Friday, the 8th. It only FEELS like the 13th.

My desktop PC at work is still hosed.  Oracle won't work on it.  That means that the 24 or so automated processes that run every day haven't run since Wednesday. Maybe it is time to move them downstairs to a PC in the data center / server farm room.  I guess I ought to do that before I piss away another day trying to fix this POS outdated PC that I am stuck with....

Normally, Friday when it isnot raining would be a motorcycle day - but when I went outside this morning it was pretty chilly,and I decided t drive the old Volvo instead.  I would rather ride, but riding cold isn't much fun, and at my age, I don't need to do things that aren't fun when they are supposed to be fun.  Sunday, there's a Breakfast ride with the Ramblers that I plan on riding - hope it doesn't get colder before that.

I do plan to ride some more before it gets too cold.  Years ago, I rode all winter, but I was younger then, and had a snowmobile suit that (mostly) kept me warmer than necessary.  Maybe I should get another one - we'll have to see about that.

Anyhow, I think I will move all the automated stuff downstairs, and then get the miscellaneous pickups and sendings caught up -  then I can spend the rest of the day doing something else - like trying to make this XP POS on my desk actually talk to Oracle.

I just bought another KVM switch (powered) to replace the unpowered one I bought a while back that has gone all flakey on me.  Brought it in and discovered I had mismatched video connectors, so I ordered the needed gender menders.  They arrived yesterday.

Today I came in, hooked it all up anticipating great results, no more lost mouses - and what I got was no display - the monitor switching stuff does not work. Damn damn DAMN!  I knew everything was going too well.  Now I gotta go back to the vendor, and am still stuck with a flakey KVM switch.  I should have known it wasn't too late for something else to turn to poop for me.

Well, now I have to go downstairs and get these auto-scheduled things to run again, and get all the back stuff caught up, or I'll have a double shift facing me on Monday.

I plan this weekend to pull down everything Greywolf has ever written and store it on the Big Server.  His RosFic is too good for it to be hidden away. It will be a PITA - some of his stuff is pretty large, but I need to do it for myself and for posterity.

I'm going downstairs to curse at hardware.  Have a great rest-of-the-day, y'all.

Friday the 13th came today....

On the offhand chance most of you aren't old enough to remember Pogo, a comic strip, the title comes from a favorite statement of Pogo Possum - 'Friday the 13th came on Tuesday this week.'

This started as a pretty good day - light traffic on the way in, not too much grief waiting - at least not until I booted my PC and tried to log onto the network.

In a word, it did not happen - the blasted thing would not boot, and gave me a BS message about how something needed was not there.  Well, of course, nobody had a boot CD, nobody had a boot floppy, nobody had a release CD, so I was reduced to removing the drive and putting it into a PC that I own, to see if I could find what was missing.  I could and I did, and then I moved the drive back to where it belonged.

No joy - I changed the BS message to another BS message, but the (muttered imprecations) thing steadfastly refused to boot.

I have a release CD.  Of course, I have it at home, and it is my personal CD, not something I want all over work, so I did not have it with me.

Eventually, someone came up with a bunch of CD's designed to do everything but eat (which is a pun on a very old IBM Utility named DEBE which was later renamed DITTO....) including a current release CD, but nothing did what was needed.

So I moved everything over to a Win/7 machine that belongs to me - at least I hope I did.  hen I remembered that a whole bunch of automated stuff runs from that desktop that was dead, so I had to create auto slots for each one (that I could remember) in the new machine.  I guess tomorrow I'll get some idea of whether I fixed some or broke more. Also, if I am blessed, tomorrow I'll remember to bring my own personal recovery disk and get the other machine working again mebbe.

Now it is time to go home, and I have not one new thing to show for the day.  I guess it could be worse.

Tomorrow looks like it will be a good day for the motorcycle - looking forward to that!

Be well.

Thursday at the Salt Mines....

Today is pretty much like any other day - you know, wake up, get up, make coffee, take coffee to wife, get breakfast, get newspaper, get in car and go to work, stop at 7-11 in Hampden for Washington Times and morning coffee - a pretty typical morning, and apparently a better morning than yesterday was.

Yesterday, I left my old Volvo at the shop for a radiator.  It has been loosing coolant, not a lot at a time, but Volvos have an annunciator panel that Tells You Things - and one of the more disconcerting messages will occasionally appear right after the engine is started.  The message says, 'COOLANT LOW - STOP ENGINE' which is a little disturbing.  It tends to make you think that the the next message will be something like 'ENGINE BROKEN - SHOULD HAVE SHUT IT OFF!' or something similarly expensive.

