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Help for IT People

August 30th, 2010 by Howard | 3 Comments | Filed in Humor, Main, Techology

I don’t know if any IT people read my blog, but I hope so. Folks, when your entire computer system is down, dead like a rock on the road, keeping the users updated is critical. Listen, I know communication with human beings is a challenge for you to begin with, but try it. Consider the airline industry. I’m sure you have flown before, and no doubt one time or another your plane has been delayed in taking off. On most competent airlines you are updated every fifteen minutes or so. What they tell you is pure fantasy, as most times the pilot or flight attendants don’t have a clue what the mechanics are doing with their heads stuck in the number 3 engine. But whatever story they tell the passengers calms them down, makes them think that someone is working on the problem, and that maybe, just maybe they might make it to their cousin’s wedding in Cleveland after all. More than that, internally they know the airline crew respect them enough to lie to them every 15 minutes. Its what they would want if they were sitting in a tiny seat breathing stale air.

So, when your system goes down, it is really important that you send out a message to everyone that you are aware of it and working on it. We aren’t sitting in tiny seats unable to stretch while breathing stale air, so you don’t have to contact us every 15 minutes. But hourly would be nice. Maybe every 90 minutes. Also, it would really help if you passed along some information. Just like the airline model, it doesn’t have to be the truth. You could say “The core server coils failed and the neon tubes have to be refilled with rayon.” We don’t know crap about computers, but we will spend the next 90 minutes discussing the neon tubes and coils with each other and pondering possible options. We may even Google the price of rayon while we are at it.

The worse thing you can do is to be 100% silent. Which by the way, seems to be the standard operating procedure with IT folks world-wide. Everyone is sitting around staring at their blank rocks on their desks, customers are standing around glaring at anyone who works for the company, and pretty much everyone is angry with you. Even though it was the squirrel that the Biology lab let loose that chewed the rubber bands off the hard drive circuit boards so it isn’t even your fault to begin with!

I am aware that I am addressing a skill set that IT people lack. Hell, if you could talk with people you would have a real job, right? So, to make things easy for you, I’ve prepared a series of emails or voice messages for you. All you have to do is send them out in sequence every 90 minutes. Just mail me a check for $99 and I will send you back enough made up messages to last you through three outages. But that’s not all. If you act today I will include my new book, “How to Dress Not Like a Geek Who Lives with his Mother Still” totally free!

And if that isn’t enough to get you off your rapidly enlarging fat ass, I will include my pamphlet, “Guide to complete sentences”, normally selling for $12.99 completely free, all you pay is the extra shipping charge of $49.99.

Wow…that felt good. Hmmmm….I wonder what else I can do while I wait for my network system to come back online???

Some Blogging Guy

Atala Butterfly

July 24th, 2010 by Howard | 2 Comments | Filed in Main, Observations, Photography

My wife achieved a milestone in her quest for a great butterfly garden with the visit from an Atala butterfly yesterday. She also captured this photograph of it.

The Atala is a rare butterfly trying to make a comeback. It needs the native plant Coontie to lay eggs on. Coontie isn’t always easy to find at your local plant nursery.

Way to go girl!

Some Blogging Guy

Garden Photographs

July 11th, 2010 by Howard | 1 Comment | Filed in Main

Let’s end the weekend with some photographs I took in our garden this weekend.

These below are butterflies sleeping at night. They find a secluded place to hang out. I was using flash so it looks brighter than it was.

The purple below is crape myrtle, again, at night using flash.

And thus is Thomas the Tree Frog. He has taken over a ceramic birdhouse we have hanging just outside our patio. Every evening at dust he sticks his head out and just relaxes until it becomes totally dark. Then off he goes, but he returns every morning to his fancy pad.

Cute guy, eh?

Havd a wonderful week folks.

