(no subject)

I just went through the open-book test on my company's general knowledge document by keeping it open in Adobe and using the find function to track down key words and throwing the resultant answers into the quiz. Took about ten minutes to go through all ten pages of questions. Everyone in the company has to do it, so at least I got that out of the way and can settle down to supporting the people who can't access the quiz for whatever reason.

I would have posted a new entry with some pictures, but my VPN server has been inaccessible from work the last two days and I can't upload any of them. Yesterday I came home to find a flashing green light on the UPS and two powered down servers. Flipping the on/off switch on the UPS brought them back to life. Today, I can get as far as the system verifying my username and password, then it locks up. Maybe I've mistyped the password somewhere. I did just change all of my system passwords since I lost my laptop on Saturday.

Oh yeah; I managed to leave the new laptop I got from work on the hood of posicat's mini-van and drive off with him. We realized what I did and went back, but it was gone. At least I hadn't been using it long and didn't have anything irreplacable. My CF card with my Quicken backups was in it, as was the play disc for Civilization Four (which ran really nicely on a dual core 2.3Ghz machine with 4GB of RAM, let me tell you), but I should have a backup somewhere of my financial stuff and I'm working on acquiring another copy of Civ. He and I sat in the Grayslake police building waiting to file a report for about half an hour that night before going to up Kenosha to meet tybis and moiracoon who were already there waiting for us after our day spent at the Am-sci tent sale. It looks like it's not going to be a huge deal at work that I lost the hardware; I've just been advised to make sure it doesn't happen again. I really hope that if I change jobs soon, it doesn't make the loss look really bad. I feel like enough of an idiot already. For the moment, I'm back to the HP NC6400 2Ghz dual core with 2GB of RAM I was using previously. And I'm on XP instead of Vista. No big loss there.

Speaking of the tent sale, I picked up two nice big power strips of the kind you see on the back of work benches. You know; aluminum case about five feet long studded with outlets along the whole length. One is stuck behind my computer desk where it's provided serious relief to the gordion knot of wires down at my feet. The other is going to go under Andrea's desk when I get to it.

Am-sci has a fluid dynamics playset for $75 that I really want. I've loved playing with water and watching it flow for as long as I can remember. I just to dig hugely long channels in the sand at the beach and pour water into the top, over and over, to watch it flow down to the lake. I can't find a link to it right now, but it's a three dimensional framework that you can populate with tubes, tanks, valves, and pumps to mimic things like a distillery, a refinery, or other industrial emplacments, not to mention just build random things and watch the water flow. I'd be absorbed for hours. I may have to pick it up one of these days.

The tech swap is coming up this weekend. I haven't managed to find time to sort stuff out for it yet, but I guess I'll make do. Friday is probably shaleari's game, and Saturday will see some of us trekking down to Chicago to pick up the King bed that someone on Craig's list is giving away. (Andrea actually took the day off of work on Friday to clean the bedroom and prepare for it.) Thursday and tonight are both occupied too, so the week is pretty well booked, as they usually are these days. Oh well; if nothing else, the rest of the geeks around at the swap can help sort wheat from chaff as I haul it out of the basement and offer it as tradestock.

One more hour to go to get out of here, and that will feel quite fine indeed. Site to site connectivity has been up and down the entire day (sounds like something has gone flaky on one of the PIXs or routers, but I'm not on that team and don't have the scoop), so it's been interesting. I just hope it's all fixed by tomorrow morning.

(no subject)

With an invitation from, and accompaniment by, darkwolf1071, Sasha, and kids, wooisme and I decided to check out a Mabon gathering up by Milwaukee. We got to see some nifty parts of downtown Milwaukee that I've never been to before. I haven't spent much time in our large neighbor to the north since Gencon moved and I stopped helping my parents run the games library, and even then I never saw much of the city itself. I was much younger then and never went very far beyond the confines of the convention center.

I saw a few places I want to go back to to climb and photograph, like the high foot bridge that runs under a higher highway bridge, and a long switch-back staircase up a steep hill, both of which seemed open to the public. But, despite my plaintive barks, we continue past them to the park wherein stood the building that was home to the gathering.

The park was a very pretty one and I took a couple of pictures of the beautiful willows overhanging the nearby stream. The building, on the other hand, looked something like a cross between an miniaturized airplane hanger and a repurposed cattle barn. The gathering itself wasn't quite what we expected either. As I put it to my mate, it felt much like being in the dealer's room at a convention on Sunday afternoon when half the vendors have packed up and left and the only patrons there are the ones who just have nowhere else to go. Some of the vendors had neat things like the hand made tie-dyed clothing that I spent a while browsing through, but for the most part things were not terribly original or interesting. Though it was fun to wander through, it wasn't long before we decided to continue on our way.










From there we moved on to a playground that sat atop a steeply declining embankment overlooking Lake Michigan. The kids busied themselves on the jungle-gym and slides while the rest of us conversed with the pleasantly cool lake breeze washing over us. Before too long, I got up to explore the grounds and take a few photos. I'd run over to the edge of the embankment and looked the sixty or so feet down to the shore and seen a hillside full of beautiful flora, inviting sandy beach, and enticing ruined piers jutting perhaps fifty yards into the deep blue water. This called for personal investigation!



( More pictures! )

This was a really pretty park and I'd like to come back again. I was so touched to find the couple who had brought blankets all the way out to the end of one of the fenced off piers and had snuggled up together to watch the water. Now that's a date. I want to see more of Milwaukee too. I'll have to find excuses to get up there more.

I spent a little while today taking the guts out of a double-wide computer case that I took home from work, gave to posicat, and then brought home after he didn't want it and I realized I could use it. It's got sixteen, count them, sixteen front accessible 5¼ bays that I'm going to populate with a couple of hot-swap SCSI backplanes that I've scrounged from a couple of servers that were scrapped; one Proliant ML530 and one Dell Poweredge something-or-other. With a little bit of Dremel work, some nuts and bolts, and a wood block or two, I'll have a case that will hold twelve or fourteen 80 pin SCSI drives. This is going to become a backup and storage box.

For now, I'm going to print out a help desk job ad with a hospital in Pleasant Prairie. I'm going to write a cover letter for my resume on the way to work tomorrow wherein I hope to <corporate-speak> leverage </corporate-speak> my experience with a company in a similar industy into a decent closer-to-home job.

Good night!