At any rate, I stopped in where I have things done to the cars one morning and asked them to check it before I drove to work. They took it back, and heated it up, then pressurized it, then took off some shrouds, then did some other stuff, and after an hour or so found a drip leak in the radiator itself - and suggested replacement. I went into the shop and looked, and it was not a fast leak, just a drop at a time, so it would not even leave a mark where it was parked - but knowing that Murphy lives here, I decided to get it replaced.

They checked the price and called me a few days later.  I choked for a bit, but decided it was better to have it done than for it to leave me in snow or something, so I arranged to take it in yesterday morning.  When I arrived they had a loaner car for me, and I left it and went to work.

In my Volvo, the headlights are tied to the ignition switch - they go off with the engine.  I learned last night when I went to get the car to go home that the loaner didn't work that way - and I had left the lights on.  You don't really need to know what I said to myself about this discovery, but it wasn't nice.  I did have the good fortune, however, that there was still someone in the motor pool who would bring me a hotshot box, and I got the car going and headed home.  Wednesday evening is choir rehearsal and I don't like to be late, because I live with the choir director, so I skipped a minimal dinner and went straight to rehearsal, then headed home, famished, and stayed up too late cleaning off the DVR.

This morning I stopped by the place, and my car isn't ready. Maybe tomorrow morning and oh, by the way,  we didn't get any surprises when we got into it, but the job is labor-intensive - the book allows 7 hours so figure on spending just north of a kilobuck.

I'm old enough to remember when it seemed like everything cost $100 - and have lived long enough that that number has increased to $1000.  I make more damn money than I have ever seen before in my life - but I don't see as much as we seemed to have when we were newlyweds.  Something is wrong with that right there.

The day yesterday finished with my buying another motorcycle - a 1999 Moto Guzzi V-11 EV.  I had about decided that someone else could bid higher and my bid wouldn't change, and I'd lose it - only nobody was bidding so I got it.  Now I gotta figure out how to get it here....  It only has just under 19,000 miles on it - a truly trivial amount for a big V-twin from Italy.  I have known a bunch of Guzzi riders, and they all loved their bikes, so the worst that can happen is I'll end up selling it.  Now I have to get it registered and insured and get busy selling Big Suzi because I have  this feeling that my wife will surely point out before long that I can ride only one at a time....

But this will be interesting - I have never owned a Moto Guzzi before....

I'm not going to talk about Our Governor and his current pissin' contest with Our Mayor - He created the problem when he was mayor, but as with all things involving large bodies, it didn't catch up with him - it fell on the next incumbent. Marty thinks he can run anything, and does quite a job of insinuating his personal toadies into any organization subordinate that he thinks he can run better (or will bring him glory.)

I shouldn't be unkind about our governor - but I am not being unkind, merely dispassionate and truthful.

Looks like the Guzzi will be showing up next Thursday evening. Or maybe earlier (that would be cool!) It is coming via uShip (ever watch Shipping Wars?) and I'll have to decide by tomorrow which of the bidders gets the business.

I've been here at work watching something run most of the day.  Some of the work I am doing for a particular consultant involves hue amounts of data, and there's just no way to make an elderly PC breathe fire (at least not without using a BIG torch!)  This iteration (hopefully the last) has been running for te last hour and 40 minutes and looks like it will probably run another 5 to 6 hours.  Happily I don't have to stay and watch it - it can do this all on its own, and I'll look at it from home late on into the night.

It i a beautiful day outside.  If I had anything resembling an excuse, I'd bail out and go home and start up Big Suzi and go for a ride - but, alas, I don't have the excuse, so I guess I will stay here and work a bit.

Just heard from the guys that have my Volvo - I can have it tonight or tomorrow morning - and it didn't cost quite the kilobuck that we expected - came in at about 2% under that. Will wonders never cease?

I have no further rants for today - maybe tomorrow, we shall see.

Be well, y'all.

Doing What I Do

I'm an info systems specialist, who does odd jobs for a living. I'm one of the people who, when asked "Do we have this information and can we get it in this form?" says yes, no, or I'll look into it.

I've been in Info Systems since the late 60's, and one thing that is becoming more apparent each year is that everyone knows things and presumes that among the things known is how something has to be done to be effective.

More and more, when someone wants something, that someone will take up a lot of time telling me what to do and, often, how to do it. Nobody any more tells me what it is that they hope to accomplish, which would go a long way towards getting an optimum result.

