Category: Jake

Several of the girls in our office here are planning a mom’s weekend at one of our bigger houses. Some of the guys (and a couple of the girls who have to work) are thinking about playing a practical joke on them. Anybody have any ideas? We were thinking along the lines of a male stripper calling the house, asking for directions, but none of us could do it because all the women there would recognize us (or even hiring a really BAD stripper show up at the door — I’m sure I could get some money from folks here to pay somebody for that). Anybody up to the task or have any other great ideas? E-mail me (jake at orty dot com).

While I managed to get some links posted yesterday, that was primarily because I was waiting for about a dozen high-quality PDF jobs to be spat from our printer at work so I figured I’d clear out my inbox. Otherwise, still working my butt off, not finding time for anything — so pretty much like two days ago. My wife had a tooth pulled today, so I’ve been taking care of her and the kids. I’m also completely re-writing my music for a piece in the band because it’s written very poorly and we don’t have enough people to cover all the parts on all the sheets of music (some composers just don’t know how to write percussion parts properly, in my opinion). Re-writing that part is taking up any free time I have, because our concerts are in a few weeks, the piece is a mess, and it needs to get done (my dad is doing the same with his parts). All in all, free time is at a minimal, but will try to get some great links sitting flagged in my RSS reader posted tomorrow.

I have eight different bosses right now….So that means when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That’s my only real motivation is not to be hassled…

My life is about like that right now, except I’m actually working, unlike Peter Gibbons. I’m getting pulled in a thousand different directions and the one person who signs my paychecks seems to be (like me) the last person to know about anything as well (so none of this is his fault). Ugh… . More details some other time. Meanwhile, it’s time for me to go home… .

OK, since several people are bugging me about it, here’s the new car:

Yes, I know, one lousy picture. Whoopty-frickin-do. Interior is nothing to sneeze at, just your normal Dodge Grand Caravan (lots of frickin’ room, which is nice for hauling stuff around). It needs a CD player and some floor mats, but otherwise, it’s a great car for a great deal ($2,900).

Once it stops raining, I’ll be vacuuming out my old car and posting it for sale here with pictures. It’s an ugly 1988 Honda Civic with a bunch of little (and one bigger) dents and 187,000 miles, but the engine is in great shape, it’s got tires that are less than a year old on it (as well as a set of 4 studded tires on rims), a clutch that’s about a year old, and a left axle that’s about a year old. It also gets 38-40 miles per gallon, which is frickin’ nice with gas prices how they are. It has a pretty loud Pioneer CD player in it (4 speakers).

The only major problem is that it needs a new right CV Joint. It’s easier to just replace the whole axle on these cars when the CV Joint goes bad, and every mechanic I’ve talked to says it’ll run about $200 to replace the whole axle.

If you want it, I’ll clean it up for you, and it’s yours for $800 or best offer (I’ll knock off $50 if I don’t have to clean it). It’s an ugly little car, but I’ve always loved it, and it’s always driven great (and parts for it are cheap). I need the money to buy some snow tires and a CD player for the minivan, as well as sun visors for the Subaru sedan we’re keeping, and to make a payment or two on the minivan.

And if you ask nice, I’ll leave the “Save a Cow, Eat A Vegetarian” and “Hang Up And Drive” bumper stickers on there.

OK, I have a request for anybody out there with too much time on their hands. I need new Sun Visors for my 1990 Subaru Legacy (anything from 1990-1992 will fit). I don’t have visors for the car, and now that I’m driving it to work and my wife’s driving the mini-van, I’m going to be driven nuts if I can’t frickin’ see.

I’ve called and e-mailed a few wreckage yards locally and around the state with no luck at all. The dealer here locally wants $120 for a new set of them, and I’m just hoping somebody out there in Interweb land knows of a source for some cheaper ones.

For anybody that finds some that I can have purchase on my behalf will get a 10% finders fee (plus some cyber-praise here on this site) from me for their time and trouble. I just want to avoid paying the dealer a crapload of money.

I don’t really care the color and or fabric, as long as the frickin’ things work (I do also need the mounting brackets for them — the bracket that attaches the visor to the car, just in case that’s not obvious).

Sorry about the lack of links today. Today I spent the day going through my “To Fix” list after the mess from last week. After a week of letting everybody play with it, there was a lot of stupid little things that needed to be fixed (funny little error messages, preferences not importing/saving right, profile issues, privledge issues, etc…) as well as things that I personally needed to fix like getting the virus protection all up to date and maintaining itself as well as our backup software up and going. I also got our old Citrix machine that went dead back up and running with a new hard drive and RAID system and have it running our online booking system now (instead of doing double-duty with the Citrix server). I have parts on order from NewEgg and Geeks.com to upgrade the Citrix server with some more RAM and get it a 2nd processor (anybody have any PC133 ECC/Registered RAM that’s larger than 256 megs to get rid of? I’m trying to max out the machine a bit). So I’ll have to come in late when those parts arrive to take care of that install (that’ll be easy, thankfully).

