saw eugene mirman at his book reading at barnes & noble last night. there are even some pictures:

Eugene Mirman, 27 February 2009

also, this was my parking lot at work this morning:

From From my phone

help desk to me: we’ve opened a ticket for such-and-such problem
me to help desk: that problem is not our group. please re-assign to the windows group.
help desk to me: we don’t have access to that anymore, you’ll have to do it
me to help desk: you just did this same thing for us earlier this morning. WTF?!

i have so much hate for our help desk.
hate hate hate hate. hate.

if someone tells you that, they’re full of shit. in fact, here’s a stupid question i just got via e-mail:

James,

Can you explain some of the odd queries that the Google Search Appliance says people are making with some frequency. Here are a few and the number of times they were made since October 1:
[search terms redacted]

yes, allow me to completely explain all of human behaviour. ever. because this is something i can do.

really, the mere fact that this person has sent me an e-mail and asked this question only goes to answer it: people are inquisitive creatures by nature, and want their questions answered. they will seek out these answers anyway they can, including, but not limited to, search engines.

perhaps that should be my response to this person.

password criteria for my new contract overlords billing system:

• must be 8 characters long. not 8 characters minimum. 8 characters total.
• must have at least one uppercase letter, one lowercase letter and one number. it can not have any “special” characters.
• the password is not case sensitive

seriously, i have a more restrictive (and safer) password policy on my laptop at home. couple that with the fact that my username is just 7 random characters (and not, say, my first initial followed by my last name, as is normal), and i can tell that i am really going to hate doing my hours.

co-worker, wandering in: “hey, do you have a floppy disk i could borrow?”
me: “have i ever told you about my magical unicorn, which has the ability to deliver strange and fantastic items to me?”
co-worker: “so, you’re saying you don’t have a floppy disk?”
me: “yes. i am saying that is not 1998, and i do not have a floppy disk.”
co-worker: “thanks, anyways.”

weirdo.

but it works:

VPN client -> wi-fi on work computer -> wi-fi on new phone -> 3G connection on phone -> VPN server at work

so if i should find myself in need of rebooting a machine at work, and no immediate wi-fi connection available, at least i can still get in there.

(sadly, a direct tether of the laptop to my phone is out of the question. way to go, security profile administrator.)

I today I learned how it feels to do an rm -rf / on my system.

This happened and work, and luckily, it was my computer, and not one of the servers. And I wasn’t running as root.

But still.

Somehow…and believe, I’d love to know about that how…but somehow, my root folder (/) go into my Trash folder. (I’m using Gnome, BTW, so hence why I even have a Trash folder.) And I decided to empty my trash before shutting down the machine (today is the day we move back into our permanent offices).

Which suddenly caused a lot more items to go flying by than I would have suspected. After cancelling the process, I realize that my Desktop is now clear of anything useful, such as my files and links. And my shortcuts are gone. And then I find that quite a lot of my dot-files are gone.

*sigh*

So now I’m trying to recover from all of that. Luckily, few (if any) binaries were affected. So its more a matter of getting things set up the way I had them before. Sadly, I’ve lost my archived e-mails for last year. And the bulk of the work I had done on our password changing mechanism.

But hey, at least I’ve got my window again, so no more going crazy without natural light.

Got a message from tech support saying that one of our proxies was running low on disk space. Usually this is a problem that sorts itself out on its own, but I decided to check it out, anyways.

Log in to the machine and check out the directory that holds all of the files that are being virus scanned on the way to the end-user, and find a large (1.8GB) ISO file. “Ah, that would be it”. Looking through the file, I see a bunch of stuff about Microsoft. So, someone is downloading a Windows DVD image. Nothing wrong with that (assuming it was from a legal source). Since it was almost two hours old, I cleared out the disk space, solving the tech support issue.

And then I noticed something else of interest. A file with a .php extension. And it was just over 200MB. Looked through the file, and realized it was a Windows Media file.

“Very, very interesting”, says I.

I watch the file for a bit, and once I’m sure its done downloading, I copy it over to a temp drive. Then I tell my coworker about it, and we proceed to copy it to each of our machines: his a Windows box, mine Linux.

For whatever reason, it doesn’t come up on his. But I send the file to VLC and start playback:

“Oh yeah…its porn.”

Bad porn, but porn none-the-less.

Sometimes, I really do enjoy my job.

I should really check my voicemail at work more often. I finally got around to doing just that this morning. Approximately 24 news messages, dating back from 5 March. Oops.

(Although, really, most of them were from ONE PERSON, all pretty much saying “call me/stop by my office when you get a chance”.)

I work for the government, in the executive branch, no less, and on a larf I try to follow the links on http://abstinencefeelsgood.com/. Tragically, I am blocked by Websense, the web filtering app that stops everyone in the Department from seeing anything naughty. (Of course, these sites were blocked for being “Sex Education”, which is funny unto itself.)

So I’m trying to decide if I should send e-mails out to complain about these sites being blocked, and having that category opened up in Websense. Because, hey! We’re under the Bush administration, and the Bush administration has a big ol’ boner for abstinence-only education. We wouldn’t want to be going against this big boss, now would we?