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August 26, 2002
That Diddly Sound
Goddammit! My RIM pager's messed up. Normally, it would only beep if I got high priority email or someone tried to page me directly. There's a setting that allows it to beep on every email that I receive... except that no matter what setting I put it on, it beeps for every single message that comes through.
I'm so pissed.
Posted by KinCross at 06:00 PM | Comments (0)
Hi, I'm Ed Gruberman
I may just give up on learning a martial art here in New York and go back to Canada instead, to study Royal Canadian Mounted Spetsnaz.
Courtesy of Nick.
Posted by KinCross at 05:20 PM | Comments (0)
August 24, 2002
Betcha can't keep a straight face on
So... everyone checked out the "US Brand Names Turned Upside-Down" link from yesterday right? Wasn't that a catchy song? Would you like to see the real video for it? (Wait for it.) How about the lyrics? Go on. You know you want to karaoke along with it.
Courtesy of my sister and LeRoy.
Posted by KinCross at 07:26 PM | Comments (0)
August 23, 2002
Surfacing for Air
Hi! It's been... a week! What's happened?
The server was rebuilt. A new quite was put out. Now, we wait to see if they actually buy a real server to replace the workstation that they're currently using.
Started training the new hires at the office on their lab exercise this week, so I've been away from my desk and sitting with them in the lab a lot, but still getting a good amount of work done.
Passed my Windows 2000 Server exam today and have already bitten a big chunk out of the Windows 2000 Network Infrastructure study guide.
And now the useless links:
Highway Traffic Stops for Franks
US Brand Names Turned Upside-Down
Sphincterine Nuff said.
Posted by KinCross at 07:05 PM | Comments (0)
August 16, 2002
Where have you been?
You may ask, "Where has Ian been these past couple of days?"
I've been rebuilding a NetWare 4.11 server.
On a POS that is now assembled on the floor in what looks like a game of Metal Jenga.
Did I mention that NetWare 4.11 is no longer supported by Novell? Don't call Tech Support and we won't call you.
Off to dinner with my relatives from Hong Kong, if they're still here in the city somewhere.
Posted by KinCross at 04:12 PM | Comments (0)
August 15, 2002
And so it goes...
For the 2002 season, here's what I'll be fielding at the office (12 teams, 18 player roster, play 1 QB, 1 RB, 2 WR, 1 TE, 1 RB/WR/TE, 1 PK, 1 Def each week, bench earns 10%):
Peyton Manning QB IND
Jake Plummer QB ARI
Ricky Williams RB MIA
Duce Staley RB PHI
James Jackson RB CLE
Kevin Faulk RB NE
Jimmy Smith WR JAC
Plaxico Burress WR PIT
Amani Toomer WR NYG
Muhsin Muhammad WR CAR
Koren Robinson WR SEA
Az-Zahir Hakim WR DET
Freddie Jones TE ARI
Wesley Walls TE CAR
Stephen Alexander TE SD
John Carney PK NO
Cowboys Def DAL
Chargers Def SD
Posted by KinCross at 05:46 AM | Comments (0)
August 13, 2002
The irony is killing me
What do Teamsters do when they need a new building and want to keep costs down? Hire non-union, of course.
Courtesy of Mike.
Posted by KinCross at 10:29 AM | Comments (0)
August 10, 2002
"Don't freak out. You're not late for work."
Last night, I came home from work and went straight to bed. I'd gone out the night before (I'll talk about this in another post) and ultimately got maybe 2.5 hours of sleep so I was dead tired when I got home. I slept almost straight through until this morning, when my alarms went off. After all, I hadn't bothered to turn them off for the weekend. I was that tired.
So at 6:25 this morning, the first alarm goes off. The first one is turned off pretty quickly. It's just a buzzer. I think to myself in that kind of half-awake muddied haze that it was Saturday and it sucked that the alarm went off.
Then the second alarm kicked off at 6:30. This one's the radio and the stuff that's coming out is the usual morning weekday radio show. Here I am thinking, "What the hell is this?" Is it a week day? Is it the weekend and they're just replaying morning show stuff?
At the end of the bit, the station identifier guy comes on and says, "Don't freak out. You're not late for work. It's the Best of the Zoo on Z100." Well, shit. I'm glad I didn't jump out of bed and dash for the shower.
