Things I Need Right Freaking Now

1. Sugar-Free Gingerbread syrup. I don't say it to make my coffee order sound longer and more important. I say it because actual sugar causes me stomach cramps and a bad mood you would not believe.

2. A new cellular telephone to replace the one which will no longer charge and prompts me to check my SIM. I checked my SIM, which for me means I pulled out the little card and cleaned it with a lotion-free tissue. That didn't help. Also, the whole process made me feel like a tool. My phone no longer makes or receives calls. It is less useful than ever and my high score on Motorola Pinball may be forever lost to history.

3. I need the guy who sits behind me to stop telling Jew jokes. Rather, I need for him to tell one I haven't heard so I can then explain that all of those jokes have their basis in the propaganda of post World War I Germany. It would be different , I suppose, if he knew that I am Jewish, but the assumption has been made that everyone will find these attempts at humor amusing. I will not be attending his Christmas party no matter how pretty the invitation may be.

4. Blue Diamond brand "Jalapeno Smokehouse" almonds, which are slightly more addictive than crack, in my opinion.

5. I need my MacBook Pro to show up so I can see how long I can last without installing a Microsoft OS through Parallels or Boot Camp.

6. Shorter waits for Battleground slots in World of Warcraft. Well, that is the solution to my actual need to pwn n00bz for a few hours to make myself feel better in general. And the Horde should play a little defense, damn it.

7. To get together IRL with some friends for the angry flinging of dice. It has been far, far too long.

8. I need for the Coke Rewards people to actually put something up there that is worth (if not the actual points) at least going through the Points Redemption Process -- Something I can cash in 4,500 points on and put this sad chapter of my life to bed forever. Or they could start putting points on Pibb Zero, which may be the finest soft drink ever crafted by the hands of mortals.

9. "Automating The Upgrade Process" needs to involve more "Automating" and less "Processing". Holy crap! I've never worked with such a tangled mess of code. Someone needs some type of award whenever the program does anything without the server physically catching on fire.

10. The DeathAdder.

11. A place from which my DeathAdder can deal out death. Through addition, maybe. I don't know, really. I'm just guessing based on the name. Math kills. I've been saying it for years.

12. One of those little smugness-generating Apple stickers for the back glass of the Geek-Mobile. Smugness-generating? Maybe not, but it serves as a warning to the rest of the planet that the car is Smug-enabled. I'm all about disclosure.

13. I need some time to catch up on the 3,000 or so hours of television I've downloaded and ignored up until now.

14. I need for someone at this company (a company which makes 100% of its money from the sale of software developed here) to match my concern level about the state of our Microsoft licensing. If our product were stolen, I'm sure someone here would be pretty pissed about it. Also, when I am acting as the ethical bedrock and moral compass for any random group of people, alarm bells should be going off somewhere. Loud bells. And strobe lights. And possibly some kind of automated flag-waving robot army.

-G

Snap your mandibles once to say you understand

Naming Conventions

When a server is built, it needs a name. Generally, I.T. organizations have a standard naming convention to excise creativity from this process.

Most often, the format goes something like (Shortened Company Name)(Location)(Purpose)(Number).

There are extremes, of course. One company I worked for used the machine's service tag to accelerate and simplify warranty support and slow down and complicate internal identification.

Another company used the Standard format for user-accessible servers and the model names of motorcycles for everything else.

At our house, most machines are named after fictional fantasy locations -- Most often those drawn from Massively-Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games. That has worked well, mostly, except that someone at Comcast uses the same naming convention for some of their routers so (unless I run my own DNS) my MP3 collection tends to get lost from time to time.

This organization uses the names of planets. No numbers, no purpose, no useful identification, no nothing but the names of planets.

In addition to confusing the new hires, this particular naming convention limits the possible machine names to just a few different possibilities. In fact, I've already heard horror stories about when they needed to recently decommission Pluto.

But anyway, the point is this:

We needed a new system and all the planet names were taken. So we used "Miranda".

"O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in't!"

It is a quiet and peaceful server. Just ignore the Reavers, please.

kthxbye

--G

Even my henchmen think I'm crazy . . .

Connected

In a stunning reversal of everything I know about Best Practices in Corporate I.T., I've been requested to set up an Instant Messenger account -- And to actually use the thing.

Part of this stems from the fact that when I was hired this company was completely out of phones. Or extensions. Or both. I don't know/care because I'm not the phone guy.

