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First day back at work after the long weekend has been a giant ball of suck so far... and the morning is only half over.

1. Failed A/C in the server room.

2. Failed Internet uplink. (Turned out to be completely unrelated to #1, unless last night's thunderstorms killed both the A/C and our port on our ISP's router.)

3. I knocked a spinning external hard drive off the shelf it was on. D'oh! (We're still checking it to see whether it appears to have suffered any damage; its fall was cushioned by a rats' nest of cables, and it still spins up and mounts...)

The whole building I work in (4 floors of offices and about ~40 offices) were without internet when I got in today. They said the ISP couldn't make it out until after noon.

Memorial day doomed more than just you JBI.

At least our ISP is local. As in, located in the same building; it doesn't get much more local than that! So once we figured out the problem wasn't with any of our own equipment (we initially suspected an equipment failure on our end due to the A/C issue, it was *hot* in there this morning!), getting the ISP to check out their end of the connection was just a matter of going and knocking on their door.

Been chasing a really weird gremlin the past couple of weeks. For some reason, the monitor would never go to screensaver or power off. I grepped the registry, made sure everything was right there, updated the video drivers, all to no avail. Sitting there last night I noticed that there was an extra device plugged into my USB hub. It was a small rechargable battery for the wife's hiking headlamp. I unplugged it and voila, 10 minutes later the screensaver launched and 5 minutes after that the monitor shut off.

For what earthly reason does a USB rechargable battery spawn some low-level process that keeps the OS from launching the screensaver???

I'll even take that one step further: In general, why does it seem like blanking the screen and putting the monitors into standby mode is rocket science, regardless of OS? This doesn't work consistently on my Ubuntu 12.04 box either. I'll have to watch in the future to see whether the bad behavior correlates with having particular USB devices plugged in.

Probably meant to keep the OS from sleeping so that the battery will charge. My dad got an MP3 player, plugged it into his computer, and walked away waiting for it to charge before I came over to help him load it. 20 minutes after plugging in, the PC went to sleep for a few hours and when I got there, he had like a 15% charge on the MP3 player. Kind of dumb to prevent the screen saver/monitor sleep though.

And now I'm 34 minutes into waiting for one of our sales reps to show up so a conference call can start with a prospective client. No-showing a demo is bad form, sales dude.

derFunkenstein wrote:

Probably meant to keep the OS from sleeping so that the battery will charge. My dad got an MP3 player, plugged it into his computer, and walked away waiting for it to charge before I came over to help him load it. 20 minutes after plugging in, the PC went to sleep for a few hours and when I got there, he had like a 15% charge on the MP3 player. Kind of dumb to prevent the screen saver/monitor sleep though.

And now I'm 34 minutes into waiting for one of our sales reps to show up so a conference call can start with a prospective client. No-showing a demo is bad form, sales dude.

Hmm, the Droid dock and Zune have no issue charging, but then again I never let the box go into Sleep mode.

And now I'm 34 minutes into waiting for one of our sales reps to show up so a conference call can start with a prospective client. No-showing a demo is bad form, sales dude.

Termination time?

paulWTAMU wrote:

And now I'm 34 minutes into waiting for one of our sales reps to show up so a conference call can start with a prospective client. No-showing a demo is bad form, sales dude.

Termination time?

He showed up like 2 minutes later. Turns out he just told me the wrong time. The prospective client dialed in at the time he told them and he was there a few seconds later and instead of 10:00 it should have been 10:45. Not as bad as I originally thought but still a colossal waste of time.

In other news, I'm building a Trinity-powered A8 desktop for my wife. Her laptop is randomly rebooting, I replaced the hard drive because it had what it thinks are bad sectors (though it scans clean with Sea Tools when plugged into my PC) and I've run multiple passes of memtest86 and the memory passes them all. Anyway, it's a first-gen Core i3 350M so it's probably due for an upgrade. She doesn't take the computer anywhere so she's getting an mATX desktop with plenty of power to run The Sims and play on Pinterest.

I had to buy a monitor and instead of just buying a cheap 1080p monitor for her (she'll get my ASUS LED-backlit TN panel), I popped $20 extra and got one of those budget Dell IPS displays from Newegg, and the monitor arrived today. Just eye-popping color. Wowza. I knew the SAMOLED on my HTC One S looked nice, but this puts everything I've ever used to shame. After a couple hours, I'm a believer.

just brew it! wrote:

Can't believe this didn't get mentioned shortly after it started. Can't believe *I* didn't mention it at some point, I guess I've been slacking off.

For over a month now, there's been an XKCD comic where the picture changes once per hour (originally the updates came every 30 minutes). [snip]

FWIW, over 2 months later it is still updating.

