Asleep at the Wheel 40 Miles Left to Go
my sweetest friend
everyone I know
goes away in the end
and you could have it all
my empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt
Sometimes, that’s just the way it is. Ya ever feel like apologizing to all your friends and family for being who you are? Tonight I do. To everyone I’ve ever hurt, and I know there’s a lot of you out there, I am sorry. Thanks for taking me as I am, and putting up with all my shit. You’re more than I deserve, sometimes.
feck.
…it’s not that it hasn’t registered, it’s more that the large majority of North America doesn’t care – including the traditional markets. I thought I would care a little, I don’t. I have football, my own Thursday night hockey league, running, group leading, movies, and a social life. That doesn’t leave much time for hockey, and I won’t have to worry about making excuses to sit inside in June to watch the game next year. I’m thinking there are a lot of people like me. I mean, really, the only people who could afford to go to the games were corp customers, and all they are missing is their tax writeoff, which they’ll find somewhere else.
Good luck Mr. B and Mr. G., I think you’re going to have a hard time getting back to where you were, and you’ve probably really fucked up places you need – like Calgary. Congrats.
On Friday there were some sales people and solutions engineers having a crisis. They had a customer who had been running their own Windoze-based nameservers for their domains. The boxes had been set up by one of their folks who acted as their IS/IT department. Said folk left, and they had some domain-related issues, somehow this became my company’s problem (most likely because the sales people wanted to close a sale, so fair enough).
Unfortunately, said sales and solutions people were also clueless as to how DNS works. I am not and, even more unfortunately, some people know this and told the sales and solution people. They called me, and tried to make it my problem. I resisted, but eventually their calls became a major pain in the ass, and it was recommended I help out in the interest of keeping the customer happy.
Fine. Their in-house administrator didn’t know what a zone file was, couldn’t tell me which method/app they were using to host the zonefiles, nor could give me any clue as to how many hosts they had configured. So, I had nothing.
I took a quick look at the domains and the zonefiles were broken, with invalid (and stupid) info in the SOA records, missing NS records, and a bunch of problems with CNAME references. Thankfully, they also hadn’t locked down zone transfers, so I just pulled the files directly from the nameserver. I corrected all the problems and tested the zones. I then sent them to the solutions engineer, who wanted to review them before they were submitted to our DNS hosting group. I did this all on Friday at 15:30 because people were panicking, and had the corrected, tested files out by 16:15.
Everyone had already gone home. I guess the name of the game was actually getting someone else to take the problem, so they could go home early.
It got better this morning. Around 09:30 I received an email from the solutions engineer as follows:
Thank you for your help. Unfortunately I am not able to open the file to check it. I am afraid that the customer can’t do it neither. Please let me know if you can convert it to a Word document. Thank you!
I had identified the zonefiles as textfiles in the email. Our naming format for zonefiles is “domain.name.zone”. So naturally, when the engineer went to verify them, all he did was double click on the attachments, bringing up the application association dialog. I guess expecting someone who is going to check a zonefile to know something like how to use a text editor was a little much. Once again, you must be this high to use the internet. Thank you for flying air kev. This is a guy who puts together IP solutions for our customers in hosting. *sigh*
On a happier note, it was the sales rep who sent him instructions on how to open the file. Technology, yay! Our solutions eng verified the file, then instructed me to hurry up and get it in place – no thank you. I did get a thank you from the rep, who seems like a decent guy. It’s nice to see that once in a while, although the whole “please put it in a Word file because I fucked off on Fridayand now it’s impacting my life again” note from their solutions guy still makes me see red.
My productivity continues to improve. I am scared.
Ok, I caved. It’s little, white, and pretty. It holds a tonne of music. It has an outstanding interface. And it’s mine now. Why’d I wait so long to pick one of these up again?
Brilliant. Simply… brilliant. Even the music for the video rocks.
So, after owning an HDTV-capable TV for the better part of three years, I finally got an HDTV receiver last week. I use ExpressVU as my provider, and have been reasonably happy with the service, so I have sworn off Rogers and will stick with them. The receivers have finally dropped to “reasonable” prices, so I took the plunge.
Annoyance number one was that you have to upgrade your antenna, and there’s an $89.95 upgrade kit that includes two signal combiners, some coax, a second LNB and no instructions. In the US, the $79.95 receiver I purchased included a dual-LNB dish and 4-way multiswitch. I wasn’t terribly cheesed, as the upgrade kit included a $60 programming credit – not the way I like to get my money back, but it’s $60 cash either way.
If you like this kinda thing, check out the mix forum over at globalbeatz. I’ve been pulling a lot of stuff on-the-fly from here, and while it’s a mixed bag, I have found some decent remixes. You have to register to download.
Mike’s post on signing up for DSL service made me chuckle. He’s right, if someone has to ask how they can give you excellent customer service today, they probably won’t be able to. My personal favorites are companies that use their Customer Service lines to pitch new/enhanced services, when all you really want to do is get what you want to do done and leave. A certain Canadian satellite television service is particularly annoying with their implementation, as every menu item starts with the same pitch.
To escape that little bit of hell, hit pound, and you’ll go to an error message which then re-lists the options without the need to listen to the pitch. If customer service departments really cared, they’d make a call menu diagram available so I knew that I would have to enter 1-6131234567#-3-2-2 instead of listening to crap for 3 minutes. They do it for my voicemail, why not their helpdesk?
So I went and saw a doctor-type, and they told me that I had strained my extensors, including my glutes, on the left side of my body. This would explain why my ass hurts, too (and no, not in that way). He didn’t think I had done any skeletal damage, and that I should start stretching and doing light workouts as soon as possible.
The root cause seems to be a lack of stretching/warming up before playing Ultimate, compunded by a workout the day before. One of the exercises I had done was barbell lunges, which involves putting about a hundred pounds on your shoulders, and lunge-walking several reps of 10 steps. This exercise works your lower back and glutes quite nastily, and the odds are very good that those muscles were a lot tighter than normal on Saturday morning.
This is something I had pretty much figured out already, but it was nice to hear that the probability of skeletal injury was low. I have no pain radiating down my leg, and my right side is a-ok, so it’s most likely a strain/sprain, and not a herniated or slipped anything. Being able to say “I sprained my ass” is both funny and not.
In any case, I’m on the mend, and with stretching and exercise should be close to good as-new within a week. This means I’ll be good to go for hockey in a week and a half, which makes me very happy.
In case you were wondering, yes, I will be stretching the back and glutes in warm-up from now on. Sometimes I actually learn, the experience just has to be painful enough. This one definitely is up there on the pain-in-the-ass scale.