One bourbon, one scotch, and one mav

Snow-Crash:~ mav$ ping yahoo.com
PING yahoo.com (66.94.234.13): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 66.94.234.13: icmp_seq=0 ttl=51 time=49.459 ms
64 bytes from 66.94.234.13: icmp_seq=1 ttl=52 time=37.810 ms
64 bytes from 66.94.234.13: icmp_seq=2 ttl=51 time=58.759 ms
64 bytes from 66.94.234.13: icmp_seq=3 ttl=51 time=75.472 ms
^C
--- yahoo.com ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 4 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 37.810/55.375/75.472/13.774 ms


Hey, it’s not great, but it’ll do until I can get DSL installed. So, just to recap, that was a four day outage starting on Wednesday afternoon sometime and ending the following Sunday morning. During a holiday weekend. Very impressive, guys. DirectNIC/ZIPA went through a goddamn hurricane and was only down for three.

After working my current job for several months (coming up on my 1 year anniversary in 3 weeks) I can say this: In the world of enterprise, a system’s worth is determined by the money, time, and effort you are willing to put into it. Thanks, CableOne, for shouting to the heavens “Fuck Twin Falls, ID, we don’t give a shit about you.” At least we know where we stand.

Expounding on Buddha’s comment. God, does CableOne ever suck. I came home after work (GAAAAAAAAH!) yesterday evening, expecting to spend a while hanging out on the Internet and watching Angel and fuck, I can’t even do that. The ‘net is so fucking slow that pages are loading like 56K, and so I end up spending the evening watching Angel and lamenting the choices of this week, including but not limited to why the fuck I ever stuck with CableOne when they have treated me so horribly over the last year.

I spent all day today up at my grandparents’ house, which is just about enough drama for this week. Then I come home and find out that holy fucking shit, CableOne has managed somehow to suck MORE. And yet somehow, it’s still working. Barely. I can’t send any email, since Cableone’s SMTP seems to be down, and connections to my webhost’s secure SMTP seem to be timing out. Probably more of their ‘intelligent’ network filtering. They were acting wonky before this whole thing went down.

I suppose this is what I should expect from a company who has refused on four seperate occasions to replace the drop to the computer room in my house. I have told them before that I thought it was the drop that was causing my cable connections to reset, but after four seperate visits, they still refuse to replace it. It was actually easier to put the cable modem in another room with a different cable drop and run a huge-ass lan cable to my router. This is the kind of quality service I’ve come to expect from the cocksuckers at CableOne.

So anyway, I guess I’m going to have to look into DSL. I enjoy contacting Qwest about as much as I enjoy hammering nails through my nutsack, but at this point, anything’s better than Cableone.

Even 56K.

They’re remaking The Prisoner.

This just in, updated tagline for current day: “I am not a number! As long as I never attempt to exercise any fair-use rights, do any significant scientific research, express any societal opinion that falls outside Biblical guidelines, or hint that my government could be wrong, I’m a free man!

Mal: Now, this is all the money Niska gave us in advance. You bring it back to him. Tell him the job didn’t work out. We’re not thieves. But we are thieves. Point is, we’re not takin’ what’s his. We’ll stay out of his way as best we can from here on in. You explain that’s best for everyone, okay?
Crow: Keep the money. Use it to buy a funeral. It doesn’t matter where you go or how far you fly. I will hunt you down, and the last thing you see will be my blade.
Mal: Darn.

When you get a minute, read this article. It’s rather lengthy, so you’ll want to have 10 minutes or so.

When I was in school, I wrote a short paper about Stanley Milgram, the history of his experiments and how they still hold up today, under modern conditions. This article is a pretty strong example of the same thing - basically, if an authority figure asks you to submit to something, you will usually do it. No matter who the authority figure is. This is the sort of thing that makes social engineering possible, and as horrific an example as the previous article is, it is a shining example of social engineering at its finest.

I just came back from the dentist, and not only did the dentist (Dr. Steve Lincoln reprazeeeeeent) manage to fix up the gaping hole in my molar, but he also declared my teeth “ugly, but functional.” Given the circumstances that’s about the best thing that I could hope for.

So I came home, having about 5 hours before my shift starts, and not particularly wanting to nap, started watching a random Scrubs episode. It happened that I stumbled upon episode 413, which if you’re a Scrubs junkie is a hallmark episode, one of the best eps they created. JD talks about ‘trainwreck codes,” when everything that can go wrong does go wrong with a patient all at the same time. I started thinking about my own job, and I realized that the thing that I really do enjoy about it over all others is the ability to take what someone considers to be a nearly hopeless situation and do a 180 on it.

What so few people seem to realize - and having worked in IT, with people that I would consider smart, this is really rather disturbing - is that the most foolish thing anyone can do is act immediately. There’s a line between acting impulsively and refusing to act, and my entire job is balanced right on that line. Success or failure in my line of work can almost always be determined by making the right call at the right time.

