Another screenshot, followed by new annoyances…

May 24, 2005May 30, 2005 D'Arque Bishop

I just took a screenshot of the home PC's desktop. Like I said, I'm on something of a Nova kick right now.

Fun fun… I get to go to Houma and Jennings next week to upgrade the engineering fileservers. I wish I didn't have to, but unfortunately I'm the only one familiar enough with Linux, Samba, et al to be able to do it properly. *sigh* Good thing Monday's a holiday… the more break I have between trips, the happier I am.

Oh, well… now to check in on a situation developing on #mortalkombat… *sigh* Sometimes I seriously consider resigning from the site. It would save me a lot of stress over the long run.

Anyway, going to get a beer and deal with this… fun…

Another day in the daily grind…

May 24, 2005May 30, 2005 D'Arque Bishop

Hrm.

I can't exactly say I'm having an exciting day right now. My main project right now consists of adding two new users to the network and setting up their account profiles so that they're ready to go once they log into the system for the first time. It's really not that much to do, really… just get it set up and let the sysadmin know the accounts are ready. Other than that, it's fairly slow right now. Oh, well… it could be worse. I could have absolutely nothing to do… heh.

Before I go any further, a quick hi to those people who are joining us from the link to <a href="http://www.dianto.org/blog">Sean MC's blog</a>; if you're easily bored, this may not be the place for you. Otherwise, welcome!

Okay, that said… Aunt Norma finally arrived last night. She's staying tonight, and tomorrow she and Mom will be going to Vegas. While I was gone at Los Angeles, two Doctor Who books she ordered for me arrived: "Winner Takes All" and "The Monsters Inside", which are both Ninth Doctor books. In addition, when she arrived, she brought with her the 1996 Doctor Who TV movie on DVD. :-) The only problem was that it was Region 2 and 4, which means it would only play on either region-free players or players made in the UK and Europe(?). So, I had to run it through DVD Decrypter and then burn it to a DVD-R in order for me to be able to watch it on my DVD players. I also supposedly have the final Eighth Doctor Doctor Who book on the way as well… unfortunately it wasn't released before Aunt Norma left for the States, but it should arrive at some point soon. Now, I just gotta return the favor: Aunt Norma missed Saturday's episode of Doctor Who, so I'm going to let her watch it on my computer system. It's not that big of a deal, really… I recorded the season finale of CSI: Miami for Mom on my TiVo anyway, so she needs to go in and see that too.

Bleh… need to go and do some printer troubleshooting… fun fun. Might as well sign off for now seeing as I don't know how long this will take. Oh, well…

Tidings from the past…

May 23, 2005May 30, 2005 D'Arque Bishop

There's nothing quite like time to kill when one has little to do. Right now I'm stuck out at the colocation, waiting for the obligatory traffic mess out at 610 and San Felipe to right itself before I dare venture home. I'll probably leave at around 6:30 PM… and be home in time to see Aunt Norma, who's in the country for a short bit.

Last Thursday, I got an email from an old friend. Actually, I probably would have received it sooner, but he sent it to my old ravenloft email address and got hit by my customized spam solution. (For those who never saw it, all mail to my ravenloft.net address gets bounced with a custom error message that says, "550 Recipient address rejected: Spam makes baby Jesus cry. If this is a legit email, send to…" etc.) Apparently he had dug up an old document he wrote back in 8th grade dealing with a bit of a… well, situation I had caused involving him and this one girl. I went by his site, read his blog and joined his forums, and for now… am just watching and observing. :-)

It's good to connect with old friends. The sad fact is, up until around high school, we had been a trio of best friends (including our other friend Kourt) who did a lot of fun and kinda weird stuff together. Then, during high school, I drifted away from them. Well, more like it was mutual drift, but looking back I don't blame them. In my freshman year and part of my sophomore year, I was something of a hateful asshole to those around me. I got better over time, but the drift still happened and I more or less disappeared from their circle of friends. I'd spoken to Sean since high school, of course, but never really kept up contact. That's part of the reason I'm kinda keeping back and keeping an eye on things… I'm actually hoping I can probably mend a few fences. One can never have too many friends, after all.

