The Life Of A LittlBUGer

Oj joy, the fun begins tonight.  Me and my Transformers costume, here I come!  Seriously though, it should be fun.  My wife goes crazy on Halloween though, a little too crazy.  I know transforming the house and the yard and whatnot is always a must for her, and that we must have a huge party before we go trick-or-treating, but sometimes… it goes a bit overboard.  Like this year, instead of a few pumpkins to carve and/paint, we had 10.  Instead of one strand of outside and inside lights, we have around 10 (inside AND outside).  And instead of covering the ceiling of one room of the house with spider web and spiders and whatnot, she covered THE ENTIRE HOUSE with the damn web.  I can’t take a single step without having web get in my face or stuck in my hair.  Grrr…  But what are you gonna do eh?  You love your wife so you bow down to her needs, then you yell and whine at her, then eventually bow down to her again because  you prefer getting laid over getting your way or being right.  Yes, that’s right ladies, we men know what we are doing… sometimes… 

As for my server, the move basically went pretty well and all seems to be OK for the most part.  Sorry about the downtime and delays in posting.  If anyone sees any problems, please let me know.   Enjoy the new server!

Oh yes, who could forget:  How to Get Laid in 1977 and Your Ass Kicked in 2007

Once upon a midnight dreary,
Fingers cramped and vision bleary,
System manuals piled high and wasted paper on the floor,
Longing for the warmth of bedsheets,
Still I sat here doing spreadsheets:
Having reached the bottom line, I took a floppy from the drawer.

Typing with a steady hand,
I then invoked the “save” command
But got instead a reprimand: it read, “Abort, Retry, Ignore?”
Was this some occult illusion?
Some manacal type intrusion?
These were choices Solomon himself had never faced before.

Carefully I weighed my options…
These three seemed to be the top ones.
Clearly I must now adopt one; choose: Abort, Retry, Ignore?
With my fingers pale and trembling
Slowly toward the keyboard bending,
Longing for a happy ending, hoping all would be restored

Praying for some guarantee,
Finally I pressed a key.
But what on the screen did I see? Again “Abort, Retry, Ignore?”
I tried to catch the chips off guard -
I pressed again, but twice as hard,
But luck was just not on the cards, I saw what I had seen before.

Now I typed in desperation
Trying random combinations.
Still there came the incantation “Abort, Retry, Ignore.”
There I sat, distraught, exhausted,
By my own machine accosted
getting up, I turned away and paced across the office floor.

And then I saw an awful sight
A bold and blinding flash of light
A lightening bolt that cut the night, and shook me to my very core.
The PC screen collapsed and died.
“OH NO! MY DATABASE!” I cried.
I heard a distant voice reply, “You’ll see your spreadsheets…nevermore!”

To this day I do not know
The place to which our data goes.
perhaps it goes to heaven, where the angels have it stored.
But as for Productivity, well,
I fear this has gone straight to Hell.
And that’s the tale I have to tell - your choice: Abort, Retry, Ignore.

As previously mentioned, I’ll be moving to my new host during these next few days with everything up and running on the new servers by the 1st of November.  Thus, this will probably be my last post until then as I don’t want any data lost.  If you see any issues after the move, please let me know.  Thank you for your support. 

Ahh yes, Halloween.  One of the only times of the year where my wife goes crazy (well, more than usual I mean).  She is so gullible and so easy to scare (I mean, Harry Potter scares her) and yet her most favorite holiday of the year is Halloween.  She goes all out on exterior things such as pumpkins, lights, hey, spooky sounds, and other stuff, and the same with the interior of our home.  But, things get a little hectic during our costume choosing and then of course Halloween night.

