The Time Sink

It's all downhill until Christmas... Whoohoo... Yeah, baby. Like I like the holiday season. Not. Oh, the family stuff? I'm getting better with that over the years. Heck, I may even put up the little houses on top of the china cabinet this year. No, it's the nature of my job. Remember? Purchasing? Yeah: stores. ...and shipping.

I'll have to pysch myself up big time to make the Costco runs this month. ...and any local store like Target <shudder> and such. ...and shipping? Let's just say the supply chain has a weak link or two, right in the middle. Janeen and I usually start overstocking around Thanksgiving and continue through the first of the year; that way we won't be caught short if there's a blizzard in the mid-west or some outfit decides to declare an extra holiday like they did one year... Sheesh.

On the home front, the partridge has decided to get back in his cage (joke from the weekend blogs: When your pet bird watches you read the newspaper, does he wonder what you're doing just sitting there staring at the carpeting?) and let me finish the work on the testbed: I now have USB under RedHat and I'll be working on the other two pieces of the puzzle this week. I think I'm done with the hardware; but as usual, a hare-brained idea hit me late last night so I need to look at that option. ...and options aside, I want to get rolling on that work machine.

A late post (actually one not made using Dave's Time Machine); the need for sleep was stronger than the need to geek out. ...and today is a shortish day at work since we have a memorial service to attend in a city down the road in a bit.

But I think I'll throw out one little tech trinket for anyone who has a need to access PCMCIA cards from a workstation: Antec has a nice little card reader that's supposed to work under Linux (I've linked to an off-site review as Antec's site access is hosed right now). I have one of these goodies available to play with; I'll let you know how it works in the real world. From what I've seen from user reports, it's lightning fast with flashcards but somewhat problematic with wireless NICs...

Symantec's info is here; their removal tool is here. <Sigh>...

The good news, and of more than just passing interest: our off-site virus and spam filter caught that sucker. ...and if you happened to look at the time-stamps for the warnings on the various sites for yesterday morning and happened to read my alternate site entry from last night, I think you may agree Erik's getting his money's worth from our investment in that system.

In other news, you've likely read about how much Brian loves the stuff from VMware... Well, here's another reason to like them: if you've purchased VM Express, you can upgrade to VMware Workstation 3.0 (Linux) for $99! The reason? They are ceasing development of the Express package...

Most places would have left us in the lurch and just said to have a nice day or some such; these guys sent out a notice to Express customers and invited us to join the big kids. Well, I had my order in though my distributor for the full version, but that's now canceled: 3.0 is downloaded and waiting for some spare time to play. ....at a $200 discount!

Svenson replied to my "Maybe I could borrow a cup of time?" comment from Wednesday, offering to help, but adding I may not like his interest rates... I came back with the information that I'd taken the day off. ...to which he responded that I really wouldn't like that interest rate. ...in the form of a greatly expanded "to-do" list! Oh, my; he was soooo correct; I'm knee deep in dreck.

But, I think I'll leave you with a few links worth a look or two. The first is an article from Newsforge about Linux obfuscation, a topic near and dear to some of us<g>. The actual title is "Making Linux look harder than it is". The author discusses command line gurus and medium-knowledge GUI users; other than referencing StarOffice 5.2 rather than SO6 or OpenOffice, he does a credible job of covering one of Linux's hurdles: how to teach newbies. ...and have them learn.

Speaking of credible, or rather in-credible, I sent this one to JHR the other day; it's an article about the magical properties of Kimchee. No, really: apply an AC current and it rectifies the current and emits light similar to an LED. Really...

Heh. My evil twin sent Erik the Geek this link to an InfoWorld writeup on Kylix. Erik develops in Delphi. Double "Heh!"... Sooner or later...

Lest we forget... Nothing special there; just reminiscing from a dwindling group who remember those days. RIP, guys...

JHR wrote in to point out The Register is playing catchup once again... Maybe they're finally catching on to what Daynotes readers already know: we do a decent job of tech presentation.

Christmas trees and Dave's birthday... Events often occurring the first week of December. My annual reminder of joining the ranks of those posting daily journals.

I hadn't really planned to take the plunge back in 1999; I was pretty content getting to know the guys from The Daynotes Gang and emailing back and forth. ...and I'd been working in CoffeeCup and NoteTab some at work. ...enough to get myself in trouble during a late night email exchange with Tom Syroid.

I don't recall exactly how it came about, likely me commenting on his frustration with FrontPage, but I think I mentioned I could have a site up with content posted in a matter of minutes. He took me up on that, so I added a domain to my Worldnet account and threw some 'content' up...

Fat, dumb and happy... For about a day. Then The Email showed up.

Whooo. Almost hosed my AT&T account last night. ...at least to the point I'd have been locked out for a time. But I caught things before they got too deep in the bucket...

Yesterday and again today, Bob Thompson was discussing the necessity of maintaining a Windows box when he switches over to Linux. My near-miss last night illustrates his point: I was merrily working away in Wolf(enstein), the dual boot Win2k/RedHat 7.2 box, testing out Gnome and Mozilla. Normally, I'm a KDE/Konqueror fan; but, hey, what are test beds for anyway. As I was trying to find that "Content" page I needed for yesterday's post, I realized I didn't have the password for the Worldnet site available. ...at least gFTP didn't like the one I was trying. So, I popped over to Worldnet's management page and blithely changed the password on that account to what I thought it should be anyway <g>. ...and then got real, real lucky and happened to glance at the 'completed satisfactorily' page.

It said I'd successfully changed the password for my main account rather than TheTimeSink.home.att.net. WT??? So I froze things in place instead of getting out of that login; jumped over to Tux, the Linux box that handles production work (yeah, started as a testbed and stuck around); and popped my email. No go: 'don't know anyone with that login/password combo'. Sure you do; you just authorized me a few minutes back on the normal mail check.

Back to the Gnome/Mozilla combo: do it again. ...same result.

C'mon guys: you're running some serious servers there at AT&T; I would expect you'd have run across Mozilla once or twice. ...unless we're talking serious command-line-junkies; you know: the ones with the suspenders! Okay, my login is still good: go change it back. I change the password for TheTimeSink and it acknowleges my main account. At least it's consistent. Check the mail on Tux: life is good again.

Quandry: I can't get to the Win2k install on Wolf(enstein) without a reboot. I don't want to leave that session 'cause I know it's good. Tux? With Konqueror? Maybe; but I know for a fact that Userland's Frontier servers don't authenticate some exchanges with Konqueror (as another example) and frankly I don't care to challenge anything right now. Calling Level One support is not my idea of a fun Saturday evening.

K'. Athena's up (Win95b box): a known good. I fire up IE and try the password thingy from there: fine; it's like a Barney song (I know you; you know me...). Confirm the page; make the post; get on with life.

Dunno', I need to try that with Netscape and Konqueror from Tux sometime; but frankly, I'm very glad I happened to catch that authentication. I wouldn't have had a clue as to why my email suddenly blew up.