It's funny how some things change and how things stay the same. Sean and Kourt are both married now. Hell, Sean was apparently thinking of fatherhood recently (if you're reading this, Sean, I ain't stalking… just saw it in one of your blog entries referenced in a post to another friend). Meanwhile… things are exactly the same for me, more or less. Still single, still living at home, and still playing video games and messing around with computers. I guess the main difference for me is that I have a good job and could move out whenever I wanted to. Still, reading Sean's forum and whatnot, it gives me cause for reflection. Am I really as far along in my life as I want to be? Is there something more out there?

*shrug* I don't know. I guess for now, I'll just continue to take each day as it comes and see what happens. I'm not dissatisfied with my life, mind you. I just wonder what more could be out there, and what I've missed in my time.

(And if you've read this far, my apologies for boring you with this rare bout of self-contemplation. I'll return to the mundane details of my life, humorous anecdotes, and social commentary with the next few posts. :-) )

Another E3 over and done with…

May 22, 2005May 30, 2005 D'Arque Bishop

Well, I'm back from E3.

I should be going to bed at some point in the next hour. The problem is that I'm still kind of on Pacific time, and I usually stayed up late every day this past week. Oh, well… the big interesting games that I saw were Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks, Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows, Stargate SG-1: The Alliance, We <3 Katamari, Quake 4, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, Starcraft: Ghost, and others. I also have blisters on my feet… bleh.

If you want to see the pics that I took, just take a look here: http://drkbish.darquecathedral.org/gallery/view_album.php?set_albumName=e3-2005

(Take special note of the booth babe from the SG-1 area on the first page. She's holding her staff weapon upside-down.)

And now, seeing as I'm unpacking my laptop backpack, I decided to answer the never-answered (and for that matter, never-asked) question: "What do you take with you on these trips, Scott?"

<lj-cut text="Placed behind a cut for those people who don't care… heh.">For one thing, I take my laptop backpack instead of my shoulder bag, as the backpack is easier for me to carry around and can be less obtrusive. As for the contents of the bag…
<ul>
<li> My Apple 15" Powerbook and assorted power cables.</li>
<li> Two retractable cables… one network, one phone.</li>
<li> An AirPort Express (aka, a portable wireless access point and router). We used it so all four of us with laptops could share one room's network connection.</li>
<li> My Fuji Finepix 1400 digital camera, and two sets of rechargable NiMH AA batteries for it.</li>
<li> My Canon ZR80 MiniDV camcorder, a Firewire cable, and an A/V cable, plus two MiniDV tapes. (It didn't see much use this year.)</li>
<li> My Game Boy Advance, along with a small selection of games. (This time I brought Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance, Space Invaders, Namco Museum, Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo, Tetris, and Arcade Classic 4: Defender/Joust.)</li>
<li> My noise-cancelling headphones. </li>
<li> The wifi detector <lj user=missyanthrope> got me for Christmas.</li>
<li> A stack of DVDs for watching during the trip. (This time I brought Mortal Kombat, Star Trek II, The Fifth Element, Doctor Who: Pyramids of Mars, and Doctor Who: Rememberance of the Daleks.)</li>
<li> My iPod</li>
<li> The travel charger for my Blackberry.</li>
</ul>
This is what I usually take when I'm on a personal vacation. When on business trips, I take the shoulder bag and don't bother taking the camera equipment.
</lj-cut>
In any event, it's good to be home… heh. A couple of other events happened during this trip, but I'm close to being ready to go to bed. I'll hopefully post about them tomorrow from work. For now, I can say it was a good trip, but it's good to be home in my own bed.