Where I work, most of our data is stored in Oracle - partly because one of our major systems is purchased and was written to use Oracle, and partly because it is a good product, with a long life and a solid company behind it. It is also reasonably easy to use when I write stuff in the language I use most of the time, and while there is a lot that I do not know, I understand how stuff is stored and have written enough code that I can usually do whatever is needed if the data exists in any rational format.

Just an example - I was asked to strip down a Personnel database and a Mobile Phones database so the bosslady could load the resulting files into Excel and use Excel to find out what phones were in use by people who weren't our employees any more - so we would know to turn them off. A couple of fields from one and a couple of fields from another, creating two files.

I had designed both databases, and knew they could be tied together in retrieval, so I did what was asked, and in one file added one field from the other database, giving one of the files all the info needed to avoid writing the Excel program. Then I thought some more about it and wrote an extract to create a file showing only phones assigned to people who were gone.

In the end, the person who actually had to use the data was as happy as a clam to get only 79 records to deal with instead of 800+ with only some labeled as needing attention. The person who originally directed that I do this was dismayed to see that there was no longer a need for the Excel program to do the comparison - but ran it anyhow and it worked, and it verified my results. I'd've had it two days earlier had it been clear what we were trying to accomplish - which was to find out if we had any cell phones assigned to people we no longer employ.

Then this morning I found that there was to be an inventory comparing our vendor's data about who was using what phone to ours. I found that wity minimal massaging I could download from the vendor site a detailed statement, parse it and pass it against our equipment and personnel databases and come up with a list of mismatched names - reducing the number of records to be examined from 1400 to around 200 - but this time I was asked if there was a way to take the vendor data and validate it against our data.

I guess the message here is if someone is going to be doing something for you, rather than let your preconceived notions of the process guide the request, explain what the desired result is and let the professional pick the methodology. If the pro is a pro and needs more information, you'll get more questions, and if no more questions are needed you'll probably get a happier result a lot faster than if you try to guide the methodology.

Enough of my grumbling. Have a good evening, y'all.

No longer Monday

Monday turned into a mental health day - by the time the morning stuff was done and the remainder was done in the afternoon, it was not worth spending two hours to travel downtown and back to work two hours - so it was 8 hours Medical instead of the four that I had planned.

If got cold overnight - it was still motorcycle-warm when I went to bed, and when I got up it was cold enough that I didn't even want to try to start one up.  I am sure that at least one will start - but there wasn't any real point since I don't really want to ride when it is that cold.  Must be my age showing through - there was a time when I'd ride no matter how damn cold it was.  But then again, there was also a time when I'd ride after ten beers to get a couple of cases to tote back to the barracks for those still thirsty.  Some of those adventures should have killed us all except maybe we just didn't know it at the time.

I have decided I need two more days in the week.  One to play poker and/or bridge, the other to bury myself downstairs in my house and fix the mess that is computers.  Procrastination is great stuff, but it can be overdone, and I've been proving that for a couple of years now.  I have a really nice IBM super workstation (dual 3 gigahertz Xeon processors) down there that I bought a year ago to replace the machines now doing mail server, file server, desktop and DVD/CD burning duty - and it still hasn't been fired up.  I'm going to be really pissed off if it won't start up.  I ought to go and get a one of the virtual machine systems except I don't feel like taking the time to learn it just now, so it will end up an XP machine doing everything that is currently done by three machines over in the work side of the basement.  I have a couple of terabyte drives for it that I intended to store all my MP3 and video stuff on - until the 250 and 300 gig drives in Alfred (that's the server's name - all my machines get names....  There's Alfred, Wallis, Rabbit, Howard, Charles, Golem and Andrew out there) started going bad.  Now I have most of a terabyte on failing/failed drives, and am pissed at myself for not taking hold of them when the failure started.  I'll probably have to go out and find all the stuff I had again.  This time, though, I think I'll do a RAID array and lay in a couple of extra terabyte drives against the day one decides to croak. They're cheap enough right now - if you look around they can be had for $100 or so.  If I can find the right motherboard, I may have to twin the super desktop just to keep from stepping on myself.  When Jamie left, he had cleared off what he wanted gone from the downstairs machine, so I can remove it and maybe replace it with something bigger and faster.

There's always something that needs done - I just hope I can recover enough of the web site and FTP site to make their rebuild just a matter of recollecting data from the binary newsgroups.  I'll also have to get a new Newsbin, since mine is on one of the fail3ed drives, and I'll have to go and make nice with Giganews, since my contract with them ran out when I let the credit card die that was used so they cut me off - but that was a year or more back, so they've probably forgot all about it by now.  Maybe I'll start on this tonight if I can find a piece of cat5 to reach from the switch to the table out in the other room.  Sounds like a good project for this evening provided I don't get sucked into a CSI:Miami marathon or something like that.