Some Blogging Guy
Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Hard Drive Memories

July 11th, 2010 by Howard | 1 Comment | Filed in Main

I have photos to post, but I am preoccupied by a laborious and tedious task at hand – cleaning out my old hard drives. I have purchased a Western Digital 1 Terabyte hard drive to replace the five I currently use. I thought that was a bargain at $99 at Best Buy but it turns out WD has started putting Crapware on their drives now. Something called WD Smartware VCD. I have no clue what it is supposed to do as I wasn’t in the market for software – I was shopping for hardware. Imagine if at breakfast I ordered eggs and bacon and they took up a portion of my plate with anal thermometers? Granted, it is a free bonus, sort of, but it is taking up a portion of my plate and I didn’t order anal thermometers, I ordered and paid for eggs and bacon. Part of my plate is occupied by a product I was not seeking.

Imagine too that the anal thermometers were super glued to the plate. They could not be removed. You were not forced to utilize them, but you had to stare at them while you consumed your eggs and bacon.

Annoying, right? At best.

It took me over an hour searching on the big old www before I ran into a combination of things that may or may not have deleted the crapware, but has made all trace of it invisible. As my wife says, “Close enough for dental work.” (Yes, I am aware that is the incorrect phrase and as such appears meaningless, but do you think I am going to correct her? Besides, it makes me chuckle every time she says it.)

Go ahead, try it. Next time you feel compelled to say “Close enough for government work” swap out “dental” for “government” and see the reaction.

Anyhoo, after reclaiming my new hard drive and registering on the Western Digital website so that I could leave a long and nasty rant about their crapware, I began the task of transferring files from five drives to one.

My goal is to do something I have never done before, intelligently choose which files to retain. Normally I just create a folder on the new drive that refers to the old and just copy the entire mess over. Which creates nested folders within folders.

When you consider that I have been into computers longer than most of my readers have been alive, you can imagine the number of files this involves. Granted, I can’t copy any files from my TI-994a or my Timex Sinclair, as hard drives weren’t available for them. I copied my files onto cassette tapes. Ok, I will wait a moment while some of you older readers explain to the younger ones what a cassette tape was.

My first “real” computer, in my view, was the Atari 800XL. I ran my real estate business with that. Mail merge, letters, flyers, database of houses. I actually still have some files from that machine. They are word processing files that I password protected. I can’t recall the passwords and it is a bitch finding any sort of file converter to allow current word processing software to open them anyway. But I still have them.

Of course, in the late 80′s and early 90′s I switched to IBM clones. Yes, this is before Windows even.

I will spare you the trip down PC memory lane. Let’s just say over the decades I have owned at least 25 computers. Maybe more. And each time I switched I copied photographs and text files over.

So, now that I am digging through my hard drive folders within folders within folders it is sort of like an archeology dig. Layers of my life are being uncovered as I peel away another folder to reveal yet more folders. All my blogs and fiction and even my poetry are laid bare as I explore.

My step-daughter lived with us for about a year. I found some letters and ‘rules’ and some great photos. I dug through my pre-marriage relationships. Man did I really write those sappy letters? I dug through my first (and last) divorce. Work evaluations, receipts from my mother’s death, and more bad poetry. I found my thesis for my Masters Degree and marveled at my BS abilities.

Some of my photographs were taken with a 1.5 megapixel camera. State of the art at the time. Amazing.

The photographs are the toughest to decide about. I must have millions or billions of images.

In the process, I also rediscovered the history of all of my handheld devices. I have an Iphone now. Before that, I had an Ipod. Prior to that a Pocket PC. Before that a series of Palm handhelds, and even a Visor. Amazing. I think I can safely delete those files…

At what point do you say to yourself, ” If I haven’t looked at them in years, it’s OK to just delete them.”?

I have some folders that are eight to twelve folders deep. Nested messes. Hmmm…that sounded like an 80′s band!

I think I am reaching the point where I am saying to myself, “Look Dude, you wouldn’t be able to find them anyway, so just push the big old capital D key!”

Yet….it is difficult. I don’t even know what I am deleting!

What if I delete some prize winning photo or some piece of fiction I wrote that could win awards?

On the other hand, what if when I pass away one day they find all my crappy poetry?

:delete:

Some Blogging Guy

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad