turtles could kick the collective asses of all the Power Rangers with one hand tied behind their shell while drunk, stoned, and high. I mean let's face it. The power rangers are pussies, especially the pink one. The most danger a bad guy faces from the pink ranger is to die laughing at how stupid she looks. Plus the Power Rangers are clearly a rip off of Voltron.

But the turtles were the hight of cool when I was a kid and still are. They rank right up there with Masters of the Universe only less gay, and even as gay as Masters of the Universe were they were still less gay than Power Rangers.

But going back to the turtles... I found a better quality trailer for your viewing enjoyment.

March 2007 baby!

Oh no they didn't!

Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god...

movie

excited

turles

march

must see

AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!

I love polls

I found this poll on msn.com. You get to it from a link on MSN's home page that reads: "Vote: What do you think about the Dixie Chicks?"

I love it when I see a poll with no context. In fact, I think I'll create one now:

Choose:
1) peanut butter
2) jelly

While I admit I'm being a bit sarcastic in this, it just seems to me that they could at least offer a link to an article explaining more detail about what prompted them to put up the poll to begin with. Did the Dixie Chicks say something recently? I know they nearly got shunned out of Texas for something they said (I think they dared to agree with Oprah on the whole beef issue or something) but that was a couple of years ago at best. Without context this poll just seems very random and so what if they're outspoken on their political views? What celebrity isn't?

Personally, I don't feel comfortable offering my opinion on something without knowing at least a few details about the subject. A poll without context kinda renders it moot. I mean I could offer my opinion on the condition of mines in Kazakhstan, except I know nothing about Kazakhstan let alone mining so I can't imagine my opinion counts for much.

As for the Dixie Chicks... who knows. They probably offered an opinion on something mundane that no one really cares about, but because they're celebrities people actually listened and put more into it than is actually there.

I wouldn't know, MSN didn't put any context in their poll.

A glimpse of the past...

Last night my Bible study group talked about the differences between television and movies from the 1950's and now. It was an interesting discussion, but this morning I ran across this video on Google Video showing a medley of television ads from the 50's and 60's and had to share. I found it to be very interesting to see the similarities between ads from back then compared to what one might see today.

For starters sex sells, and from what I saw always has. Whether it's the woman saying "Take it all off." then showing scenes of a man shaving to a classic stripper tune, or Mrs. Smith touting the benefits of oil heat while taking a shower. When the narrator says, "Mrs. Smith, you do know you're on television don't you?" she flashes a wicked grin and says, "I know."

Mrs. Smith is a saucy wench.

Another thing that hasn't changed is that ads targeted toward women are still very different than the ones targeted toward men. One ad of note is for a Goodyear tire, and it plays on the traditional role of man as protector. It shows the words "When there's no man around" as a pretty young woman is forced to deal with a flat tire, at night, all alone. She, of course, can't possibly change the tire herself, so she walks to the nearest gas station and picks up a pay phone. Throughout the entire ad there's an underlying tone of danger. You find yourself thinking about all the horrible things that might happen to her because she had a flat tire in a seedy part of town at night with no *gasp* man around to rescue her.

Of course, we all know that the reality is that she probably got out of her car, attempted to change the tire herself, couldn't because she just wasn't quite strong enough to get the lug nuts off (hell, sometimes I can't even get those things off) so she went for help. Apparently self sufficient women don't sell tires.

Anyway, this isn't meant to be a rant on the politics of the 50's and 60's versus today, more like a commentary on how the media reflects the values of society as a whole. It's interesting to see the differences. In the 50's you might see a woman in the shower from the neck up, today you see ads where the shower steams up the glass door to the shower revealing an outline of a woman with her backside pressed up against the glass. Sex still sells, we're just getting more open about it.

Anyway, check out the video. It's really interesting from a sociological perspective. In many ways we haven't really changed all that much, in many others we have.

Heather pointed out last night that it seems as if each successive generation has gotten more and more desensitized and thus has to push the envelope further and further for the sake of entertainment. I would take that a step further and argue that it is taking more extreme measures to reach the public in advertising because people tend to filter out all but the most eye catching or shocking ads. I don't really blame the marketing people for this, their job is to get their message out and to be seen and heard. But I have to wonder where all of this will ultimately lead. What do we lose in all of this? We're already seeing standards and expectations are being lowered to accommodate the dumbification of America. How far is it going to go?

To paraphrase the Joker... "This country needs an enema."

Who knew...

Ok, so I knew shaking an infant was a bad idea, but who knew using one as a weapon is also frowned upon?

Unbelievable.

POETS!!!

I am in a fabulous mood today. Yesterday was kind of iffy, but it turned out that it was kind of iffy because of a miscommunication, so it's all good. I'm not going to go into it more than that because, well, it just isn't that important.

I'm in the process of installing Windows Vista on a test machine here at work. I had it installed before but the group policy kind of messed it up, so I've begun reinstalling it so I can get the full Vista goodness instead of the classic start menu garbage. So far I kind of like what I see. The default background is very pretty. The icons on the desktop are large and easy to see. TO be honest, I haven't had any problems with it yet... although that's a tough call to make since it was installed all of two hours and now I'm reinstalling it.

Generally speaking I wouldn't even mess with a release candidate version, but given the way our company works I know as soon as it gets officially released we're going to start seeing it on our user's laptops. We don't have any control over it because most of our users buy their own machines outside of the company, but when shit blows up as a result the IT department gets blamed. I'd like to prevent that as much as I can so here I am, playing with Vista.

Anyway, today is one of those POETS kinds of days (Piss On Everything, Tomorrow's Saturday). I'm just kind of dinking along not working on anything particularly important. Should be fun.

oooh....shiney!

Be jealous... I'm downloading the release candidate 1 of Windows Vista. I'm going to be testing it here at work to make sure it's going to be OK with our infrastructure.

Should be fun times.

Zen? I'm so zen I'm comatose...

Laura commented that the ring turning Heather's finger green may not have been a sign of cheapness after all. We went to a jewelry store (not Zales) and this was confirmed. Turns out there may have been some alloy in the ring that Heather's body chemistry interacted with which caused the discoloration.

That said, Zales still sucks.

Setting the ring aside I went into their store three times and of those three times only one time was someone even remotely helpful. So in my mind they still suck.

So we got heather a new ring, and I'm happy to say that thus far, her finger is still very much not green.

Yay not green!