Also, apparently instant messages are the preferred communication tactic by those who share my office space.

This is weird for me. Our team at Reliant used MSN Messenger for pretty much everything, but I started to fear being connected when the trend developed of sending embarrassing pop-up messages to whoever had their laptop hooked up to a projector for a presentation.

I'm not going to say who started that tradition, but I will say that to this very day he gets a warm feeling from remembering the time he sent a message to a co-worker who read (along with a conference room full of suits) that his "intimate" rash was probably normal and that there was little to be concerned about as long as he stopped actually sleeping in leather underwear.

Such a warm feeling indeed.

As a side effect of this new policy, I'm forever more reachable by those who want to complain about my latest post here at Pr3++yG33kyTh1ng. Feel free to add me to a "Buddy List" and ship me complaints, threats, half-baked theories on the purpose of life or (most importantly) Coke Reward Points.

Over 4,000 of those things are slowly doing absolutely nothing in my Coke Rewards account. I have to go #1 almost all the time.

So. Yahoo IM contact information is currently crammed up in my profile on the right, though I never ever check the Yahoo email -- Like even less frequently than I check my MySpace messages, if you can believe that. You should add me to your Yahoo Messenger anyway.

Go ahead. You know you want to.

In other news, my work computer came with Office 2007. I've ranted a bit in the past about the state of the Microsoft Office suite and about useless features and terminal application bloat. However, I had not had the opportunity to try the latest version until yesterday.

I'm not too proud to admit when I'm wrong about something.

That won't be necessary this time.

Holy crap, Office 2007 is the worst ever. Whatever team put this thing together should all be gathered together again when the final release version is added to the International Computing Museum's "Full of Fail" wing and made to promise never to write another program under pain of removing either their thumbs or their space bars -- Depending on how militant the mob is feeling at the time.

But wait! To their credit, there is one useful feature in Office 2007. Incoming IM's are now blocked when someone is running a Power Point presentation. This feature alone uses over 400MB of system memory -- And it is worth every byte.

--G

Attention Whore of Hiltonian Proportions

Odds

You've seen the media representation of technology. Data travels flawlessly on spinning arcs of light, every surface is either chrome or neon, the full-time hackers who work on the systems have bad hair and completely coordinated "techno-goth" outfits and $900 Kenneth Cole laptop bags.

These places exist. Seriously they do.

But one must temper this knowledge with the awareness that for every high-tech awesome place, there are 5,000 little firms chugging along just keeping their code compliant and up-to-date with the latest operating system.

And so, I'm officially a "Code Monkey". My previous experience is all in working around the limitations coded into the programs by others, but now I get the chance to input limitations of my very own!

When I interviewed, I was asked if I had scripting knowledge. I replied that my experience was limited to cases where someone approaches me and says,"Hey! My code is busted! Fix it!"

And I generally can figure it out given a few minutes and access to Google. As for writing my own, I said I frequently find scripts on the interwebz and steal borrow and modify them.

Apparently, there are a lot of people who do just that and make whole careers out of it!

So there are no servers to work on here. Those are all on the East Coast somewhere I'm not concerned about.

User support is a hemisphere away from me, physically now as well as emotionally as it always has been.

Diet Coke is $.25 by the can on the honor system.

And most importantly, this morning I found a handy Starbucks where they made me a venti breve latte with sugar-free gingerbread syrup!

Of course, there are adjustments to be made.

As a people, developers are not a "Morning Folk". We do not expect them to arrive before 10am and we do not look directly at them until they return from lunch. I learned that yesterday while I dodged a stapler.

I'm faster than I look.

Well, This is I.T.

Okay, everybody! Coffee break's over! Back on your heads!

I've had two weeks to reflect on life, I.T., what cats do all day, and World of Warcraft. This has been beneficial time for me to reset emotionally and become ready to start something new. I've also enjoyed good coffee.

The whole process has been tolerable because I've been paid to do it.

There are a lot of things which become tolerable when someone is paying you to do them.

On Monday morning, I'm going to do another one.

I've accepted a job at a software company doing [insert technobabble everyone would skim anyway] and at 9am sharp I officially rejoin the in-the-trenches ranks of the over-utilized and under-appreciated nerd set. And that's okay. It's my thing. It's whatever the hell it is that I do.

At this job, I'll drive less getting there and back. There is no hardware work. As far as I can tell, there are no users to work with.

