Patrick’s Rants

When the District moved buildings they added a server to the server closet. And they added my user name with only nominal user rights. I can’t upgrade software that I use every day. Nope, I have to get someone else in the department sit down at my workstation, log in as the “transportation administrator” and perform menial tasks.

This means that Windows might be updated in the background (let’s hope that it is) but also that software I use every day – Openoffice.org – will never be updated on that workstation. This is especially frustrating when you realize that I am the network administrator for a high volume tax office, I run this web and mail server and administer my home network. When I called to see about upgrading software on the computer – software purchased to run transportation services – I was told that I didn’t have those rights. I used to. Well you don’t now.

Huh. That kind of sucks.

Almost true… We are raising your rate

I’ve lived in my apartment for around eleven years. Just a few weeks ago, due to the work and preliminary success of our “communal garden” I decided to set up a garden box outside. It’s really a bunch of plywood pieces held together with screws and 2×4 pieces from old pallets. It’s small, just 24″ front to back and slightly over 10′ long. I then acquired some used banana boxes to act as “pots”. A trip to Home Depot yesterday for several bags of soil, a bag of composted steer manure a couple of tomato cages and plants was just what we needed to get started. My wife also grabbed one of those upside down tomato planters. I don’t know how well they work yet since we only just planted it yesterday, but considering that she has another on the way from Amazon.com I’m really hoping they work.

I filled the bottom of my boxes with top soil, added a few inches of steer manure and a small amount of worm castings that I gathered in the woods (mine aren’t producing much castings yet). Into the mix went tomatoes and bell peppers. This morning I direct seeded onions, mustard, lettuce, carrots, spinach and dill. I still have a couple more boxes to fill and plant, but for now I get to sit back for a few minutes before trying to get a few more pickle buckets and collecting some mulch from the free pile at the public works yard to top off the planters.

According to the commercial with push to talk Blackberry’s if a student was missing there would be an all out search for that student. In the search, they find a different kid that they apparently don’t know was missing. They eventually track him down and send him to detention.

Now, here’s the truth.

Schools don’t have the time to track students down. They aren’t “packages” don’t pretend that they are. There is no way to accurately “track” a human being. Give the kid a bar code that is scanned as they get on and off the bus? Some parents might think this is a good thing (and some days I agree with them) but the fact is the kids will lose whatever RFID encoded card they carry, purposefully leave it at home or school, parents will fight it and the ACLU would be drooling at the chance to strike down any “papers please” program.

The transportation people don’t want the school employees on their radio frequency. Really. School employees tend to act like what they want is the only thing that’s important while the transportation department has to juggle multiple field trips and the needy people from other schools. Really. Shut up and get off of my radio.

That and schools/teachers don’t care if the kid is missing from their class. I get an automated call from my kids’ school when they are marked absent. In the case of my high school kid it merely states, “your student was marked truant in one or more classes.” If the teacher follows a strict “ass in the seat when the bell rings” policy I have no way of knowing whether she was standing at the pencil sharpener at the wrong time in one class or hopped a Greyhound to Mexico and missed the entire day. Neither the school nor the teacher is going out of their way to find a missing kid when there is a classroom full of students who do want to learn.

So what if delivery people ran the world? They wouldn’t give a crap where the missing kid is either, that’s what.

The garden seems to be coming along. The first potatoes have really started to fill in. I recently planted the rest of the potato row, but those new potatoes haven’t started coming in yet. This last weekend we started planting most of the rest of the started plants and we direct seeded several different kinds of beans and squash.

I discovered that I already had the licensing in hand to activate the Terminal Server – it was in the email sent to me by Dell. My bad I guess. Actually, the activation is separate from adding user CALs to the system. I could have been working on getting my users working on Saturday.

