It's not easy being green

The web hosting service I use, UnlimitedWeb.net, has their new hosting plans up, just in time for me to renew my account.  The prices aren't too bad, and I've never had any problems using them to host my personal site.  Having the domain registration thrown in makes it a good deal.  I'll fess up right now that going through that link to get service will score me a 5% kickback...

A serene calm has come over me in the last half-hour.  I've finished all of the "emergency" problems that I've been dealing with for the last week.  My phone has stopped ringing off the hook, people aren't e-mailing me every 15 minutes about the same problem, and I'm starting to like my job again.  I've still got work to do, but it's not urgent, no one is waiting on me to get something done. 

It's 3:15 p.m., so what should I do with the rest of my day?

I think I'll go home early and watch some T.V....

Garret has a link to the Green Eye Project this morning.  I don't think I'll be posing for the pictures anytime soon.  My combination of English, Danish, and German genes probably doesn't exactly qualify me as being ethnically interesting, despite the fact that I have green eyes.

Jonesin'

I saw Thirteen Days this weekend.  It was a gripping and intense movie, but it's not for the blow-em-up crowd.  Lots of political drama, intense debate, and Presidential hand-wringing.  I had to read RFK's book for a class, and found it to be quite interesting, fortunately the movie version didn't disappoint me either.  I give it an enthusiastic thumbs up, especially if you weren't alive in that era, as I wasn't...

The departing Clinton staffers apparently swiped the W keys from their keyboards on the way out.  That's too funny.  I would have loved to see the look on the faces of the Bush folks when they showed up to find their computer lacking the W. [via Dangerousmeta] 

Also see the MSNBC story, which had this tidbit:

Our efforts to reach former staffers of Al Gore and Bill Clinton were mostly unsuccessful, but Gore campaign press secretary Chris Lehane, tongue in cheek, fielded our request for an explanation: “My guess is that the White House did not have many reasons to use the letter W over the last couple of years. It’s possible they just fell off because of sheer atrophy.” Lehane added: “I think the missing W’s can be explained by the vast left-wing conspiracy now at work.”

There's a re-designed TiVo.com that has gone live today.  It's very "flashy".  I really don't like web pages that don't take advantage of my 1280x1024 resolution either...

Here's the latest joke from my inbox:

George W. and Cheney are having lunch at a diner near the White House. Cheney orders the "Heart-Healthy" salad. Bush leans over to the waitress and says "Honey, could I have a quickie?" 

She's horrified! She says, "Mr. President, I thought your administration would bring a new era of moral rectitude to the White House. Now I see I was wrong and I'm sorry I voted for you," and she marches off.

Cheney leans over and says "George, I think it's pronounced 'QUICHE'

James Earl Jones was a delight to watch last night.  He read works of Carl Sandburg for most of an hour, then answered questions from the audience for another half hour.  At 70 years old, he's getting a little hard of hearing, so the questioners had to repeat themselves a few times, but it was still quite entertaining. 

Asked about doing voice-over work as Darth Vader, he said that he used to go around denying it was him when Star Wars first came out, he wasn't listed in the credits until Return of the Jedi.  He said he used to tell people that it was the 7-Up "Un-cola" guy.

Sidewinders

The vandalized Christian Peterson statue has been repaired in MacKay Hall at ISU.  I'm glad to see that it's been restored so quickly, even if it did cost a whopping $36,000 to do so.  At least they caught the jerk who did it, ripping the head off a 60 year old statue, which was a gift from former students is very uncool:

Back home
The "Marriage Ring" was reinstalled in the foyer of MacKay Hall this morning. The Petersen sculpture, a gift to the university from the students in the class of 1941, was vandalized last September. Francis Miller, with the Conversation Technical Associates, Connecticut, began repair work on the sculpture in early January. The highly specialized work, which cost more than $36,000, involved cleaning the entire sculpture, putting the broken head of one of the children back together, reinstalling the head on the sculpture and repairing cracks. Miller will spend the next day or so doing final detail work on the sculpture, including painting the filled areas between the cracks.

A mysterious computer game that'll call you on the phone and threaten your life?  This could be VERY cool, or it could be incredibly stupid.  If done well, this could be quite the little adventure, I'd give it a try.

Here's my stupid Windows NT 4.0 error of the day.  Don't install a service pack before you have your network card up and running.  I did, and now I get to re-install the service pack to stop all these error messages that read "Not enough server storage is available to process this command."  That'll teach me...

This weekend, I got a Microsoft Sidewinder Game Voice for my computer.  At first glance, it just looks like any other headphone and microphone combo, but besides adding voice chat capabilities, it also adds voice recognition to your games.  For instance, if you're playing Unreal Tournament, and you want to switch weapons, you just say "Rocket Launcher" and you've switched weapons, all without having to switch your hands.

It was especially fun to use with Age of Kings, you can say "Build Barracks" and your little minions jump to work, much faster than looking for the hotkeys on your keyboard, or dragging the mouse around the screen.  It's truly a neat product...

Undead Tech Support

I just posted a Disturbing Search Request, someone found my page after searching for Undead Tech Support.  I'm sorry, but I'm not that experienced in providing solutions to the supernatural.  The site that they were probably looking for is quite funny, however.  Here's a bit:

TechSup: Hello, Undead Technical Support, may I please have your name and the date of your death?

Cust: Ummmm, yes... I am Vlad the Impaler and I am a GREAT AND MIGHTY VAMPIRE!!!

TS: Can I please have your date of death, sir, as we have currently Around 120 Vlad the Imaplers on file? It is a fairly common name among the undead.

Cust: Ummm, yes... uhhh... well, you see, I haven't actually died yet... I was just sort of, you know, looking to see if someone would, like, you know, bite me, or if there is some sort of trial period?

TS: Yes, sir, unfortunately we can not provide that service. I would, however, point you towards you nearest foreboding castle or dark alley to find a blood sucking fiend of your choice.

Cust: Oh, why thank you! (Click)

Failure

You can read all about my little TiVo problem in the forum posting I made in the TiVo Underground forum.  It wasn't disasterous, but it certainly didn't go according to plan.  Maybe I'll try again in a few weeks when I get my courage back up...

John paid me a nice compliment in his little rant about the difficulty of finding good employees.  John was a good boss to work for, actually.  He paid me what I was worth, which is a rare thing on college campuses.  A lot of the departments at ISU would want to hire students to do tech support, but only pay $5.50 an hour (naturally, they had high turnover rates). 

John started me at nearly twice that (I had experience).   He also refrained from dumping all the crappy work on me, though I did get to do most of the heavy lifting, probably because I'm built like a football player, and he's built like Olive Oyl.

Although, I never have forgiven him for making me use a Macintosh...

So far, it has been a lousy day, very little has gone my way, and I'm ready to give up and go home.  I tried to upgrade my TiVo, that didn't work so well, but I'll write up the story later today when things calm down.  Nothing is more frustrating for IT people than things that don't work, for no particular reason.  Those bugs that you can't figure out, the ones that come and go.  For instance, take two identical computers, from the same order from Dell, set up from the same disk image, sitting six feet apart from each other.  One crashes WordPerfect every time you close a file, one does not.  Why?  It just doesn't make any sense.