We'll be okay

Sure, Shana is out of town for a couple of days.

Gwynyth and I are just fine.

We are both mature enough to take care of ourselves.

For a few days, we can remain civilized. We can prepare our own nutritious yet nacho-based food. We can (probably) keep ourselves relatively clean, considering. We can make our appointments and meet our obligations. We can "for once find our own damned pants", as the no doubt common saying goes.

So far, neither of us has started a campfire on the floor of the kitchen to cast shadows on the cabinets and tell tales of the dark gods of the forest. We have refrained from fashioning instruments from the turtle shells we've been gathering by filling them with shells. We know enough to know that those shells can be traded to the neighbors for food and protection from the ravenous packs of carnivores which prowl the grasslands of the suburbs.

Of course, neither of us has been home all day, either, so all bets are off starting around 5pm CST.

This will not be like last time Shana went off on an adventure without me. There will most likely be no incident where I curl up into a ball on the carpet listening to Sting and slice my grief into my legs with the shattered remains of my favorite Boyz2Men CD. No, that CD is long gone. I will not put on a bunch of black eyeliner and mope about in a buckle-studded black shirt and moan about how awful life can be.

This time, Gwynyth is with me so my time will be spent making chicken nuggets and mac and cheese, most likely.

Shana will be back Monday.

Geek miss Shana very much.

Ooog.

Geek make coffee. Offer sacrifice to Kona gods for good harvest.

Geek bang rock on bigger rock make happy sound.

Geek try not get tears on sweater mess up cashmere. 

Sorry For the Late Post

I was busy getting kicked off another Ben Affleck Fan Forum.

  

Not Psychic Enough

  Yesterday's highlight (after spending an hour of my morning in the hallway due to a failure of the "security" system) has to have been the meeting.  

In my experience, a Monday morning meeting with a manager is rarely a good thing. The tip off that things are not going well are:

1. No doughnuts

2. No scheduled meeting

3. Conference bridge already open to the VP in another state

I didn't get fired, but it seems the 40 hours I put in last weekend have been erased from the corporate memory. They have issues contacting me after hours.

Now, I figured there might be an issue when I got the email from Friday night on Monday morning which let me know that I was on call for Sunday. I didn't know in time for Sunday, and therefore did not spend the whole day hovering over my email client just in case.

I was told I don't answer my phone. I let them know it never rang. My missed call log was empty in three separate contact numbers.

In the end, I was (for lack of a better term) bitched at for not answering a call on Sunday which they admitted was never placed.

They admitted that no one tried to call me, but I was still in a conference room being berated for not answering my phone. 

What the hell am I supposed to do with that?

What action item would you come away with?

I suppose I could burn up my cell minutes (which are, thanks to the fact that I pay for them, my cell minutes) calling all the managers every 15 minutes or so to find out if there was anything for me to do.

I did ask what my Service Level Agreement was for this job, because no one ever mentioned one. So, how long do I have to get to a computer and get working after hours and on weekends? The reply (I swear this was the reply) was "Instant".

By definition, my commute time could get me fired.

That's insane. I'm telling you that. I told them that. On some level, being members of the same species as the rest of us, they have to understand. But understanding has little place in corporate policy.

The action item I took away from this meeting is: Update your resume and find a better use for your time. I'm on it.

This is honestly the first time I've ever heard of anyone getting penalized for not answering a call which was never placed.

If someone uses the work "proactive" around me today I'm punching them in the neck.

Some Inappropriate Things

1. Gruul the Dragonslayer is a giant monster in World of Warcraft who requires a minimum of twenty-five players to fight/kill.

2. The Arena System in World of Warcraft allows the creation of 2v2, 3v3, or 5v5 teams which are named by the players.

3. Winning or losing in the Arena system has only a marginal difference in points awarded at most levels of play.

4. The best name we could come up with for our very own 2v2 team was "2 Gruuls 1Cup".

If you get the reference, I'm sorry. If you don't, please go on about your life without further research into these matters. It is for the best for all parties involved.

Moving on:

To: Marketing

From: Staff Photographer

Subject: Some editing required before publication

Hey,

I got the picture you wanted. I went ahead and used Photoshop to mark the nerds with our standard "delete me" red boob tag. Just airbrush out everyone but Bono and maybe put some women in bikinis or something. Anything would be an improvement.

Even getting this shot was a pain. Gates kept touching Bono's ass and then his Windows Vista compatible sweater seemed to blue screen.

Good luck fixing Bono's face so it doesn't look like he hates us all and is pissed to be doing something about AIDS or whatever.

You up for coffee later?

Thanks,

Staff Photographer

p.s. Keep an original of this for historical purposes. Seconds after I took the picture Steve Jobs stormed in with a strike force of iNinja Fembots and destroyed all sentient life in the room in a swirling vortex of razor-sharpened death. You know. Like he does.

Of course, Michael Dell was uninjured.

Just Sad

First, these posts seem to be getting later and later. Sorry about that, work has been filling my mornings with . . . well . . . work, I guess.

Have you ever been CC'd on an email thread which you regretted witnessing? Yesterday featured such a thread for me.

I was included on the Carbon Copy line of an email from our Software Build Manager to our Development Manager which posed a question about process, with specific inquiries about the method we might go about altering that process.

This email was met with a reply which was terse and bordering on rude.

The reply suggested that alterations in the build process were subject to approval by the build team, especially when the changes came in a manner which seemed arbitrary.

An explanation arrived in reply. It was brief. To the tune of "your process sucks and this is better" brief, to quote. There was an included offer to set up a conference call to discuss the details.

The Build Manager replied his thanks at the conference call offer.

The Development Manager replied to that with "I was being sarcastic about the conference call".

