Hello, Friend

P.S. Can I borrow $500?

Baloney

Excuse me. I worked for that tax money to give to you, Mr. Government, so I'd like to have a say as to where it goes.

A Thought On Mondays

It's a well-known fact that Garfield hates Mondays.

I hate Mondays, too. I, however, work a desk job.

It occurred to me during the normal mid-morning job-ruing that, as a common house cat, Garfield has absolutely no reason to hate Mondays. A day is a day is a day - that is, an opportunity to nap, eat lasagna, and get into hijinx with his wacky owner Jon (mostly involving napping and eating). The hatred of Mondays, obviously, is Jim Davis strategically giving Garfield a character trait that lets him identify with the white-collar working force as much as the younger age bracket that would more typically be interested in the funny pages: more office personnel would then be able to buy Garfield merchandise to express their dislike of the first of the week.

I hate Garfield.

Lynx

Via Digg: If you only need to save one thing in a fire...

Windows shared drives in OS X 10.5. Look closely.

George W. Bush, tired of stepping all over the Constitution, decides to start stepping all over his own executive orders.

Also, Dungeons and Dragons is fun.

I Should Be Sleeping

Word: OLOEOXEPOP
Points: 124
Meaning: I've run out of actual Scrabble words

Sans Weekend

Not like there's anything to do, but it's disturbing when the weekend drops by suddenly and leaves with as much notice. Pretty much all I do is sit around and play bass, listen to music, and watch anime - I guess like a high school stoner, minus the drugs. There's probably something constructive I can do with my free time, but I suppose I have the rest of the (dauntingly long and boring) summer to take care of that.

On a wholly different note, words are cool.

Tomorrow begins the Dungeons and Dragons, so we'll see how that goes.

Do Want

Mac OS X 10.5: sweet, sweet nectar.

Let The Office Warfare Begin

For $7.99, how can you say no?

The Quintessential YouTube Poop

So this is what acid is like.

Multimedia

Case Of The Mondays

Well, that weekend blew by. In between seeing the Indians lose (great seats, boring game), Kevin's college grad party, cleaning, and Blood+, it feels like the weekend lasted about three hours.

So why am I so tired?

To illustrate, here's a simple diagram I whipped up.

Fig. 1: Qualitative sleepiness indicator

I'd get coffee but I'm currently holding down the office by my lonesome. The question is, how effective is a guard who is always asleep?

Great Success

I know that we take lots of things for granted in the computer world. I know that not everybody can be or should be a computer genius. I know that the reason that help desks exist is to take computers out of the equation to let people just work.

That really doesn't make it any easier to not shoot myself in the head.*

Today we got to experience several of the holy grails of tech support when a user called in for us to troubleshoot his copy of Eudora:

• An analyst of ours told the user to hit the "OK" button that just popped up on the screen; the user spent five minutes looking for the OK key on his keyboard.


• We decided it would be best to do a remote assistance session (like remote desktop through your browser). The user was unable to locate a web browser, yet was able to find the "Run..." command and enter the URL for the support page.


• The user spoke very slowly and read everything on his screen aloud.


• Remote assistance requires you to install an ActiveX control. A window pops to the forefront with a large arrow pointing to the Information Bar in Internet Explorer and instructing you to click on it to install the ActiveX control. The user lost this window and was unable to relocate it, causing the remote session to need to be started over.


• The user would randomly decide to right- or left-click on something and would not click the correct button when instructed to do so.

All told, what would normally be a 45-second setup took 45 minutes of coercing, prodding and swearing (to a muted handset) to accomplish. Now begins the actual task of, you know, figuring out what's wrong.

Technology: it makes the world go 'round.

* I actually like my job, I just sometimes wish people would let me do it.†

† Please don't fire me.