04:22 Sunday, 25 January, 2015
This weekend is being much less exciting than last weekend. So far, I have: gone on a minor Costco run Friday night, slept, slept, gone out in semi-fruitless search of sourdough bread (the good sourdough at Sprouts vanishes quickly), and now re-indigoed my hair.


00:58 Wednesday, 28 January, 2015
Tuesday: didn't get as much sleep, slogged into work. Had a fascinating hallway chat with Mr. Wizard Beard, who has pruned his formerly glorious facial tresses back down to a reasonable inch or two of starting point. Lunch was nice even though the sandwich was uninspiring. Purple and the guys were talking about heat sinks. (A lot of times various of the guys will ask Purple to explain a thing. It's great.) I googled up illustrative pictures.

The Dean has made the jump from Extra Special Groundskeeper to HR (Parties Division). I think it's a good change for him. He wandered through on his way back from lunch. We are trying to pin down a date for the kickoff of the You Haven't Seen That?!?!? movie night series. On his way off, he made some casual reference to the contents of Blade Runner. I indicated confusion and unfamiliarity. "You haven't seen that?!!??!!" he asked, proving the relevance of the series title.

I do like taking notes on a nice large sheet of paper. I should make sure to do the Printout of Things for the 1:1 more often again, as it's a helpful framework. My manager said some reasonably encouraging things, even though they were not the sunny-day path. Also, some projects! Whee!

Among many other small items of the day, there was a fellow bemoaning the lack of jam in his building on [off-topic]. One of my unofficial duties is to make sure that random stuff that comes up in [off-topic] gets properly handled, so after mentioning that I had seen jam in my building (today, with no boom), I cracked open the user console for the helpdesk. After a few false starts, I selected the category most likely to correspond with jam tomorrow, even if there was no jam today.

"Jelly in [off-topic-guy's-building] invisible. Jelly in [ajlunatic's-building] visible. Please look into this." File on behalf of: remove ajlunatic, insert off-topic-guy, submit.

Watch confirmation page load. Look for link to ticket to add ajlunatic as cc. Realize that last week's overhaul of user-facing console removed the module containing the most recently filed ticket link from the left-hand side, perhaps because it was too fucking wide on a page with generally shittastic use of space. Realize that because some fuckhead thought all Facilities tickets (kitchen issues included) should be fucking private as all fuckery, I can't jump over to the terrible blue-and-white interface to add myself (or, well, grab the ticket number and whine to helpdesk).

Write up the newly fucking discovered goddamn bug involving the workflow of the fucking assistant, and file it the fuck against the goddamn system.

Call helpdesk. "Hi, I need to be added to a ticket I just filed on behalf of a colleague."
"No, I don't know the ticket number, and I can't find it, it's in Facilites."
"Let me spell his name."
Two minutes pass.
"No, it wasn't technical, it was in Facilities. Under Food & Drink, I think."
Another three minutes.
I spell my own user ID, and I am at last added to the ticket.

I am still cursing in IRC when Purple shows up to drag me away from the computer for the night. (My dad is much better about praise and constructive criticism.)

I contacted technical support regarding my attempt to install TomTom HOME, when the installation program would not open after download. The reference number for this conversation is []. I was told that this was due to my having downloaded the file over a wireless network connection and the file had become corrupted or had pieces missing, and I should try downloading it on a wired network connection.
I doubted this answer.

( Read more... )

After installing Service Pack 3 and .NET Framework 2.0, the identical file that had not opened previously did in fact open and successfully installed TomTom HOME.

Please make your tier 1 technical support representatives aware that this error can in some cases be resolved by ensuring that SP3 and .NET Framework 2.0 are installed.

---

Many thanks to sithjawa for helping and suggesting the solution that actually worked. ♥

( Gay movie. )
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/27/email_harvester_lawsuit/ -- go Project Honey Pot! Best of luck!

http://www.scoutwalker.com/ -- still funny. (I found it!)

http://kucinich.house.gov/SpotlightIssues/documents.htm -- Did I link this already? Kucinich thinks Cheney should be impeached.

http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/stories/2007/04/26/0426edabort.html -- Georgia wants to define the beginning of legal life as the moment of fertilization, which would outlaw certain kinds of birth control devices as well. I am appalled.

http://blag.xkcd.com/2007/04/19/life-imitates-xkcd-part-ii-richard-stallman/ -- RMS with a katana. Ph34r.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2003683287_webtimecapsule26m.html?syndication=rss -- Time capsule from the 1950s. Pr0n from the 1970s.


