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A place write I write things about stuff

Category: Work

The State of the Site, pt. II

I learned how to change a toilet seat today.

Now before everybody starts jumping to conclusions about why this took place, let me set the record straight: I did not race to the bathroom in a diarrhea-induced panic and blast humanity all over the old toilet seat. It wasn’t anywhere near that exciting – one of the bolts snapped for some reason, leaving me with a seat swinging around on one bolt. No big deal, replacement seats were $10 at Home Depot, problem solved.

I’ve been sleepwalking through the day, thanks to being awakened at about 830 this morning. That includes the escapade with the toilet seat, dinner with the folks, a few hours cleaning up the storage drive on my PC, etc. It wasn’t anything in particular that woke me up, but I suspect the sun being out and shining into the room had something to do with that. I’m going to have to hang some curtains I think; getting four hours of sleep on a Saturday is criminal (and having it happen several Saturdays in a row as it has to me is even worse).

I had some issues with the cable after moving everything in here last night – apparently the signal coming into the cable outlet in the bedroom is significantly weaker than the one going into the living room. Running the cable box and the modem through the bedroom outlet resulted in the cable box not being able to pull down the programming schedule from the provider, even though pulling down a list of channel names and displaying the correct time was no issue. So now the modem is hooked back up out in the living room and everything works fine. Cox wants $45 to send a technician out within the next week or two to ramp up the signal in the bedroom – screw that.

Actually, it’s kind of funny – at work all we charge for trouble tickets is the price of any parts used, and we try to adhere to a 24 hour response time. Here Cox is charging me $45 just to roll the truck sometime in the not-so-immediate future. No thanks, I’ll work this one out on my own.

I’ll post some tidbits about some other crap here in a day or so.

And on a side note… what’s the deal with MTV advertising hip-hop ringtones during Headbanger’s Ball? What am I ever going to want with a “Throw Some D’s” ringtone?

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More shit

Yeah, so it’s kind of cold out there. A balmy -3 last time ForecastFox showed me a weather report, and it has snowed several times since last week. That’s ridiculous, but I guess it’s better than sweating my ass off in 100 degree heat on the drive home from work every afternoon this summer. Thing about being hot or being cold is… if you get cold, you can turn up the heat and pile on as many blankets as it takes to warm back up. If you get too hot, you can only take off so many articles of clothing before you’re completely naked, and then you’re screwed because you’ll start offending people and there’s still no guarantee you would cool off. It’s a lose-lose situation, I tell you.

Inventory page is progressing well. I logged in a few hours tonight working on that after I got home from work and hashed out a good chunk of the price list. All I have to do is straighten up the layout and code the section to actually edit the prices. I want to make sure I get that done right since any given operation in that department is going to hit at least a couple dozen records, and I don’t want to blow the database up. 4am is not the best time of night to be blowing your database up. At any rate, the upshot for me is there has been some interest from some other folks about using the software I’m writing for their own inventory management. Some changes will need to be made, but it wouldn’t be anything major. Unfortunately since this is all coded in ASP.Net I don’t have a way of putting it up on this server to demo for people. However, Dreamhost does have Ruby On Rails installed on their servers, and I do happen to have a Ruby On Rails book… next project, maybe?

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Minimum maintenance roads…

… SUCK.

So I was scheduled to go out to a customer’s house this morning to look at their DSL connection. Pretty typical shit. I got a map off of Mapquest and headed out, making my way for a county road south of Blair. County roads, as you well know, have several different meanings. They can be paved, gravel, dirt, or they can be a trail between two corn fields lined with signs that say TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT.

This morning I was on a county road that was all of the above. It started paved… then became a gravel road… then turned to a dirt road… then turned into a muddy path with a sign that said MINIMUM MAINTENANCE ROAD. But I’m a trooper – I was literally almost there, I figured a little mud wouldn’t be too bad. I made it through about half a mile before I got myself stuck in a rut.

Long story short, I had to walk about a mile and a half back towards civilization before I finally ran into someone who lived at a house back where the road was paved. Had to call the boss to bring his hugeass pickup out to tow me out of the mud.

Moral of the story: If you see a sign that says minimum maintenance road, turn your ass around and find another way. It’s not worth it.

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My abomination

I stopped by Big Brain the other night to do some maintenance on the project we did for them a few months ago. It was nice to see the 5-headed monster we set up working great. It seemed like half the customers that came in would go straight for a station there to look at artwork. Gave me kind of a sense of accomplishment knowing that Mark, Ed, and I basically worked our asses off for a good month and a half doing something that only a handful of people have ever done before and it was being put to pretty good use.

Relevant linkage:
Userful
Fedora Core
Shellfish

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