Then again, I wouldn't have done that until the third alarm kicked in at 7:00.
Posted by KinCross at 06:34 AM | Comments (0)
Boing boing
Everyone's favourite topic: Britney Spears' breasts.
Courtesy of Colin, via email.
Posted by KinCross at 06:18 AM | Comments (0)
August 07, 2002
Uncommon Fonts
Anyone know how to encapsulate a non-standard font inside a webpage? Please email me if you do.
Posted by KinCross at 11:16 AM | Comments (0)
August 06, 2002
A question about patriotism
Why is it that many Americans feel patriotic about flying a flag or buying a box of Corn Flakes with the Stars and Stripes on them, but won't turn up to vote?
(51% of the voting age population voted in 2000.)
Posted by KinCross at 12:49 PM | Comments (0)
For Doyce, Meme Nut
Describe the items below using only two words.
07:30 am: Leave! Now!
12:30 pm: Lunch already?
05:30 pm: Must... finish...
10:30 pm: Still going
Fifteen minutes: Phone call
7:30 is when I leave to go to work. 12:30 is when I usually remember that it's lunch time. 5:30 is usually when I'm scrambling to finish something so I can go home. 10:30 is 30 minutes to Law & Order and really nowhere near when I go to bed, even though "bedtime" is 10:00. Fifteen minutes is the basic billing unit that I use when I bill time; any short phone call is billed as fifteen minutes of time.
Posted by KinCross at 11:20 AM | Comments (0)
Not-Your-Mother's-Quiz Time!
There's a section called Quizzes at B3TA and this is what I got:
Female or Shemale: 13/16
Jailbait or Legal: 14/16
Funnel or Tunnel: 11/16
Gay or Straight: 12/16
Celebrity or Look-alike: 14/16
Female or Shemale 2: 12/16
Female or Shemale 3: 13/16
He-cat or She-cat: 14/16
Posted by KinCross at 11:00 AM | Comments (0)
Bullet-Time Care Bear Stare
MIT students. Saturday. Lots of idle time.
EVIL.
(I want one.)
Courtesy of B3TA.
Posted by KinCross at 10:44 AM | Comments (0)
August 05, 2002
Chocolate-Coated Sugar Bombs
What is it that changes, as you grow from a toddler to an adult, that makes the affinty to sugar decline to the point where you can't stand the childhood cereals anymore and actually like the slightly bitter taste of grapefruit juice.
I wonder if, when I'm in my 30's, I'll actually start to like Grape Nuts.
Posted by KinCross at 08:48 PM | Comments (0)
Y'dead, mon?
I never read Skattieboy's blog before today, and only today because Xkot had linked to him under the title "A Sad Loss".
Non sequitur: I get spam from one, Christine Hall, telling me that I could put www.xkot.net on the map if I subscribed to her services to put it on some search engines. Great. I wonder who's out there helping put me on the Internet map on my behalf.
Back to the topic of Skattieboy. If you had stopped to read any of the links above, you would have discovered that Skattieboy (a.k.a. Scott Vice) was found dead in his apartment last Monday. The funeral was this past weekend. I read about this first thing this morning and it had me fixated on my own mortality and the issue of discovery and propagation until lunch, when my thoughts were then displaced by an all-consuming urge to feed my face with kielbasa.
But for the morning, I was feeling pretty morbid and a little freaked out. The topic seems to come up from time to time and, like the Billy Crystal character in City Slickers, I fixate on the whole death thing for awhile, except without the sticking my hands in the womb of a cow part.
It struck me that Scott had been a vibrant individual, well on his way to earning a Ph.D. in Psychology and had been, up until very recently, talking about his relationship with the girl among other very typical daily life things. He had even apologized in late July for posting less due to his busy life.
And then, there was nothing.
A friend of his ribbed him about being lax in posting, two days after his last post.
Then his brother posts in one of his comment sections, a week after his last post, that Scott was discovered dead in his apartment the day before.