I did tech support last night at the end of writers group. V had a computer problem. Turned out to be file type associated with the wrong program, which was what I thought it was when she said something about it. It was the work of a very few minutes. She paid me in cookies. Thin Mints. Hooray! We're also plotting a Rocky Horror trip. The thin mints for tech support got me much envy from my fellow Support denizens. I win at tech support, because I got cookies.


In the other end of things, where I was actually getting things done at work (brain-breaking things, which was why so much of my internal nattering wound up on LJ), I have things set to start in the direction of going first thing in the morning tomorrow. Tomorrow is a good morning to have things going, I think. I should be less sore by then. I was aching by the time I got home. No particular reason, just not enough bouncing around in my seat at work.

If I hadn't been so very, very tired, I would have been tempted to drive out to Mesa. I almost did. But I managed to not botch my will save, and went home instead. I think I need to adjust my meds a bit. This has been a crappy spring for a whole lot of people, and I've got the musical emotions going on.

Darkside answered the phone when I called after I got home and just vegged out for a while. Yay, Darkside. I was planning to share my glee at getting some of the DB stuff hacked out, but he was watching a game show with his mom. Instead of dismissing me, he kept me on the phone and I settled down to "watch" with them (I have no current TV, and really no need for one; I do have an old unreliable expensive tiny one, but that is not what I would call Real TV, especially as I've only rarely used it, and not for more than 10 minutes during the past 2 or 3 years) and we had a whole lot of fun. He seems to have embraced again the idea of hanging out on the phone, sharing an audible window of time together. That, and he also needs a) a job, and b) to be dragged out more often (or have more friends descend upon him). He has access to a hacksaw. And he said if there is no hacksaw, he thinks there might be a chainsaw. I didn't enlighten him about why I wanted to know these things; he didn't ask. He probably already knows, because either he reads my blog or my mind. The mental image of me using a chainsaw to cut up PVC pipe makes me think that I'm ten and about to get in a whole lot of trouble, and I'm not entirely sure why, because I never actually did anything like that when I was ten.

I got off the phone with him (almost a full hour later, which was nice -- he seems to be falling back into old-old socialization habits now that probably yet another crop of friends have drifted off with the change in his ability to contact them first), and then the phone rang again. (Speaking of phone, hcolleen, do you know where the wireless handset is? It's not near the charger and I didn't see it on your desk.) It was M from writers group, with a tech support question. That was gawdawful. Three women on that end of the phone, and only one with a slight amount of technical clue, and that one was not M and not the person whose computer it was. I mostly talked to her, and she relayed instructions to the person at the keyboard. It was Vista. I don't support Vista. It was missing NTLOADER or something like that; the slightly-tech-savvy one had Googled it, and based on the Google, asked me if I had any XP install disks. Google had assured her that when NT Loader went missing, the sure-fire cure was an XP install disk. I pointed out that a) this was Vista, and b) this was VISTA. It was only after I pointed out that Coke and Diet Coke are both Coke, but different kinds of Coke did it seem to sink in that Vista and XP are Not The Same Thing. (And it was never just Vista, no; it was "The Windows Vista Experience", or "The Vista Experience", or even "Vista Experience".)

I wasn't able to help much, but I did get their boot order shuffled so it booted from CD first. And of course they didn't have the Vista disks; they just had an upgrade disk.

*facepalm*

Help.

I am getting called upon when the database throws a type mismatch error. I do not have access to fix it, nor do I know what should be there, but I can explain.

Laptops are fun for the whole family! It's great -- you can unplug them from everything and keep working when lightning starts lightning-ing.

Woah, that was totally green lighting.

The power's been out twice, so I'm writing in the dark again. I think I won't be getting my shower until morning, which means I should probably be getting ready for bed soon.

(Oh. Lights on again. I wonder how many times this is going to happen? hcolleen's box booted down the first time we had an outage rather than a brownout, so it should be OK with the surge strip. The grass mat she put up on the balcony blew down, because the wind has been plenty intense. I want to be out in the rain, but I'm not so enamored of that to dare the "light-ming", as the LF used to call it.)

( work )

( Leftover Leftovers Guy )

( Technical Woes: End-User vs. the Man )

Snarky Lady was telling me about her experience with Dell Tech Support. She was having problems, and she was telling her tech about it. In some detail. Quite firmly. The tech asked her to repeat that. She did, with quite some vigor. The tech then told her that he'd needed to get her irate on tape so that a supervisor could take action -- evidently they only voluntarily take extended action if the customer is demonstrably irate. (Which ... wtf?) She hazarded, that from what I related, the tech had heard me just find when I stated what I wanted to do quietly and politely -- he'd just wanted me to blow up on tape for the supervisor. ...If any current or former Dell tech support peoples pass by, have you got any insights on this?

