Usually I try to keep this place on the internet light-hearted and fun, but today I must share one of the most tragic stories I've run across in years.
You see, Arthur (beloved children's program cartoon character and proponent of reading and doing things for the right reasons) is having his identity taken from him. Forced to hide his rodent nature, Arthur is a victim singled out simply for his species.
The conspiracy is wide-spread. Some of the official Arthur webpages have been hacked and defaced, racial slurs scrawled across the title calling Arthur the hamster "Aardvark" and advising readers (mostly teachers) on the methods of "using" Arthur in the classroom -- with no regard to his feelings at all.
I know he is a cartoon, but I still feel for the little guy. Some meth-head freaks on Wikipedia even psycho-edited Arthur's listing as some kind of sick joke.
I submit as evidence a picture of Arthur in a hamster wheel:


For further evidence, look at the many subtle differences between the hamster above and this aardvark:

And then, I discovered this re-writing of Arthur's species has stretched inside the very walls of my home. My own beloved spouse is buying into the pro-aardvark hype.
I can re-edit and correct the Wikipedia entry all day, but I need everyone to please head over to Shana's delusional challenge to set the record straight.
Arthur = hamster.

As many of you are aware, I'm 100% on board with the oppression and enslavement of other species. It looks like I'm not alone in this.

A group of scientists has figured out how to coat biological viruses with platinum. After the bling is applied, they are coaxed into lining up to create super-tiny microprocessors.

Of course, using viruses for any type of experiment invariably ends up in either apocalypse or rampant zombie-ism. I think it is a fair trade-off if we can squeeze a few more frames per second out of some blistering 3D action.

Any easily (or even less-easily) offended people should stop reading here. The rest of this gets icky and twisted.

Hi, Pam! ;)

In the course of my daily research, I turned up some unfortunate URLs. It is extremely important when choosing a domain name to think of it in every possible context. PrettyGeekyThing.com is a fairly straight forward name. Of course, it is a very simple site. There are other names that are not so well thought out.

Here are some unfortunate URLs:

1. I need a vacation. How about one in beautiful in Lake Tahoe? We can find their brochure website at www.gotahoe.com

2. Therapists in the US merely wanted to offer troubled souls a shoulder to cry on. Let's hope their advice is not as short-sighted as whoever registered the URL www.therapistfinder.com

3. Welcome to the First Cumming Methodist Church. Their website is www.cummingfirst.com

4. There is one betting site that is way out in front as my favorite: www.oddsexchange.com

5. "We're not just a printer," claims the firm Tri-Plex. And they guarantee: "Short runs or long, we can handle both equally well." But it makes you wonder what kind of service they are offering from their website with a name like this: www.triplexbusiness.com

6. If you are looking for a place to download the latest songs you might think this one is a homage to bad digital music. It just so happens that the banner ad displays Mariah Carey so maybe this URL is accurate after all: www.mp3shits.com

7. Law firm Morrison & Foerster has more than 1,000 legal professionals worldwide. Surely one should have caught this. It contains a slang abbreviation for a rather strong swear word that would leave them in contempt of court: www.mofo.com

8. This drinks franchise has spawned a host of copycat stores around the US as it attracts customers by the barrel-load desperate for a schoolboy giggle and quick buzz: www.beaverliquors.com

9. Ingleside Vineyards of Virginia has a website. This makes me both laugh and follow up with "Awesome": www.ipwine.com

10. The plant-growers of Mole Station Nursery in New South Wales claim to specialize in the production of frost- hardy native shrubs and farm trees. OMG: www.molestationnursery.com

11. If you need an IT professional to fix your broken PC this could be a great place to start, especially if you are having a problem with your hard drive: www.expertsexchange.com

12. Looking for an actor and want to get in touch with his or her agent? Then "Who Represents" is a database of contact names and numbers: www.whorepresents.com

13. A building firm based in Ontario, Canada, promises: "No job too small, or too tall." They have even helpfully included some handy pictures showing exactly how they manage to get it up: www.mammotherection.com

14. Then of course, there's the Italian Power Generator company: www.powergenitalia.com

15. And then there are these brainlesss art designers: www.speedofart.com

Before registering a URL, these companies should have run the choices by their I.T. people. Any giggling would have been a sign to look in another direction for a name.

