In which it takes me an entire day to get nothing accomplished.
I slept way the hell in today. I’m so bad. I wonder if I’ll ever outgrow that feeling of dread and shame drilled into me as a college student that I still have whenever I sleep in? Gack.
Brett and I went to the bank this afternoon to see about refinancing the property, but the loan guy wasn’t in. So we dropped by Field Of Dreams and I bought picks and a set of strings for that acoustic guitar, but the high E string broke while I was re-stringing it so I still haven’t really played it. Also the bridge is cracked, so I doubt it’ll ever stay in tune or even last very long before the bridge pops right off and those little plastic pegs that seat the strings go flying everywhere. Hopefully it won’t put my eye out.
Brett had to meet a potential client this evening, so we went to town and he deposited me at the bar while he went off with Jimbo for the meeting. I sat and read my book, had a drink, and chatted with a few folks. Dave told me an endearing story about meeting a rock star in Minnesota.
Brett, Jimbo, Steve, and Dave at the Red Rock Tavern
When Brett came back we went to Los Portales for dinner, where I had a bean & rice chimichanga and more chips and salsa than I really needed.
In other news, I have nothing profound to say and I love my cell phone camera so, so much.
According to this site (which I found by accident, doing a random google for a meme I’d seen), goblinbox.com is a Superb Service Award winner and has “been widely recognized by other Award Sites for [its] excellence in design and content.”
Not only do I not know how this happened, but I don’t know what it means either. But that won’t keep me from claiming to be the sole web mistress of an “award-winning site.” Eh.
I’m just so tickled. If only I knew what service it was, exactly, that goblinbox has been performing – and for whom – while I’m not looking.
I found this recipe waaaay back in August and printed it out because it struck me as being amusing; I’m all for any cream cheese frosting-carrier that doesn’t contain raisins.
I finally bought the key ingredients (bananas, canned pineapple, and a new bottle of vanilla extract) last Monday, and – that’s right bitches – I got it in the oven today!
The part of the recipe where they suggest you “pour” the batter into the prepared pans is a joke. This batter could be used for bondo, I am not kidding you. You could stand a three-foot fork up in this batter. This batter actually freaked me out a little, because I had to knead it like dough because it was too thick to stir and because I’m more of a cook than a baker and I don’t know enough about cake batter to know from reading a recipe if it will work out or not.
The cake still cooling, but it looks cakey enough. We’ll see if it’s food or not when it’s cooled and frosted.
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In which I bitch about traffic. What there is of it.
It was really foggy this morning, with low visibility. So naturally everyone drove their morning Interstate commute at about 11 miles an hour over the speed limit with their headlights off.
(When I say “everyone,” I mean the six other vehicles I saw between Batavia and Fairfield.)
And because it was chilly when I dressed, I wore an angora sweater. Now it’s sticking to my underarms in a really creepy, fuzzy way.
I’ve been having problems adding an edit_post_link to this installation of WordPress. I went and
started a thread at the support forum, and got what I thought was good help…
…until today, when I discovered that the link in question does show up if I use Internet Exploder. What I don’t know is if this is a browser bug or a WP bug?
In which I get a new toy.
This is an old acoustic that Bucket ‘gave’ me, and of which I have indefinite custody.
My new free guitar!
It needs strings sooooo bad, and I will buy it some and hopefully start playing regularly. All in an effort to be, you know, more musical. I’m thinking about lessons, even though I would probably never go to lessons, and about starting to write a little… even though I haven’t written a song on a guitar since I was sixteen – more than twenty years ago.
Would someone explain to me how I became old enough to say things like “more than twenty years ago”?! Shite.
In which I’m a total fucking geek.
Since Shegeki put a picture of a rack on his blog today, I decided to do it too. Here are a few images of the data center where I work.
Cobalt Web Servers
The bright blue servers on the right are the stupid Cobalt RAQ web servers that I hate to death. Goblinbox has, in the past few years, lived on three of those four remaining servers, and I ended up having to move it because each time the server fucked up in some major way and my site wouldn’t work.
Lately, Buzzdoctor and I have been moving customers off of these boxes – an astonishingly boring and tedious procedure because it’s not automated and it involves contacting customers – and eventually we hope to shut them down, take them out of their racks, and shoot them with automatic weapons until they explode spectacularly.
Once I spent hours trapped in the data center on the phone with Cobalt tech support. I finally made it through to their third tier support and enjoyed flirting with the geek who was helping me… but the problem – scripts wouldn’t run – never did get solved and we had to wipe the box and start with a fresh install, which sucked and took a long damn time and wouldn’t have happened if there’d been a patch.
Big Brown Digital Switch
This is a big brown thing. It’s telephony gear. I don’t know much about it other than it’s a digital switch and there’s some kind of voice traffic in there. I remember something about ATM from the meetings a few years ago, too. I like it mainly because brown is my favorite color, and also because Lance (the guy who started this company) was so cute and geeked out when he told me he’d bought the whole thing for pennies on the dollar from some poor defunct CLEC.
Total Control
This is the Total Control chassis. When you use a computer to call one of this ISP‘s dial-up numbers, you get connected to this thing. All those stacked green lights indicate that customers are connected – I think each green light represents 8 or 12 customers, and each card has 12 lights. (Or something. I haven’t had anything to do with this chassis in three or four years, but once upon a time I knew how to get into the thing via its management interface and was on call three days a week in case it went down.)
Anyway, if you were to pull one of those cards it would disconnect a whole bunch of dial-up customers all at once. I’ve had occasion to pull active cards out before, and it’s deeply satisfying knowing that you just disconnected like a hundred porn downloads in one fell swoop.
Bonus: My Favorite Working-at-an-ISP Story
Years ago, Sam and I had to replace the aged UPS at one of the POPs. We walked up to a bank of whirring, flashing, humming equipment… and yanked the plug out of the wall. It took 45 seconds for the whole thing to spin down to silence. It was so, so fun disconnecting an entire town’s worth of Internet traffic all at once! OOH, THE POWER!
We had the new UPS in and everything booting back up within seconds, so the outage was probably less than three minutes, but still. The power, people. The power. It’s why I love knowing that I could read anybody’s email. I mean, I never do (because how boring would that be!), but I could.
If I had XM, I’d switch to Sirius for this reason alone:
In early September, Sirius Satellite Radio kicked The Word Network off the air — for good. In the meantime, Sirius is adding programming that insults the values of The Word Network and our millions of listeners.
– from Save The Word Network.
I’m religious, but I’m not Christian and I’m just a wee bit tired of some of them. If you know what I mean.
If you’re ever interested in joining the Science Fiction Book Club – the only book club I’ve ever belonged to that sends me selections I actually read – please let me know, because if you join through me I get a free book.
Seriously.
And free books are so good. Especially with summer ending and reading season upon us.
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Instagram has become unusable crap, so please click the icon below to see my latest pics.
4 random books from my Library!