Seriously, last year she wanted to be some sort of Pharaoh/Greek/Caesar lady and wanted me to be the accompanying guy.  Well, her costume turned out to be great, as she’s hot and she can make a long white dress type of thing look good.  On the other hand, mine (though it was made for a man) looked almost exactly like hers.  She loved it of course, but I did not.  I wore it anyway (silly me) and it turned out I was right.  As we were walking about, going trick or treating with our kids in the freezing cold (it usually snows her in Montana right before Halloween night), all dressed up as we were, we walked past a couple of  10-12 year olds.  At that time, I was pushing our stroller, as it was a backup in case our youngest at the time (our little boy who was 1) didn’t want to walk anymore and it provided ample candy storage.  Well, as we past those kids, they both laughed at me and asked “What are you supposed to be, a woman?”, and laughed some more.  I replied with the likes of “No, I’m Caesar…” to which they sharply replied “Oh, well isn’t it the woman’s job to be pushing the stroller?” and they laughed and walked off.  Holy crap you should have seen my wife when she heard that.  She is a bold person who stands up for herself and doesn’t take any shit or femist crap from anyone.  Me, being me, was nice about it and just asked her to please listen to me for once (she still doesn’t of course) and what a fun 5 minute night we had (I told you it was freezing).

So costume time came around this year, and I was dreading for the worst.  Luckily, my oldest son, 4, wanted to be Optimus Prime of the Transformers and wanted me to also be the same (like a son/dad or little/big kind of thing) so I thought that would be a lot better than last year.  Well, though my son likes it, I still look like a fricken idiot.  Luckily I have a mask so it’s not quite as bad…

Anyway, to make a longer story shorter, never take your kids to a public Halloween event at a tiny school where they have 10 games and about 1000 kids in a tiny gym to play them all, and never listen to your wife… ever. 

Today I thought I’d grace everyone with a fun experience I had with Gateway a couple years ago.  I’ve already posted it on the wonderful site ClientCopia, but I thought I’d repost it here as well for your enjoyment.  :-)   So here it is:

I was working on a computer at my work that had a strange error (I work in the IT department). After much troubleshooting, I decided to chat with Gateway online (gasp!) to see if they could help, or just give me a replacement. Here’s the chat log with the original explanation on my problem. Nothing was edited except for me being nice and removing the person’s badge number (note his spelling/grammar).

“After doing a routine image restore, the computer suddenly locks up right after the Intel Boot Agent screen (of which we don`t use). Many things have been done to resolve but nothing works. We think it`s some issue with the on-board LAN/NIC. Help/suggestions are needed and if nothing else works, a replacement is required.”

Jason: Welcome to Gateway Remote Assistance. I am looking at your account and the information you submitted. I will begin troubleshooting with you in just a moment.
Jason: Hello (my name)!
Me: Hello.
Jason: have you reinsall the driver?
Me: As I stated when I filled out the form for the chat session, the system hangs right after the Intel Boot Agent screen right after the POST screen. I can’t get into the BIOS, I can’t get to the Boot Order menu, I can’t boot off of a disk or CD, I tried re-setting the CMOS with no luck… nothing works.
Me: The only thing I CAN get into is the Boot Agent setup screen by pressing Ctrl+S, which does no good though as we don’t use it and there’s nothing there to help.
Jason: Have you try to boot in safe mode
Jason: then do the system restire there.
Me: Pressing any key, either F1, F2, F8, F10, whatever doesn’t work as it hangs the split second after the Intel Boot Agent section. Nothing happens after that. Nothing is accessible. This is why I think it’s the on-board LAN/NIC that is suddenly causing problems, for some unknown reason.
Me: If I could get into the BIOS, I would disable the boot agent, but I can’t. If I could get anywhere, I could fix it, but I can’t. Is there some sort of key combination I can press to bypass the Boot Agent manually? Or anything similar?

(a few minutes pass…)

Me: Hello?

(more minutes pass…)

Me: Anyone there?
Jason: yes.
Me: So can you help? Any suggestions?
Jason: Have you try to restore in safe mode?

(WTF?!)

Me: Did you not read what I said above? If I could get into Safe Mode, then that would be getting somewhere, but I CAN’T get anywhere. Even if I could get into Safe Mode, it wouldn’t do much get (meaning if I tried a System Restore) as our company doesn’t use System Restore.
Me: If you can’t help or you don’t have any suggestions, please send me to someone who can or please give me a replacement on the computer (or at least the motherboard) as it’s still under warranty.
Jason: Reinstalling your os is the last option .

(WHAT?!)