Edit: Shana suggested an internet security consulting company. For more information you can visit them at: www.rtfm.com

Edit #2: Andrew offered up a pet portrait site that could double as a fan site for the flatulence of John Woo at:www.woofart.com

Broken computer stuff completely sucks.
Of course, it also largely pays for what my family and I lovingly refer to as "living indoors", so I guess it has its upsides.
Our CIO stopped by my cube earlier this week and knocked. What CIO knocks? Also, there is no door, so he had to knock on the piece of plastic that tacks down the carpety stuff I like to stick pins in.
He asked me if I was monitoring "Context Switching" on the server farm.
Never, in a decade, has anyone ever asked me about context switching. Hell no, I'm not monitoring for it. No one has ever cared. I thought I was the only one who even found it interesting.
Windows native monitoring (and most third party monitoring add-in like sysmon and perfmon (which are considerably less third party since Microsoft bought them)) look at processor load and memory utilization. It takes very specialized monitoring tools to even notice context switching, much less analyze trends related to it.
In general a Context Switch is something that is at the core of a multitasking operating system, as it is in fact the switching from one application running on the computer to the other. A CPU can actually do only a single task at a time. Sure, it can do a lot of them in a second so it looks like its doing various things at the same time but down-level you can only use the hardware registers once. Intel's Hyperthreading tries to cheat around on this but in the end the CPU is still doing a single task at once.
Let's say your CPU is currently executing a program that is part of MS Word, now on your Citrix server this will not be the only application available so MS Excel is also running. The operating system wants to give Excel its slice of CPU cycles so it switches between the two. What happens is that the CPU registers in use by MS Word are written to memory, afterwards the CPU registers that MS Excel has been using are copied to the CPU. When these are in place the task the CPU is supposed to be doing will be executed.
Stack up 40 users worth of these and you can see where there might be a lot people spending time staring at the spinning hourglass. Oh, how I hate that hourglass.
The earlier indicator of excessive server load is memory utilization and processor activity. These are easy to track.
Citrix has an optional module that checks for context switching issues and (within five minutes) my CIO was proven correct.
That was a long way to go for a short conclusion. I apologize. As compensation, please feel free to discuss Context Switching at your next dinner party. I'd suggest just after the salad course.
He told me I'd been budgeted for more servers next quarter and wants a full and detailed plan for what I'd do to "fix" our solution. Our little group of servers will probably double.
I'm pretty happy about that.
But I still hate broken computer stuff.
Like our router at home.
Apparently, "wireless" in the case of our router refers to the need to walk upstairs every ten minutes and pull the power "wire" out of the back to reboot the thing.
I've made public my plans to smash it with a brick when the new router shows up. Smash smash smash smash-ity smash. Last night I picked out the lucky brick.
I updated the firmware, switched the channel, altered the "mode" and gave the router every possible chance to maintain our connection to the internet. All I want to do is download some podcasts and surf the internet. iTunes freaks my router out like I'd freak if someone dumped a bucket of live spiders on me.
Mmmm . . . bucket of spiders. I could have a lot of fun with a bucket of spiders.
A tightly sealed bucket of spiders. With a very very long handle. Maybe remote control.
You know, I should probably just wait a few years. I hear the Japanese are developing spider-filled robots in a secret bunker somewhere in Okinawa. I could probably pick one up cheap after they use them to completely immobilize every military force on the planet to return the Sony empire to glory.
I, for one, hope our spider-launching robot overlords can find a use for me growing sushi rice somewhere quiet. Hopefully hydroponic rice, since I hate to get stuff on my hands.