Welcome, my son… welcome to the machine…

May 16, 2005May 30, 2005 D'Arque Bishop

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/business/3182087

CHICAGO – Perfect attendance is such a virtue at Lawson Products that employees who go a year without missing work or arriving late are rewarded with extra paid days off.
But for some, there's a downside. At the distributor's warehouse and customer service center in Addison, Ill., there are no excuses for missing work unless time off is scheduled in advance. Any unplanned absence, whether for illness, a flat tire or family emergency, is a black mark.
Punching in one minute late earns half a point. Missing one to two hours merits one point. A full day adds two points.
Six points results in a reprimand; 10 points, suspension without pay. Employees can be fired if they exceed 12 points within a year.
Such "no-fault" attendance programs, which run counter to the trend toward more family-friendly approaches, are migrating from factories and warehouses to white-collar workplaces as employers try to standardize discipline and wrest greater control over workers' schedules.
…
<!–StartFragment –>
No-fault policies eliminate judgments about whether an absence could have been avoided. Instead, they draw a strict line between planned and unplanned time off. Typically, no more than six unscheduled absences
are tolerated within a year, although multiday illnesses count as one "occurrence."
Those with paid days off for illness or emergencies still get paid, but these unplanned absences count against their attendance records.
…
<!–StartFragment –>
"It's kind of like three strikes and you're out," said George Faulkner, absence management practice leader at Mercer Human Resource Consulting. "We try to tell employers, you have to give employees some
kind of flexibility here."
Strict proponents take a different view.
"When management says, 'We're going to give you an opportunity to fire yourself,' people understand that," said Gene Levine, a California-based consultant. "You decide how many times you want to be absent, and you begin to count down to termination."
Levine described his approach at a company that was unhappy about having to fire an employee after she missed work because of her grandmother's death.
"In each of the absences you had before, was there any one you could have avoided?" Levine recalled asking the woman.
She acknowledged one, he said.
"We're not firing you because of your grandmother but because of that date," he told her. "After that, absenteeism dropped because people said, 'If they can let this person go, they're serious.' "

I doubt he'll read this… but Mr. Levine, I want you to do me a favor. Scratch that… I want you to do yourself a favor.

Go home to your wife, your kids, your parents. Tell them they're irrelevant. Tell them your job is more important. Tell them that you'd rather save your career than help them.

If you can't do that… then I want you to sit down, and realize that is exactly what you are telling your employees to do. Think on that. If this truly does not bother you… then I weep for humanity, as you are obviously one of its first casualties.

For <lj user=pandorah>…

May 9, 2005May 30, 2005 D'Arque Bishop

http://www.wrongplanet.net/modules.php?name=Articles&pa=showpage&pid=98

The link is to an interview with Bram Cohen, the guy who created the popular BitTorrent protocol so popular in filesharing and the like. The reason I bring it up here to <lj user=pandorah>'s attention is that unlike most interviews, this one takes a different tack and focuses on Cohen's Asperger's Syndrome.

Just thought it might be an interesting read, especially as it focuses on someone who's in Gabe's shoes and has achieved some measure of success in the computer field. :-)

Things are looking up…

May 4, 2005May 30, 2005 D'Arque Bishop

Well, a quick post before I go to bed…

I've spent all week working at my employers' booth at the Offshore Technology Conference. I swear, I know how the Midway folks feel now… I'm on my feet all day, more or less stuck at the booth, talking to people who happen by. The main reason I'm there is to keep an eye on the laptops that are showing our presentations on the plasma displays we rented, and making sure they don't crash and also switching them whenever needed. It's been a long week, and I'll be glad when I can get back to the office.

On the personal side of things, I've reconnected with an old friend, and things have been… well, I haven't been this content in a while. Cute little text messages and emails back and forth between us at work, talking after work, and just generally enjoying each other's company. She's known I've had feelings for her for a while… for one reason or another we never really connected until recently. I can honestly say I'm glad she's in my life right now. (And no, I'm not saying who she is… I'm taking the <lj user=jenndolari> route and keeping her anonymous until/unless she wants to become known.)

Oh, well… life is good. I'm content. Here's hoping things stay this way or better.