Mostly Harmless

Every time you see a commercial for any type of abdominal exercise product, do a few ab crunches.

Tim is having a fun week. He was at work past 2:30am this morning dealing with “The Evil NT Server From Hell.”

This is the server that is connected to “The Evil RAID From Hell.” The RAID is the main problem and should have been replaced years ago, back when I was primary support guy. It breaks randomly and there are virtually no spare parts available. The secondary problem is that it’s running NT 4, Services For Macintosh. It takes five hours to reboot and have Mac file sharing available — because it’s got a single 240-gig partition with hundreds of thousands of files on it, and NT SFM sucks ass.

If you’re “lucky” it takes 5 hours. If you’re unlucky you’ll get forced into a check disk and be down for just over… *drumroll please* 75 hours.

The system was taken down (cleanly) for a reboot on Monday morning, 2:45am, and got back up, for the first time, last night at 8:30pm. It being an NT Server it needed more work after that, and at least another reboot, so it finally started the final 5-hour stretch at around 1:15am this morning.

It’s days like this that you wish that you had, after years worth of attempts, put in a purchase request for a new server and had it approved by all but the final manager three weeks ago — oh wait, they did that, silly me.

Yeah, the new server got approved in a big hurry, after a long delay, and is being built right now. It’s still an NT box but it’ll be about ten times faster and will have a RAID that isn’t a complete piece of shit, so that’s something.

“Pick up your freakin laundry!”

I did laundry on Tuesday night and had to move some woman’s mostly dry clothes out of one of the dryers when it was time to dry my clothes. I’m guessing that her laundry was in the dryer for at least an hour or two before I even started mine, based on how cool it was.

My laundry got done and her clothes was still in the laundry room; one dryer has a bogus timer and runs for more than twice as long as it should, so I, Mr. Nice Guy, put her laundry into that dryer to finish drying.

I got home on Wednesday night at 8pm and walked past the laundry room, the clothes were still there.

The question is: Is this person on drugs, or is she just stupid?

If you’ve got a shared laundry room it’s sort of a good idea to occasionally pick up your clothes, within, say, 24 hours or so. The same person does this all the time.

The dryer runs for 45 minutes; what you do is set the timer on your microwave to 45 minutes so it will beep when the time is up, then you pick up your clothes, it’s real fucking simple.

Update: As of Friday morning, 11am, the clothes are still there.

Mmmmmmmillaahhhhh!

(Fun fact: Milla Jovovich is pronounced Mee-la Yo-yo-vich).

I finally got out to see Resident Evil yesterday and I must say that it’s the best movie based on a video game that I’ve seen this year!

This picture is all you really need to know about the movie. The blonde, “no-makeup”, mini-skirt look works for me, and the “just woke up in the shower with no memory” look is pretty decent too.

Pay no mind to the bad science, if they used good science the movie would be over in 5 minutes.

I haven’t played the game itself for more than a few minutes so I can’t give an opinion as to how accurately the movie follows the game, but there are lots of zombies, an evil computer and a babe with a gun, and that’s good enough for me.

I’ve already read that there will be a sequel.

Now I’m off to see Blade II.

I’ve already read that there will be a sequel.

Thanks to an unscheduled post over in abmbvsr I’ve gotten the last Season 2 episode that I was missing (206 Halloween).

That means that I will have the complete set nine days earlier than I had planned, based on the repostathon schedule. I have four Season 5 episodes and eight Season 4 episodes remaining.

Season 5 episodes are posted one per week on Thursdays so I’ll be “done” on April 11th.

Then there are five more episodes left in the current season, running from April 23rd to May 21st, but I’ll have those the day they air. (Hmmm… 42 days (of torture!) between episode 617 last week and episode 618 in April).