Spinning Our Wheels

I got some disturbing news yesterday morning.
I have a friend (no blog link) who worked with me at MD Anderson. Before that, he was at Shell Oil for years.
In addition to being really good at EverQuest, Jason is one of those I.T. people we have all heard about who was asked to train his outsourced Indian replacements before his lay-off date.
He was given enough notice in that round of lay-offs to land another job before the end, but I know people who haven't been so lucky as well.
Jason got out with tons of amusing stories from his days spent training people half a world away and some of the disastrous impact they continue to have on the bottom line. He still knows people at Shell.
Anyway, Monday Shell announced that they are delighted with the effect outsourcing is having on the stock price. As a result, they are ramping it up over the next 12 months.
They have also fine-tuned it. This time they will offer enough notice that they won't have to pay severance to the displaced I.T. workers -- several who have been loyal employees for over a decade.
There are a lot of questions that spring to mind over this.
When factoring in response time and system downtime, is there really a cost savings?
How do the business units feel about having a technical team that attends meetings from the other side of the planet?
Is this about efficiency? Using contractors instead of full-time employees? Hiding expenses from stockholders by funnelling money through other channels than payroll?
Is it evil?
I can't answer any of those questions with authority. I know how I feel about it.
And then there are hard facts.
Within a year, Houston will see a glut of displaced I.T. workers on a scale unseen since the Enron collapse.
These people will spend the following 12 months adjusting to new roles elsewhere.
Some will move away, but the majority will be absorbed (skills intact) into the Houston I.T. landscape - a landscape dense with Shell competitors.
During my interview for this job the final question from my current manager was "Why should I hire you and not someone else?"
I love that question. I always have.
The answer is the same, always: "Because I'm going to go to work somewhere. Would you rather it be here or at someone this company competes with?"
I think in the long-term Shell will end up paying a lot more for outsourcing than the books suggest.
I know in the short-term I'm done buying gas at Shell. And Quaker State and Pennzoil.
While I can buy petroleum products anywhere, it is wrong for a company to take the same attitude towards I.T. services.
Leslea sent me a link to USB-powered awesomeness. Due to the topic of today's post I wondered if the little guy might be a metaphor for the I.T. worker in the market today.
I think it can be for a number of different reasons. First, it obviously works very hard and goes almost nowhere. Secondly, if you remove it from a computer it doesn't do anything (though it remains cute and fluffy).
For the third metaphor, the "U" in USB stands for universal -- This little guy can do his thing anywhere with equal cuteness and efficiency.
I remember from keeping non-USB old-school hamsters years ago (as everyone should at least once), like the modern I.T. worker hamsters need something to chew on all the time or they become sick and despondent.
I also remember that the cute and fluffy little guys can inflict a very nasty bite if they feel they have been wronged.
There are ways I.T. people differ from hamsters, too. Like the whole "eating their young" thing.
But every metaphor has a limit.

Over the weekend a firewall hole used for testing was accidentally left in place. As a result, some enterprising spammer spent the whole weekend relaying junk email through our mail server. Thousands and thousands and thousands of emails.
Of course, it all got lodged in our outbound filtering system and stopped all mail by Monday morning.
On the bright side, I know where to get cheap prescription drugs.
Since I personally have nothing to do with the firewall and very little to do with our email system, I came out of the meeting as the only one un-fussed at. Looking good by comparison is the same as looking good based on individual merit. Not that any fussing was of a level I'd deem noticeable anyway.

Basically, my boss turned on his speakerphone and addressed the offending team member (who was not only not responsible for the firewall but had been working on the mail issue from home since 4am) by telling him how shocked and disappointed he was in the whole situation. He did not curse. He did not raise his voice.
And technically, even though my cube is about 10 feet from his open office door, the conversation was private.

By 10:30, things were going back to normal in the email world, so my boss called a meeting.
He apologized (three times over about 10 minutes) to the admin he had called out over the speakerphone and to the rest of us who may or may not have heard it.
I chose to not tell him that I've been personally insulted and demeaned at the end of a successful project and that contact from management during an actual crisis has often stopped just short of physical shaking. If he thinks that is the line I'm not going to be the one who argues to re-draw it someplace angrier.

And then I went to work on our old Citrix farm. I've avoided it like it has an open dripping wound so far, but there are applications still in use on the old girl and they are (understandably) broken.
Our new farm is load balanced and up-to-date and accessible from (literally) anywhere on the planet. The hardware is state of the art and the event logs are remarkably free of angry red marks of Microsoft pain.
The old farm is two wheezing servers running an outdated version of Citrix. Also, due to an error in the licensing protocol, you can't actually connect to them through Terminal Services. This means that to work on one, I need to plug in a mouse and keyboard and monitor. Only then, they don't show up. Even using USB hardware the operating system won't find them without a reboot.
So I power cycled the first server blind, with no way to know if users were on it, and the keyboard still didn't work. I needed to launch a session on it to initialize the drivers, only there is no real way to launch that session.
In the end, I found that the only way to gain access was to launch a third party application and break out to a desktop. That done, I discovered that the problematic applications were deployed on the other server. The other server that did not share the hackable application.
Due to lack of documentation, I started a full forensics job from the accessed server to the running production server I have no way to get into.
I kept picturing the swamp monster in the stump in the Flash Gordon movie. Timothy Dalton was pretty enough. I'm at least as pretty as Timothy Dalton.
So I dug around in a dying server full of users most of the day yesterday, pulling applications and *.dll files to the safety of the new farm and telling the Desktop Group to expect the calls as people start to have applications vanish.

Plans for today include finding the ex-employee who left me this mess for a fight to the death on top of a floating, twisting, spiked platform.

My Thumbs Hurt

Honesty time.

I'm horrible at video games.

