Ramble On

Yet another reason to implement one’s own jabber installation.

I’m not your typical systems geek. Most system geeks name their servers after typical geek things - science fiction, medieval characters, the simpsons. I even had some colleagues do “Ren and Stimpy” one time.

Me, I have gone with baseball names.

So far, I’ve named systems after Lou Gehrig, Jackie Robinson, Stan Musial, Casey Stengel, Bill Veeck, storage units after the Polo Grounds and Ebbets Field, and two student use workstations named after local-area minor league ballparks.

My two new servers are named after Roy Campanella and Roberto Clemente.

Not a bad all-star team if I do say so myself.

If it wasn’t bolted on.

So last week we finally got the ports activated for our cubicles (for our future student workers, and my colleague James Robinson). Well, unfortunately our campus telecommunications installer didn’t have any long cables with him (and don’t think that he wanted to crawl on the floor to install them along with the phone cables anyway) - and like most campus groups, the ‘cost’ was probably higher from them then someone else, so I knew I’d have to buy them, futher delaying networking to the cubes. (I knew I’d need at least 25′-50′ cables)

Well…. after rummaging through the cabinet to figure out part numbers of the 6′ and 12′ cables - I found the 40′ cables that I had ordered several months ago for this very purpose

Sometimes I think way too far ahead for my own good.

(p.s. - you like that little negative that’s not at negative at the end there? next up, Jason lectures on resume writing and real estate taglines!)

You know, Microsoft Windows gets a bad rap. Sure it’s not all that secure. Sure Internet Explorer is a wretched piece of software. And sure that the plethora of poorly written 3rd-party extensions and drivers sometimes make it not very stable.

But it’s the daggone second coming of vms and netware 3.x compared to whatever fool operating system the engineers at Scientific Atlanta put in my Explorer 8300. It can’t go two consecutive viewing sessions (I watch TV about 2-3 hours a week if that) without locking up while I’m channel surfing, to the point that the only thing I can do is pull the plug and reboot the whole box.

Maybe Cisco buying them will mean they get a decent OS. Somehow I doubt it.

I think I’d rather have Windows CE in the thing versus whatever is running in it at the moment. Anything would be an improvement.

So Tim Gaden over at Hawk Wings (a pretty decent, and pretty oft updated Apple Mail.app tips site) - went and posted an epistle on the value of “top-posting” - the practice of responding to an email above the previous sender’s message. As this (the “top posting”, not the epistle) encroaches on what many consider good taste, and might even violate an RFC - you might expect he got some responses, even an ode to bottom posting.

After seeing both of these, and somebody’s postscript to a Mac OS X Server list thread to “P.S. please stop top-posting”. I decided that I had to respond.

With a call to the WAAAAAAAAAAAAHMBULANCE.

Get over it.

I have learned that effective net reading means dealing with both equally, and learning to comprehend asinine email threads with 50 billion cc:’s and a mix of bottom-posting and top-posting and even a few of those idotic confidentiality statements made up by lawyers with too much time on their hands.

It’s called reading comprehension. It all started with Pat and the Cat and the Hat in kindergarten.

And what’s more?

I top-post and I bottom-post.

AND I LIKE IT.

Hey! Why is your head down on the desk there?

Oh nothing, it’s just a normal support day.

Support day? What’s that?

Oh that’s…

Five Thousand Spams
Four broken apps
Three new installations
Too many phone calls
…And a stuck floppy in a PC

Hey that’s rough, but it sounds like you are just doing a rip-off of the “12 days of Christmas”. Except you’ve only got 5.

Well, I’m waiting for the other seven to download off BitTorrent. Oh here they come!

Oh no!

Oh yes.

Twelve spreading virii
Eleven IE exploits
Ten RIAA summons
Nine Windows Holes
Eight logins failing
Seven server reboots
SIX STUCK ON CAPSLOCK
Five Thousand Spams
Four broken apps
Three new installations
Too many phone calls
…And a stuck floppy in a PC

Man, you aren’t kidding. How’d you get all that?

Users.

Users?

Computer users.

You know, like when you are surfing the net to read the Onion and Nothingsworth over in Research calls you because his christmas eggnog recipes won’t print?

Or when Doozi, with an “i” over in accounting calls because her sound for that dumb snow screensaver that’s really Claria-laden spyware doesn’t play?

Or when old Mr. BimbleWits can’t mail his “spreadsheet” when you know it’s just vacation pictures from Aruba?

You know, computer users. The ones that give you:

Twelve spreading virii
Eleven IE exploits
Ten RIAA summons
Nine Windows Holes
Eight logins failing
Seven server reboots
SIX STUCK ON CAPSLOCK
Five Thousand Spams
Four broken apps
Three new installations
Too many phone calls
…And a stuck floppy in a PC

I’d like to really go to Aruba

Great! Take them with you.

Who?

Are you not listening to me? Those folks that sent me

Twelve spreading virii
Eleven IE exploits
Ten RIAA summons
Nine Windows Holes
Eight logins failing
Seven server reboots
SIX STUCK ON CAPSLOCK
Five Thousand Spams
Four broken apps
Three new installations
Too many phone calls
…And a stuck floppy in a PC

Hey my screensaver’s not working.

WHY ARE YOU SCREAMING?