Lots of assorted wet out there, but not much more in the way of Dog-Eating Thunder Monsters or wild winds. Scary Lipstick Phone Goon was talking about the tree branches that fell all up ons her car last night. Crazy stuff.

Maybe the heat wave will break soon. I know legomymalfoy has been documenting the crazy heat we've been having -- oi! At least my chiller has recovered -- the thunder/lightning scared it into nonfunctionality last night.

I had a bad, bad day with the computers today, from a tech support standpoint. ( No one around here tells me anything. I seem to be one of the few people who knows what some of these errors mean. )

( The computers around here take a lot of abuse, like the thing with the power button being accidentally sabotaged. )

I bitched at some length about the sheer amount of special it took to do that to a computer, and the Obso1337 Supervisor brought forth some of the latest workplace gems. It seems that the Plaid Geek (the one who I ran into when I was doing the interminable disc project) was cracking the cases on some of the non-working items brought in to him, and he found things inside.

Gum foil. Lollipop sticks. Soda bottle wrapper. All of these things are things that the call center supervisors see jammed in machines with more or less regularity, so we were impressed by the Plaid Geek's touching faith in the integrity and garbage collection abilities of the average phone goon (evidenced by his outrage that some of these unspoken Rules of Computing were broken). I started wondering how long it would take before the other shoe dropped for him; Obso1337 Super indicated that it already had.

"It's a surprise that some of these machines were still running," was Darkside's take on the matter, when I recounted the Tale of Woe (or "This is what I did at work today, honey!") to him.

"Mind you, these were the ones brought in for repair," I said. "Like the one he found with the underwear in it."

"UNDERWEAR?!?"

Yes. Underwear.

All discussions of that PC seem to have short-circuited at about that point, with the usual newspaper barrage of questions like Who? Why? How long ago? Wouldn't someone notice? Was it theirs? Were they ... you know ... used? Boxers/briefs/panties/G-string? and other such frivolities. Such is the zen of employment at this call center that the old-timers have found that it is safest to not even begin to ask most of these.

Though if we knew the Why? we would probably know the Who?, and likewise. No one who works with me (except for the IT guy, who is new) thought to ask the question Who in their right mind stuffs underwear inside the case of a computer? because we all know that no one who works there is actually sane.

This may well be a final farewell from the One Man Bald Nudity Crusade. Who else would pick such a charmingly literal way to tell the computer, "Eat my shorts!"

It's like they had levels in 'annoy geek' or something. Trash put inside the machine. Crisp bags. Lollipop sticks. WTF.

"My babysitter's running low. ...Late."

Strawberry blonde! Now made with real strawberries!


The guy who called up, called us fucking sons of bitches, et cetera, and then called us from a cellphone and whistled at us. Rev. Not-So-Nice Super eventually answered the phone on him. (He's infamous for answering the phone. We don't let him do it often.)

Someone insane called up wanting to know if we had an internet connection. Rev. Not-So-Nice Super said yes. The someone wanted to know how fast it was. Rev. Not-So-Nice-Super wasn't able to answer the question, and "put them on hold" ... complete with humming and bopping some "hold music" through his fist into the microphone. By the time he was about to "transfer" to Comic Pirate Super, who was going to take the call, the dude had hung up.


"My computer locked up!"
"What did you do to the computer this time?"
"IT'S THE COMPUTER'S FAULT! IT CAN'T EVEN SPELL!"

"What part of 'find a booth in Area 2' did you not understand?"
"I'M NOT SUPPOSED TO READ ALL THAT SPAM!!"
"Job-related paperwork being put on your desk is not spam."
"I DIDN'T ASK TO GET IT! IT'S SPAM!!!!"


(in short? Must. Control. Fist. Of. Death.)
Calling Darkside after work never looked like such a good option. A minute and a half with him at the end of lunch break. So good.

I was up until 2-ish last night with a recalcitrant old installation of '98 on an utter dinosaur. It's used, and this is at least the second owner on this installation. I found myself singing, "Please don't call me, I won't call you, don't ask me to fix it for you: I'm not Bill Gates, I'm tech support!"

What figment0 and I really need to do is have a few words with AOL tech support and get things changed; he really needs his OWN login and password for the bleedin' ISP, not his late wife's.

Eh, little by little. This time we actually GOT ONLINE FOR MORE THAN TWO SECONDS, which is a new recent record.

I think I'm'a have a few words with Comic Pirate Super when I get in, words like "please" and "for entertainment purposes only" and suchlike. And words with figment0 involving "backup" and "You have the installation disks for some of this, right?" and "You have got to be bloody kiddi-- ... of course you don't. Of course not."