I have to go back in today to try to figure out the installation problem I’m having with the tax program – the 2008 version relies heavily on .net. And the version on Windows Server 2008 64bit does not seem to be doing the trick. I may have to fight with it for a little while to see if it gets running. There are a couple of hoops that I haven’t jumped through yet – including calling customer support. I may also be forced to use Microsoft’s virtual machine. More to come…

The Windows 2003 server at the office has been struggling to keep up with the demands placed upon it. It was a great machine when we bought it: dual PIII 1 GHZ processors with 1.5 GB ram and mirrored 120GB hard drives. Today it’s severely strained in the way it’s used. It’s a Terminal Services machine with four to five consecutive users at any given point in time who each have a half dozen intensive programs open. If I dismiss the minimal use from the receptionist workstation that’s still around 300MB ram for each user.

First I talked to our software vendor to determine if our tax software was going to run on Windows Server 2008 x64. I was assured that the QA and development departments were working on Server 2008 and x64 and that both are likely to be listed as approved/supported Operating Systems by mid-summer. After that we called up Dell to give them our list of requirements. We ended up with a Power Edge T300. On Dell’s website these are starting at $1278.00 with no OS and one 250GB hard drive. Ours cost nearly $5k with raided hard drives, dual 1Ghz NICs and licensing.

Saturday was the first that I was able to get into the office to start configuring it for our use. The first boot of Server 2008 requires the Administrator password to be set. After several failed attempts to enter a password at the prompt I realized that hitting the Enter key on this screen is the same as clicking on “Cancel”. Sombich! I had to actually use the mouse to click on the the little button to the right of the confirmation box to get the machine to accept the changed password. Why did it default to Cancel when hitting enter? That’s not the expected behavior. When I enter the password at the login screen Enter is the key that I want, it defaults to “Enter” why not when changing the password? Of course this is a minor hitch and not a deal breaker – it’s merely frustrating for 10 minutes or so to figure out what Windows is doing.
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I was telling my mom about the worm bucket system that I set up and she decided that’s what she wanted for mother’s day – a worm farm. And mom was serious. So I had to look into gathering more empty buckets. I had one and my “design” calls for four. So I stopped in Burger King last Friday, bought an obligatory coffee and asked about buckets. The kid behind the counter brought me one. I asked him about the ones I had seen by the dumpster and he told me that I could take those too. I scored five.

On Saturday I started making mom’s worm farm. After thinking about it for a while I decided to make the farm five buckets instead of four. My thinking was to make two into the spacers. That would mean that the stack would be: solid bucket on the bottom, empty main bucket, main bucket, spacers. Two of the rim sections of these buckets adds about six inches of height. Once the empty main is rotated to the top there is nearly a full bucket worth of castings in the main bucket. I liked this idea so much that I added another spacer to mine. I added 3″ of newspaper bedding and scooped out a couple of handfuls of worms to drop into the new system. It’s not much to start with, but they are supposed to be prolific breeders.

We went to mom’s on Sunday for late brunch. My aunt, cousin and my cousin’s daughter were visiting with my mom. I haven’t seen my cousin in something like 15 years so it was good to see her again. Mom was waiting for her worms. I showed her the setup, told her how to feed them and when to rotate the main buckets. Her main compost bin is too narrow, doesn’t heat up enough and dries out too fast (I see a new compost bin construction project coming) and she is probably going to end up using the worm buckets as her primary kitchen waste processor. And she couldn’t have been happier with a store bought gift.

Pizza Hut has an annoying commercial promoting large pizzas for $5.99. This dork is standing at the counter asking what he can get for $5.99.
I have two bills in my pocket a five and a one, what can I get The blond behind the counter answers that he can get a large pizza for $5.99. But that’s not true. He can get the hell away from the counter or an ass kicking, but not a pizza. I don’t know many places where that he can get that pizza without paying some form of sales tax except Oregon.

So the dork can get the hell out of everyone else’s way and stop saying A LARGE for $5.99 Yeah. Large can of whoop ass.

The latest Alltel commercial really stretches the limits. It opens on some group of super heroes all complaining that they can’t talk to each other to beat their arch enemy because they are all on different cell phone networks. The solution? Chad from Alltel. They can call anyone they want with the circle plan. The thing is if they all switch to the same provider they will get free in-network calls. Somehow we are supposed to believe that Chad’s plan is the best even though every provider has a similar plan.

So if you missed it the complaint is: we are all on different networks.
The solution: you should all be on the same network.
Well duh!