I’m also going to see if I can get MovableType 3.16 installed, now that I know many of my plugins will work appropriately. So hopefully that will happen later tonight.

Meanwhile, I’m going to see if I can clear up some of my RSS feeds and get some more content ready for you folks. Thanks for hanging with me through this!

I promise that someday I’ll be back to normal blogging that all the folks that read this site all love, but meanwhile, here’s an update on things after last night. I went home and tried to get some sleep, got about 90 minutes, but couldn’t sleep as my mind was still hanging out here in the office, making me a nervous wreck. At about 6 o’clock, after thrashing around in bed for at least an hour, I finally got up, showered, and drove back into the office.

After a bit of work, I got the server up and running in full (for the most part) this morning. I got everybody printing properly, got most everybody into their e-mail, and setup most folks’ preferences. I’m still having some oddball roaming profile issues, mostly from folks who log in from home (anybody want to give me a hand on these? Active Directory whiz, I am not). They can sit and simmer for a bit, however, as they’re not critical to the function of things, minus they can’t get access to e-mail and other preferences. I’m also having an issue that didn’t crop up until I had Citrix on the server: The clock periodically resets itself. Still haven’t had time to figure that one out, but am not going to worry about it right now, but if anybody has any random ideas off the top of their head, feel free to share.

I was at the office from about 7:00am until about 10:30 this morning. I then went to Selco to get an auto loan for my new ride (got a nice 4.5% interest rate), and then I went home and slept for about 90 minutes or so, spent some time with the kids, ate something, and now I back at the office, getting the accounting software all setup so that we can get paid this week (figured this would happen during a payroll week). Should be here just about another 30 minutes or so, and then I’m heading out of here and going to bed.

I’ve already said I’m not going to come to work tomorrow because not am I totally and utterly exhausted, but I think I’ve caught a bit of my daughter’s stomach bug, as I was feeling crappy all day today. Hopefully a good night’s sleep will help that a bit.

Back to regular links (and I’ve got a ton of great submissions) when life is back to normal a bit (what I wouldn’t wish to have me cloned so my clone could post the links here, or to have a guest contributor or six).

Meanwhile, there’s lots of interesting reading here (even if the date/time stamps are a bit messed up on the thing).

Right now I’m stuck at work, and will be here for quite a few more hours. It’s spring cleaning time on our servers here, so I’m going to be doing some major archiving, cleaning, pruning, upgrading, and whatever else I can get done. I might see if I can post some links later as I’m staring at progress bars, but we’ll see.

Update at 8:35: I’m screwed. Powered down and rebooted my Citrix Metaframe (running on Windows 2000) machine — which, unfortunately, powers the entire building — and the thing crashed bad during boot up. Rebooted, and now the thing won’t login. I can’t get into the system with ANY login/pass. It’s like the thing revereted back to its default settings. And, naturally, I can’t get onto the machine to get the memory dump of the crash. This is not cool at all. Thank frickin’ god I have offsite backups.

Time to yank the drives out, see what I can recover on thing. Yipee….

Update at 10:15: OK, I gave up trying to get into the Citrix machine, and my backup hardware wasn’t running stable. So what am I doing? My online booking server is over powered for the minimal amount that it does, so I’ve pulled the hard drive out of the Citrix machine and installed it into the online machine. I’m copying the data onto the hard drive of the online machine, which I’ll install Citrix Metaframe, a few applications, and hopefully be able to go home by midnight (not holding my breath, however — I just went across the street for a caffeine buy, just in case). I’ll just let the machine pull double duty until tomorrow when I’ll format the old Citrix machine, and get IIS back up and running on that machine.

I didn’t want to just reformat the Citrix machine, as reinstalling an OS and getting it all up to speed is no fun. The online machine had a stable and patched OS, and getting Citrix and Terminals Services all setup on that won’t be too hard, just tedious.

In the long run, this will be better, as the machine that was doing online bookings was way more powerful than the Citrix machine, so things should run faster.

Anybody who has any ideas on ways to speed this all up, my IM handles are here, so feel free to send a note my direction (just give me a bit to reply, as I’ll probably be beating up server).

Update at 12:30AM: Yes, I’m still here. This night couldn’t get any worse. Got Citrix installed on the 2nd server, and now my Citrix licenses won’t activate, so I’m screwed. I’m going to see if I can get a hack installed to make things work until I’ve got some sleep, but I still have to get MS Office and our bookkeeping software installed which, unfortunately, is mission critical as well. Time to dip into my Pepsi stash…

Update at 1:45AM: I give up. The folks here can login and make reservations, and that’s about it right now. They can’t print, they can’t do any bookkeeping stuff, but I got the activation crap with Citrix figured out, and I’m starting to feel sick with all the crap that still needs to be done. But I need to sleep, so I’m going to take a couple more sips of soda and drive the long highway back home. I’ll probably be back here at the crack of dawn tomorrow, but I’m finishing up a memo to the early morning staff here, in case I’m not.