How weird is that?

I will continue to collect stories and spit them back up here for your information/amusement/State's Evidence -- I just have no idea (much like with these last two weeks) what time of day the posts will come up.

Visits to Pr3++yG33kyTh1ng will be like a glorious adventure. Think of it as a treasure hunt! Will there be some new gem posted this time or the same tired old crap that was posted yesterday? Some insightful observation or the same old mean-spirited ranting and personal attacks that just manage to skirt the libel laws of 49 states (Up yours, Idaho!)?

If we are lucky, the answer will continue to be "all of the above".

I May Keep Live Writer

History:

For the past decade or so, we've made most of our cash as a family from supporting Microsoft server-related support. While this doesn't mean that I've never gotten a call from someone who returned from lunch to find all of her work missing, the email she had been writing all morning gone, her Internet Explorer favorites overwritten with weird stuff and her desktop background replaced with a picture of some strange man (As it turns out, she sat down in the wrong cubicle), it does mean that I've been regularly away from the user community puttering away behind the scenes making Microsoft's server products function as well as (if not better than) they promised on the flash presentation some Executive downloaded.

Like ten freaking years, almost.

The whole time I've embraced the upgrade process from 95 to 98, from 98 to 98d, from 98d to Windows 2000 to XP to Vista on our computers at home. I've felt it was the proper thing to do to thank Microsoft for creating software with such weird glitches it requires a full-time support staff of surly, user-hating, science fiction-watching pasty people.

Bill Gates gets a "Thank You" e-card from me every year, and I don't see that tradition stopping anytime soon.

Here is a list of things which are stopping soon:

1. My user account control settings will never again be called into question.

2. If I go to a website and download a program, I will never again be asked if I'd like to download it and then again if I'd like to run it and then again if I'm sure I'd like to run it.

3. Software I purchase will no longer hobble itself if for any reason it can't access a massive database somewhere in Redmond which I have no control over.

4. "Ultimate" features I pay extra for will not have to be disabled because they slam the processor for 40% utilization while I just . . . Check . . . My freaking . . . . Webmail.

5. My totally up-to-date, much-heralded web browser will not just shut itself own in the middle of an article and toss an error message up to block my finishing the read before hitting the damn "Okay" button. You know what? It's not "Okay". It pisses me off. At least tell me why in the event log. If the OS knows enough to toss an error it should jot it down in the event log. Why else even have an event log?

6. I've got my own anti-virus. I said I'll take care of it. Windows Security Center should take my word on it, set some registry flag and leave me the hell alone about it.

7. My "Next Generation" operating system will not serve up fewer frames per second on better hardware than my old reliable one on hardware a couple of years old.

You know how I know all these problems will be going away soon?

I got the shipment notification this afternoon for my Mac.

Unfortunate Outbursts

I think it is probably safe to say that fairly regularly people drink a little and say things they may not have fully thought out.

If you need documentation, I recommend visiting any random Facebook profile.

Sometimes an outburst happens between courses at Thanksgiving, apparently.

We spent most of yesterday at our friend's house, latching onto their family gratefully for companionship and (among other things) awesome sweet potatoes.

We played Outburst a few times, boys against girls as nature intended. This has paid off for me in the past, like the time we had to name the Commandments and the Rabbi was on my team so I could pretty much take a little nap until the timer ran out.

Yesterday we got "Characters From the Bible" as our Outburst topic, and I was able to draw upon my WASPy upbringing to fill in names from the New Testament. Sadly, my ability to think on my feet (numbed by a combination of turkey and wine) all too quickly degenerated into "Sneezy, Grumpy and Doc" territory, but I sensed that the effort was appreciated. Of course, my low tolerance for alcohol makes me feel like a lot of my behavior is appreciated . . . And then I get another call from the DA's office.

Anyway, the point is this: When playing Outburst, "Nachos" is never a wrong answer. Carry that secret to victory, friends.

Today is Black Friday. I've kept my year old promise to myself so far, only venturing far enough outside to check the weather. I'm planning to avoid all non-food-related stores and shopping destinations until mid-January. All purchases for everything that won't melt during shipping can (and should) be made online. And the economy is crappy enough that shipping is cheap. Go Team Horribly Expensive Oil! I can have a whole bathroom full of towels delivered for a nickel!

You know. If I knew someone who needed a whole bathroom full of towels.