I'm okay with this, really. If there were an award for most deaths in EverQuest, I'd interrupt my current naked run through dangerous territory to get back my stuff to step up to the podium and graciously thank the EQ Academy for their consideration and all the little people (gnomes, mostly) for their unwavering support.
Especially twitch-based games. My thumbs are powerful BlackBerry scrolling tools, but my reflexes are poor at best.
I've long suspected that any frag-tastic success at gaming is attributable to dumb luck or my penchant for camping the spawn points and firing a virtual rocket launcher at anyone who shows up just before they can fight back.
But yesterday all the luck and guile in the world failed me, and failed me miserably.
Gwynyth and I broke out the PS2. She wanted to play the X-Men game, but that game is cooperative and I wanted something a little more competitive.
We settled on Dead or Alive, a fighting game that allows a player to punch, kick, tackle and throw his or her opponent through destructible set pieces or off roofs.
I picked the angriest looking Kung Fu guy and Gwynyth settled on the girl with the nicest dress. And heels.
I tried almost every combatant available over the next hour or so. Gwynyth stuck with her original choice.
She beat me mercilessly ten matches to two. Her pretty-dressed avatar kicked mine in the face, chest and groin and repeatedly threw pushed and kicked me off overhangs, through parking garage walls and over railings.
Gwynyth is a poor winner. I suspect the standard Texas school curriculum includes Math, Science, English, History and Trash Talk, a subset of Social Studies probably.
"I'm going to beat you down again, old man."
"Oh. You want me to defeat you again?"
"Push the square button. That helps." (It doesn't, by the way.)
"You've been beaten again, but remember that time two matches ago when my girl grabbed your guy by the beard and rammed his face into the wall again and again? That was a good time."
She continued the trash talk through dinner and my switch to Mortal Kombat. The constant sprays of blood hastened our switch back to Dead or Alive. Where the beatings resumed.
As we put her to bed, she couldn't resist reminding me about the time she threw me off a cliff and I bounced across the cobblestones. I muttered something about my (legitimately) sore thumbs. Older people develop thumb cramps. I have a potassium deficiency and I'm allergic to bananas.
"Fine, Whiny McWhinester."
I turned at the top of the stairs and walked back to her doorway fully intending to lecture her about sportsmanship and being a good winner.
All attempts at good parenting evaporated when I saw the confident smirk under the pink mesh canopy.
"It's on for tomorrow! Be prepared to bring it!"

"It's already been brought old man, but I can bring it again."

Were it not for a stupid email outage, I'd have stayed home today to practice.

Hey! Look!

If you need a strong password for Windows XP, open a command prompt (Start>Run>cmd) and type:

"net user administrator /random" without the quotes.

A strong Windows approved password will be generated without having to think anything! Yay for not thinking!
I'd never used that little function until earlier this week. Also, I'd never missed it since I only used it because I was researching this post.
Truth is, Windows XP is full of functionality no one ever uses. These extra apps are a major source of the billions and billions of security related issues which come up all the time.
They are also the reason my current Windows XP directory takes up (just checked) 2.33 Gigs of space on my hard drive and is using a staggering 640MB of memory (page file) for me to compose this and use Firefox.

So, Joe brought me a desktop computer to manage . . . um . . . media gathering optimization exercises?
The computer included a license for Windows XP Professional, but I didn't know the password. I also didn't want the password. Seemed rude.
So I loaded a version of XP I found earlier called TinyXP to replace the licensed version.
TinyXP has the extra junk included with XP removed. Like Internet Explorer. And the bits and parts associated with Microsoft Office. And the Windows sounds and screensavers.
Strangely, audio and printing support are left in. So is MS Paint. Wordpad and the Calculator are missing, but the Microsoft Sidewinder game controller is still supported.
Here are the advantages:

1. On disk, the install (Windows directory, Documents and Settings, and Program Files) takes up just under 400MB of space. Contrasted with my figure of 2.33 Gigs for the Windows folder alone you can see it earns the name TinyXP.
2. Stuff doesn't run in the background. Listen. According to Task Manager, the OS is using under 40MB of ram. That leaves quite a bit available for whatever I'd like to do.
3. The distribution includes, uTorrent (for um . . . verifying network speeds?), a browser (which I replaced with Firefox), WinRAR, and the Windows management suite has been replaced with versions of everything that run cleaner and use up fewer system resources.
4. The whole OS installed to a freshly formatted drive in six minutes.

The distribution won't work on a laptop (no power management junk left in) and some driver updates were problematic because the manufacturer-supplied drivers included applications which relied on Windows XP Bloatware features TinyXP doesn't include. The workaround is the bust up the executable and manually install the driver files - but it works.

The end result is that the system is fast and responsive. I haven't missed a feature yet. Unless you count remote management, but that is more an issue with stairs than TinyXP.

Since it is offically October, today will be spent rigging up the house to try to make small children cry by the end of the month. 'Tis the season.