And the hostilities, which I would classify as veiled until this point, escalated. Angry emails soared back and forth across the twenty feet or so separating the two managers until I feared that the only possible outcome would involve an actual physical confrontation between these two men.

If there is ever a thing which would cause a person to feel ashamed on behalf of the whole male gender, it is most likely a slap fight between two software professionals.

Seriously. It makes a witness want to just turn in his penis and call it a day.

Fortunately a VP (and by now the CC list included people I'd never ever heard of) stepped in and threw the ice water of cooperation and team spirit on the whole tussle and both settled into an uneasy silence which has carried over for the past 18 hours or so.

It is kind of nice.

User, Generic

Ah, the "generic user". Bane of the IT set. How I hate you, you lazy little tool.

Instead of making everyone use their existing domain account, sometimes the decision is made to grant access to network resources via generic accounts not tied to specific users. In some cases (let's not name names, stupid non-disclosure agreements) the password restrictions are relaxed and the permissions enhanced. For instance, the generic account "testuser03" with the password "testuser03" would have complete authority to change anything and everything on the system while the user making use of the account would be much more limited in his own granted permission set.

Why would a company ever allow this kind of foolishness?

The answer is probably more simple than you'd think.

Unfortunately, I don't have it. Other than basic laziness or malicious purpose, I have no idea why anyone would allow it. Yet many do.

While having Superusers test an application makes coding that application easier no doubt (what with no worry about permission issues and all), recovering from an issue becomes an exercise in ghost-chasing. Sure, you can eventually figure out which machine was connected to the server at the time of crisis, but tying even that information to a real, punchable, living human is difficult.

This morning a user (an actual person) was directed to my desk because his remote session was unable to connect. This happens, so I logged into the server to find his session and actually end it to resolve his problem.

Instead of his name, or any name but my own, I was greeted with a list of connected sessions for "Testuser01" - "Testuser09", all in the same state according to the server.

"What are you logged in as?" I asked him over the cubicle wall as he had drifted back to his desk.

"I'm logged in as me."

I didn't see him, so I figured I was on the wrong server. It isn't like there is a list somewhere of what server has what purpose, so this is all guesswork anyway.

I cycled through half a dozen servers looking for his account and feeling more and more dumb.

Maybe, I decided, his session ended on its own while I was looking.

"Hey," I attempted to get his attention again as he was surfing ESPN.com,"Try it again."

Sometimes just giving it a minute allows an IT person to look like a miracle worker. The only work involved is crafting a root cause, which (in my experience) usually has something to do with phase modulation or a faulty flux capacitor sub-system.

However, his session was still stuck.

"Are you getting an error message? Are you sure you are logging in as you?"

"No error. It just sits there."

Between you and me, it does not "just sit there". It never "just sits there". Something happens, even if you have to note the order in which the system fails to a hung state and appears to do nothing.

I walked over to look. The screen was blank and looked for all the world like his disconnected session was not allowing him access.

"Start over, please. A new browser window."

He sighed, obviously very sad, and did as I requested.

The username field was blank, and he typed in his account name. You can probably guess that opposed to some variation of his first and last names it instead read "Testuser03".

Rather than stab him, I just logged off the session to give him access I am certain he did not merit.

I went immediately to the Corporate Wiki Site and posted this haiku:

 

Generic Account

Who the hell are you really?

Probably a noob.

A Couple of Quick Things

The first is this: I've fallen ill with the plague that yearly strikes all Houstonians. A nasty cough, sinuses that fill to overflowing, general aches and discomfort and a small, annoying, fever.

At the risk of sounding like an alarmist, I must tell you that I will likely die. Soon.

Before the illness took me, I managed to get to a large screen to see Cloverfield. As I feel it is my duty to provide public feedback on popular sci-fi and fantasy works from the geeky perspective, I will do so now. As always, I will try my hardest to keep this space free of spoilers.

 

Wash dies.

 

Okay. There are a couple of things you should know before going in to see the monster movie Cloverfield. The idea is that a handheld camcorder captures a ground-level view of a giant monster attack on New York. That much is clear from the trailers. For anyone expecting a jerky vision of destruction from the point of view of the screaming citizens in a Godzilla movie, it is in there.

But the first thing you must keep in mind about this monster movie is that it is not meant to be viewed as a movie at all.

There are seizure warnings at the ticket booth. Anyone who has spent more than half an hour on YouTube knows the queasy feeling associated with hand-held video. Cloverfield is well over an hour of that, so let your eyes relax and glaze a bit. The director is good enough to show you what needs to be seen. In that way, this film is more a series of powerful stills broken up by incoherent motion and yelling which is often unimportant to the story. It's a slide show. Don't vomit.

The second thing to remember about this monster movie is that it is not about a monster at all. Sure, there is a monster in it. And a monster is a plot point, I suppose. But Cloverfield is no more about a giant monster crushing Manhattan than Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants is about a giant monster crushing Manhattan.

Note to self: Time to break out the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Director's Cut DVD again. There is no better way to cheer up a sick person than with that film. Every single time I see it I end up weeping for about an hour afterwards, but even sick people need a good cathartic cry now and again.

Cloverfield has a side-plot about some screaming people and relationships or something, but the movie isn't about that either.

The problem with my spoiler-free review is that I can't tell you what the movie is actually about without giving it away completely and leaving you either pissed that I ruined it or so smug watching it in the theatre with people there to see a "Monster Movie" that actual fights may break out during the pre-show -- Probably right between the ad for Ford trucks and the AT&T "please turn off your cellphone" message. Once the real previews start there is rarely time for violence.   

In short, unless you are prone to nausea and motion sickness, I'd recommend Cloverfield. Due to the filming style, this may be an sci-fi movie which actually plays better at home on DVD. You may want to keep that in mind.

You may also want to keep Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants in mind as well. 

It is, after all, cold and flu season.