Of Homes And Gnomes

I have responsibilities here in Columbia. I mean outside of work (which consisted of five and a half hours of meetings  today only because I skipped one). I've been tasked with finding our new home. Shana sells ours (nearly impossible in this crappy market) and I search new housing areas for a place with solid gold toilets.

I found a place with a totally bricked in backyard. I immediately thought of filling it with water and holding mock naval battles for the amusement of my subjects.

Then I thought about how cool it would be if the wall extended all the way around the front of the house so that my garden hose could create a moat, which has been a long-term goal of mine for a while.

Stupid Girl Scouts and their high-sugar cookies.

The agent selling the house said they would not extend the wall around the front, though. She acted like I was crazy for even asking, actually. Perhaps it was because of my searching dressed in ripped jeans and a Gwar t-shirt. Maybe she just skipped her meds.

Anyway, I found another house before that agent could follow through on her threat and "call ahead" and now I have to time the purchase of that house with the sale of our own.

That is almost impossible.

But anyway, at work today we took the test servers and dropped them into the Organizational Unit with the new Group Policy Object, then requested that they be rebooted and scanned for vulnerabilities. The security team wanted to know who built the servers, since that group would need to reboot them.

When they asked me, I realized that I had had no contact with the people who actually touch computers so I replied,"Server gnomes?" with kind of a half shrug.

Without cracking a smile, the security guy informed me that there were no "Server gnomes" and that this company had been using Oompa-Loompas since 1998 as a cost-saving measure.

I'll be avoiding the server room on purpose now, because those little guys freak me out.