The site that lets you view them in sequence/pause/reverse/etc. is still up as well: http://xkcd.aubronwood.com/

Stupid Heat. Wish the Pacers could have pulled this one out.

Sigh. My PC took on some water damage from the May 20 tornado, and insurance is taking its sweet time processing my claim. Looks like I'm stuck using my phone for internet connectivity for the time being.

damn. the 1.5 year old daughter of some casual acquaintances just died. DOn't have a clue what to do or say; gonna make a donation to the foundation that works on the disease that killed her, but not sure what else to do. Not sure there is much to do; they live in San Marcos so I'm nto close enough to like, make casseroles or do their lawn. Times like this I just hold my son a bit tighter

Don't ask them how to be of help. Instead, gather all of the support crowd and just do it. If you can't get there yourself, see how to help those that can. Give them what they need to get through the first few weeks without having to deal with domesticity. Words will come later and will be much more meaningful once the initial shock has passed.

aye aye Cap'n

paulWTAMU wrote:

aye aye Cap'n

Life sucks at times, no doubt. What I was really trying to say was to avoid the oh-so-common response in these situations, i.e. "what can I do to help?".

Just ran across a link to this quiz. I scored an 88%, without cheating (i.e. I did not look anything up or ask anyone else).

Haha. I also just got 88 percent. No cheating, promise.

I just learned I know **** about physics from that test. I missed every physics question (and more than I should have on chemistry).

paulWTAMU wrote:

I just learned I know **** about physics from that test. I missed every physics question (and more than I should have on chemistry).

96% for me.

88% for me

88%

Mostly missed questions with terminology I couldn't remember.

4 88's. Must be a certain few we are all missing.

Ned is a cheater.

DancinJack wrote:

Ned is a cheater.

I missed the zygote/blastocyst distinction and another question (somewhere in the 40s number-wise) that escapes me at present.

EDIT: It was #47.

why is it so hard to find *good* premade first aid kits? ONes with splints, clotting agents, eye washes, small medicine bottles (with more than 2 damn tylenol though!), medical glue, thread, etc?

paulWTAMU wrote:

why is it so hard to find *good* premade first aid kits? ONes with splints, clotting agents, eye washes, small medicine bottles (with more than 2 damn tylenol though!), medical glue, thread, etc?

Because no provider of same is willing to take the inevitable liability suit when the "mega kit" doesn't save someone's life.

A good stretch with the 15YO daughter this afternoon. Her car (MiL's old car, now ours) still had its snow tires on. Long ago I made sure that snows & summers each had their own rims for this car (and it's pre-TPMS). She got a good training on how to properly change tires, complete with using the torque wrench. What really got me is that if I ask her to feed the dog she bitches, but she got right down and changed all 4 rims (I ran the jack) without the slightest boo. Too bad the school year is over.

That's not even a "mega kit." I mean, it isn't even a full trauma bag. I'm just grumpy from trying to fix this I guess.

edit: Found an EMT supply place from a nurse friend of mine that has some kits that might work. This makes me happy.

Saturday was busy (and beery): Proctored a beer judge exam in the morning, then went straight from there to judge in the regional round of the Sam Adams Longshot homebrew competition in the afternoon.

Being a proctor at a beer judge exam isn't like proctoring a normal exam. The students taking the exam must judge a series of 6 test beers; they get graded on how close their scores for each beer match the scores given by a panel of experienced judges. The proctors are the experienced judges... so the proctors have to taste all of the test beers too. Some of the test beers are intentionally defective in some way, or may be good beers but mis-categorized (e.g. you may be told that a beer is a Robust Porter when it is actually a Munich Dunkel).

Judged the fruit beer category at Longshot. Some pretty good ones this year. Sam Adams generally treats their judges (and other volunteers) well -- nice dinner after the competition (each course accompanied by a different Sam Adams beer, of course), and a hotel room at the competition site for anyone who wants one.

Sunday has been pretty low-key. Just hangin' out at home, mostly... went out for lunch to try a new Chinese restaurant that opened up nearby. Took a nap. Drained and rinsed some beer fermenters that had been soaking in the basement. That's about it.

I figure today was the calm before the storm. We've got an important tech demo coming up at work, and it is going to be a mad scramble to get stuff ready this week. In the middle of all this, our entire IT infrastructure is being redone (by our new corporate overlords). Whee!

just brew it! wrote:

Just ran across a link to this quiz. I scored an 88%, without cheating (i.e. I did not look anything up or ask anyone else).

I got 88% also. The ones I missed weren't science questions, but phonetics or history. Some of those were figure it out based on my 5% understanding of Latin, others I wasn't so fortunate.