Customer calls in, has this colossally huge problem, the little lightbulb (blue led lolz) goes on in your brain and you start asking questions. You question and question and question, and get right up to the point where you can tell the customer is ready to ask the “We’ve been on the phone for 15 minutes, why haven’t you DONE anything yet?” when it just all pops into place, and you can lay it all out.

“Power off and reinsert the original drive, bring the system up and read configuration from the original disk. We’ll boot the system and see if we can get it up into the OS, at which point we’ll fail the data drive out manually, replace it, and initiate a manual rebuild blah blah blah blah” and suddenly their situation goes from completely and utterly hopeless, disaster recovery territory to not only 100% working, but better than it was. Calls like that are what make the job doable, and they are far too rare to not spend a little time dwelling on.

Last night I’m sitting at home sitting on my ass and contemplating my life, drinking a Pepsi, eating a piece of beef jerky, and watching episode 2 of Eerie, Indiana - you know, the one where Mars and Simon’s friend Steve gets the fucked-up retainer that lets him hear what dogs are saying? I run my tongue along my teeth, and suddenly I realize there’s a big goddamn hole in one of my molars.

Now, my teeth are hardly in the greatest shape. I’ve probably got more of the fuckers that have been worked on now than I have virgin teeth, most of them have been violated in a variety of heinous ways due to my overconsumption of sugary beverages and the fact that oral hygiene wasn’t a big worry in my house growing up. (Lesson for parents or parents to be: It’s really true, dental hygiene habits developed at youth really do stick, or at the very least, lack of dental habit really fucking sticks.) I’ve been doing way, way better as I get old and cranky but it’s a bit fucking late now.

So tomorrow I get to go to the dentist and see if he can put my molar back together. In the meantime, the really fun part is that every time I talk my tongue scrapes against the sharp edge of the hole. And since I talk for a living, my tongue is rubbed raw by this shitty-ass hole.

God damn, life never gets any fuckin’ easier.

It’s not like anybody ever reads this, so I’m probably just preaching to myself anyway. But here’s the score.

Over the last couple of weeks I have been myself a new system. However, the new system turns out to be less than stable. I have tested every component in the system that I am physically able to test. However, the system continues to lock up after long periods of moderate to heavy load and I can’t for the life of me figure out why. I am completely at the end of my rope, and I honestly don’t know what to do.

I need access to the following hardware in order to test the system:

• A Socket 939-based motherboard capable of supporting an A64 3000+ (i.e. an A64 system I could test my proc in)
• An Athlon 64 socket 939 CPU
• A PCI Express video card of any type

There’s no way I can come to any sort of conclusion without at least one of these parts. If I can at least get a video card, I can come to some sort of conclusion based on this. If I can’t get something that will allow me to test this out and come to some sort of conclusion, I’m going to have to replace all three of these components - and if this is the case, I’ll be taking my really angry crowbar to my mainboard, cpu, and video card.

No, I’m not kidding.

In addition, my crowbar makes Gordon Freeman’s look like a piece of shit.

So, if you would like to see me destroy my CPU, mainboard and ram, by all means, do not help.

This is so goddamn crazy that it deserves a 24-bit alpha blended

Jesus fucking Christ. CD’s released by Sony Music actually rootkit your goddamn box!

No, really: HOLY FUCK! Holy mother of fuck! Shitfucking ass-spelunking donkey fuckers on a platinum shit-encrusted ice cream cone! How in the ever-living dickshittery does the music industry expect to be taken seriously while doing shit like this? “Oh, we’re just trying to make sure that our listeners don’t rip their music by ROOTING THEIR GODDAMN MACHINES.”

Christ, I hate Windows so much. There is NO GOOD GODDAMN REASON why this should be possible. In addition, there’s A LOT OF CAPS IN THIS POST. My mind is still swimming. How many things have to go wrong in what order for this sort of thing to happen?

1. Gates and DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEGODDAMNSHITFUCKINGDEVELOPERS MAN add an inocuous feature to a security-poor OS to allow inserted CD’s to automatically run programs. (for reference this sort of thing is called “foreshadowing”)
2. Previously mentioned assfuckers release an OS with extremely fine-grained security model that just happens to be so incredibly difficult for end users to work with that it pretty much requires all users to run everything as admin.
3. Music industry asshole tells music industry asshole-in-training/peon to do something about the rampant piracy issues.
4. Music industry asshole-in-training/peon discovers that English company is writing rootkits for honest companies who would never ever ever do anything bad (please reference Sony CEO we-will-stop-them-at-the-routers batshit loony speech. I’ll link this if I can ever find it again.)
5. Sony Music directors decide that nothing can possibly go wrong with hacking users’ systems to prevent them from doing anything illegal. Breaking news: Two wrongs actually do make a right (if you’re a multinational corporation.)
6. Users jam these discs in their systems worldwide, thus allowing not one but two multinational corporations to compromise their computer simultaneously.

See this link for all the gory details.

In addition, Mark Russinovich is a crazy badass on any platform, and sysinternals/winternals kicks a ridiculous amount of ass.