And of course I still have Christmas shopping to do - just about all of it, and I gotta call my brother because I don't have a clue in hell about what I should surprise him with this year.  This was a whole lot easier when he was only 30 and didn't already own everything that I could afford to get him.  I know - I'll call his wife and see if she has any ideas - although they've been married long enough she's probably as out of ideas as I am.

I think I've had enough fun for today, so I'm going to close up and go home.  Maybe I'll hear from Jamie tonight with more adventures from Australasia.  He's putting up his pictures at http://picasaweb.google.com/ijam357 if anyone wants to look.

Happy Tuesday, y'all.

Monday Evening

I thougnt I learned years ago never to change anything in the last hour of the workday - but I was doing so well at bringing some stuff together and making it work better.

That is, I was doing so well until I broke it.

I didn't want to stay late, and here it is already an hour past leaving time - and only the first two spawns do what they should, then the damned thing just goes to end and doesn't tell me why - and I have code in there that ought to force it to tell me why.

I hate it when I outsmart myself.  

If it ain't broke, don't fix it!  How many times have I told everyone else that, you ask?  Many times, and here I just spatzed myself. Luckily, I can just shut this down and let it wait until tomorrow, so I don't have to stay much later and I can get outta here.

But it sure is irritating that I did it yet again. I'm looking at the code that fails first and the code that works and they look the same. Probably I've just discovered some unwritten rule about programming in Clarion that makes what I am doing legal if you do it twice, but not if you do it three times. At this point, I dunno - but I'm gonna close up shop and go home - WinAmp radio has even quit working - which is something I want to talk about another time.

It'll be interesting to see just how long it takes to find it tomorrow morning.  For tonight, I give up!

Computers, redux

Well, I spent most of the day with my Toshiba 3500 tablet PC trying to make it make sense to me.

After getting frustrated all morning, I took it, my CD's, and my USB drives down to our PC repair shop to inquire if they had a USB CD drive that I could borrow since mine seemed to be not OK. There was one, but meanwhile I learned that one of the folks that lives in there has one of these little pups, and even has the right CD drive for it. We are trading the use of his drive for the use of my official disks. When I get back on Monday, it will come right up - it says here....

Meanwhile, I'll take the drive home and see if I can get the mini-Toughbook to come back to life. That would be a real coup!

I've just rediscovered internet radio - WinAmp comes with a set of directories to find almost anything you might want to hear - and some of it is pretty good. One of our local radio stations changed format a while back, and made me mad so I quit listening to them and supporting them - and on the internet I found a source of the sort of things that they had me hooked on.

The Internet is like a huge library - without a card catalog. Google helps, but if the search is broad enough not to miss something it can take years to examine everything that gets returned. I've learned to get clever sometimes with searches - but sometimes I get too clever and get frustrated.

Some SOB in our building finally turned the heat on - and has it up really high to make up for the month that had everyone complaining about freezing. Not cool (and no that wasn't an intenional pun, but if it works for you....)

Choir rehearsal was good last night - it seems to be getting better, or else I'm getting more mellow. But when it was done, I was ready to go home and read the latest from Greywolf at the Roswellfanatics site, which is one of the largest and most active Fan Fiction sites based around the Roswell TeeVee show. I should never admit to this, lest folks think I'm getting soft in the head, but I really liked that show - it resonated with me - and there are some damn clever writers writing to the show's character set and backstories. Some of what is written is crap, but much of it isn't - and as much as I'd like to think most of the writers were twenty-somethings, I have found a couple up around my age - and some of them are truly outstanding. In fact, I wish I could write like some of them.

Anyhow, now you know my secret vice. Please don't tell anyone, OK?

Actually, there's another secret vice - one of my compuers here at work has Linux on it - and Linux has mcuh better games than Windows, even their Solitaire is better. There's a Mah Jongg that will make you crazy, and a pretty good Othello, too. Since I use one monityr and one keyboard and a KVM switch to switch between computers, if I am paying atention, nobody notices when I'm playing, and since it usually happens only when I'm waiting for something to happen so I can continue something, there's no harm and no foul, although he bosslady has asked on occasion what I'm doing. When she asks, I tell her I'm goofing off, and she walks away, apparently the truth boggles...

I gotta get ready to get outta here. It's Thursday, tomorrow I am off, but that doesn't mean rest - Phyllis and i have a Joe visit, then I have to get ththoroughly swaddled and insulated and get my motorcycle up to Jack so he can put in the new steering column lock, then get home before frostbite sets in. At least it isn't supposed to snow before Saturday.