Me: Umm, it has NOTHING to do with the OS. This has to do with the HARDWARE. If I could update the BIOS, that might fix something as I may be able to disable the Boot Agent as it seems to be causing the problems. Anyway, thanks for helping. I guess I’ll be calling Gateway now for a replacement…
Jason: BIOS update,
Me: Yes, it would be nice if I could update the BIOS, but since I can’t boot off of a CD or floppy disk, it does me no good.
Jason: Have you try to change your boot option?
Jason: (gives web link to BIOS update download)
Jason: that is the link where you can download the bios update.
Me: OK, obviously you are not reading what I’m saying. For the last time, I can NOT get into the BIOS to change the boot order. I CANNOT also press F10 to change the boot order. The system hangs before anything like that can be done!
Jason: there is your bios update.

(Bangs head on desk…)

Me: Nevermind… I’m calling Gateway now…
Jason: It was a pleasure working with you. My name and badge number are Jason. Thank you for using Gateway Remote Assistance and have a great day.

Well, lessons learned, I wont be chatting with Gateway online anytime in the near future…

Hello all you programmers/coders out there.  I have a question if anyone can answer.  To put things briefly….

I’m moving servers/hosts soon and putting in some load balancing for my downloads site by moving the downloads to a couple mirrored download servers.  This is fine except for how my downloads script works.  Currently, when you add files, it copies them to the main download folder and then renames them to a certain “masked” name.  It then stores the masked name and the real name of the files in the database, so that when a user downloads a file, it renames it to the real name on the fly.  So the local file may have a masked name of “28o24309usf0h2kj223.rwd” or “thisisafile1.rwd” and the actual real file name is “thisisafile1.exe”.

Because of the new servers and load-balancing stuff, I need to be able to have an automated method of parsing through a list which has the masked file name and the real file name respectively and have it search through the actual files in the folder and rename them to their real file name on the fly.  I’ve done some web programming and SQL stuff, but I haven’t really messed with manipulating a lot of files on the fly like that before.  Does anyone know of a program that could do this for me?  If not, is anyone willing to create some sort of batch file or vb script or something that would do this for me?  I have about 260 files to rename and I’d be willing to pay you for your time.

I can give more details if needed as long as you just contact me.  Thanks. 

Don’t you just love how the ads on my site are primarily displaying somewhat “adult” links about vasectomies right next to non-adult links about Team Fortress 2? I know I do. Oh, and don’t forget the ones about “Castrating Devices”… what joy can be had by just looking at some ads!  Clicking on them is fun too, lots more information about stuff you really didn’t need or want to know!

You know, for a lot of people out there, the majority of us who don’t have a lot of money, it’s easy to say “We can’t afford that” or to just not buy something even though you really want it, because you know you can’t afford it. This is even somewhat prevalent in people that DO have money, as there’s always a point where “enough is enough” (haha! Did I really say that?). But then, you have other people (hopefully very few, or I just feel even more depressed about the human race), who seem to think a different way, a seemingly psychotic and completely illogical way, like This One Lady. It’s one thing to have large credit card debt, but to have enough debt that it could pay off my house (seriously people, my nice house here in good ol Montana cost as much as her entire CC debt) and then, with no remorse or care for the other people in your family, keep raking up the debt, well you’ve crossed into what I like to call ” The someone-needs-to-smack-the-shit-out-of-you-to-knock-some-sense-into-you Zone“. Seriously people, either she’s completely insane and lives in another world, or… well, there is no or… she’s insane damnit. And her husband is even worse, the damn bastard (if I made as much as he did a month, I’d be rich now).

On a happier note, since my job entails a lot of different things, I’ve had the pleasure to buy and use Replay A/V and the rest of the suite, and I have to say it’s been doing fantastic. I always had my doubts in the past, but when all of my other freeware options, and even some paid ones, couldn’t cut the bill, it seems Replay A/V came out on top.

For today’s conclusion, I’ll leave you all with something special for the kiddos and the anime porn specialists alike: Pikachu Vagina (SFW). Enjoy!

BONUS: For those of you who are gamers out there, I’ve seemed to have finally found a high quality version of the ending credits and song to the new awesome game, Portal. I’ll add it to my downloads site soon.

I had an experience just the other day that I know I’ll never forget. They call it… a vasectomy…

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You only get one chance, no saves or restore points, no second chances or time to think about an action before it’s done or see the future before it’s set… where would you want to play in the game of life?

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