Reading the various responses was enlightening. First, there was the disbelief and denial ("please tell me you're joking") and then the outpouring of emotion and condolences as people struggled to get a grip on the impact that this announcement would have. In Scott's case, many of the people that posted to his blog were his personal friends from when he lives in Utah, but there were, too, quite a few that knew him solely through their interaction with him and his blog. My condolences to his friends and family, of course, but his passing led me to think of a few other things.
If I died unexpectedly tonight, who would know? Who would find out first and, from there, how would the rest of the world know?
I live alone, save for a pair of cats, and they haven't been receptive to my attempts to teach them how to dial 911 on my cellphone or manage saying anything more than "meow." My contact with friends here, face to face, is sporadic, as is my contact with family, whether by phone or by email. For them, it's not unusual to not hear from me on a weekly basis. I suspect that my workplace would find out first, when they discover that I am neither reporting to work nor telling them my whereabouts. So... figure it takes them a week before they decide to send someone to check on my apartment.
They have my next of kin, so my family would find out about as quickly as they find out at the office, but from there, I don't know how much further it would go. My college friends would probably find out, because my parents know some of them and might have their phone number. If they got their hands on my Palm Pilot, they'd get that stuff, too. I don't know if they'd go as far as to start calling random people on my Palm Pilot to tell them the news.
The kicker is that I have a lot of friends that I've made online, whether through the blog, or mailing lists, or MUSH/MUXes. I'd like those friends to know if I passed away, but I'm not sure that anyone would know what to do. My sister is aware of my blog, so she might think to post something on here about it. That would notify quite a few people, I guess. From there, I suppose it would propagate to the MU* and the other mailing lists... so maybe there's not much to worry about, as long as something gets posted up here.
So who knows anything about do-it-yourself will kits? I think the best way to take care of all of this is to just write down the instructions on how to post stuff around to let your online buddies know what happened to you, if you die.
Talk about a morbid Monday...
Posted by KinCross at 08:25 PM | Comments (0)
Big Ass Trees
Though she didn't know that she was influential in this, Drew's sister Lorena can be credited with getting me off my ass to process the pictures from my camping trip to King's Canyon and Sequoia National Park on Memorial Day Weekend 2001. Alas, I don't have much in the way of pictures of the typical campfire stuff, but I snapped a few gorgeous scenic pictures of the Sierra Nevadas, not to mention some really giant trees. Check them out in the Pictures section.
Posted by KinCross at 08:12 PM | Comments (0)
Pigskin, Perchance?
Usually, you can tell when I'm in the office and when I'm not by the level of activity on the blog. For the past few weeks, I've been pretty busy on a client. Why, then, was my activity still low last week, even though I had come off the regular team on the client? Well, for that you can blame fantasy football.
I was fine with not thinking about football up until last Wednesday, when a colleague showed me his super nifty cool Excel spreadsheet with VBA that he was going to use for the draft. (Further, he was going to finish it off a little more and consider selling it. It's that good.) Anyway, having seen him with a cool tool, I had to have one of my own.
Last year, I used a moderately complex and surely not user friendly method of tracking the fantasy draft. I had all of the draft slots set up and ready to go and had a giant list of players that I used as a validation list when people drafted players. Needless to say, this took some fair amount of scrolling and it sucked in the early rounds when all the choices were really easy and people were blowing through their picks.
I aspired to more this year. That included trying to set up a spreadsheet closer approximating my colleague's. I don't know VBA, so there was no really good way for me to get up to speed on that, but I know Excel and I'd be damned if I couldn't try to simulate as much of the spreadsheet as I could.
So I spent the week hacking at Excel.
The result was pretty nice. I have an interface where I have a table with all of the draft slots, waiting to be populated. I have supporting sheets with players, ordered by value-based massaging. I have another table that shows me the roster, on the fly, depending on a variable, the owner of a team. Enter another team owner and the roster rearranges itself to show the new owner's roster. Likewise, it will show the distribution of positions (quickly eyeball how many RB's you have compared to WR's) and bye weeks (check to see if you're going to be overly weak in Week 8).
I'm pretty happy with it so far. My next big hurdle is trying to find a way to make it easy to populate the draft table, while eliminating the players already selected and keeping the lists compact. This, I think, might require me to learn some VBA. I have until next Wednesday to accomplish it.
Welcome back to the obsession.
Posted by KinCross at 08:07 PM | Comments (0)