Happy Thursday to all of you out there.

Computers

I work with computers. As a result, I have a couple that my office did not issue to me. Being the cheap SOB that I am, I never buy anything new - most of the desktop computers around our house are things I have assembled from parts (including the media server in my basement that is currently waiting on parts) at one time or another, many of which have been upgraded to the point that I no longer know just what I originally built into them.

I have a (work-supplied) Compaq NX-9600 laptop/kneecooker. Nice machine, a bit out of date, big screen, weighs a little more than a case of beer. It also runs hot (apparently early P4's were like that) but it has been reliable and does most of the development duty at work, since it is stronger than any desktop that they've seen fit to issue to me thus far.

My lovely wife is a bit of a Luddite, and will touch no keyboard that looks like anything other than a piano, so she doesn't do computer things. I had hoped to get a Midi setup hooked to the keyboard that she has learned to love, but it hasn't happened yet, and the things she would need to use it for involve a really long learning curve. In order to try to get her interested (and to learn something myself) I picked up a Toshiba tablet PC, thinking it might appeal to her, with its ability to accept handwriting and such. It still might, but meanwhile I used it for a GPS machine in my car, and apparently it took a thumping that was more than the drive would like, and it quit booting one day. It tries, but gets nowhere.

Meanwhile, I picked up a Panasonic CF-T2 Toughbook that worked well - nice and fast, weighs next to nothing, good battery life. I had various USB CD drives and floppy drives laying around the house, so I wasn't concerned that it did not have either, for that ws part of how it got so light. Well, I fell asleep in front of the TeeVee one night with it on my lap, and apparently it spent too much time in contact with me - the fanless design demands air space underneath, and there had been none for a while, so it no longer boots quite up to XP - instead it ges so far, says "CRAP!" and starts the boot again. Of course, I did not get it with recover disks.

Then I got another Toughbook, this one really hardened - heavy, but nice and fast and it even came with a good battery (unheard-of!) so it now sits where the HP 6100 I had from work had sat, and that 6100 is going to be returned.

I got recovery disks for the tablet Toshiba, and spent about half a day discovering that even though it would 'see' a USB CD drive, it would not boot from one. So I googled a few things, and found that there is a utility to write a boot image (and probably all the recovery CD's) onto an SD chip, which I do have - but I can't find the utility anywhere, dammit, and the workarounds all involve a boot floppy, so I know where part of the weekend will be spent.

Meanwhile, the tiny wonder languishes, and I read somewhere hat it can be reloaded from an XP master set, then have the special drivers added back for the touch screen - so I have to get a pristine XP build, and then find all the drivers. More of the weekend gone, I guess - but with any luck at all I'll have them all back to functional next week.

I'm trying to get to the point that I can leave the big Compaq at work, and use one of the smaller machines as a Remote Desktop gateway to it, and then carry only the smaller machines. First I have to get them all healthy again.

I remember when computers would simplify our lives, or so they said. Then again, I'm old enough to have worked on computers that had tubes (and not the CRT variety) in them. We sure have come a long way, I guess - but life isn't all that much simpler, and as for paperless, which dates back to the halcyon days of the mainframe - well, I have yet to see anything computerized produce less paper than before.

I ought to retire and go to work selling the Police Department paper, I suppose.

I guess the point of all this is that life just gets more complex, and computers will be hated by even folks like myself that love them. If I were to bury in the back yard all the hardware I have accumulated over the years of working on and with computers, I'd run out of back yard long before I ran out of stuff to bury there. If I didn't know better, I'd say it reproduced by parthenogenesis (the thought of computers having sex has far too high a squick factor for even this old reprobate.)

I'd be inclined to get rid of them, but I still enjoy writing some software now and then, and when I can';t sleep or the TeeVee bores me, sometimes I get my best code just sitting there in my chair with the laptop on my knees. I am also addicted to the variety of music and video available through binary newsgroups, and am building a couple of collections just for me, of things I like to see and hear. Whether I'll ever get the chance to listen and watch what I collect is anyone's guess, but I've heard the best part of any journey is the getting there, so this collecting is fun - and at least big drives are cheap and fit inside the case - it the music were on LP's and the videos on tape, I'd've needed a bigger house just to warehouse the recordings.

Well, lunch time is over and the boss wants something from me, so I have to go pretend to work so they can pretend to pay me. Odd how that works....

Tonight is Choir Rehearsal, one of my favorite days of the week. Y'all have a good day, y'hear?