first off, i’m lame. i wrote a chronicle that never got published on it’s date. i’m just now sending it out to the list and putting it on the web. so please forgive me. i should be punished 😉
things that piss me off
- Novell and Oracle. Spent about a total of 15 hours attempting to fix ted’s machine at work within the last few weeks. See we run a front end for Oracle called Clarify (the -not- so clear solution). It is the database we use to track customers and the ilk. On 98% of the machines located in the office, I have been successful in getting the software installed and functioning. On ted’s machine, it’s been a fucking nightmare. The freak has novell, nt networking products plus he has used other ODBC drivers for other software (Platypus, FlyCast, god knows what else). I’ve been all over the web and Oracle’s support site looking for the answer. So Scott and I call their support and spend another 45 minutes on the phone, ONLY TO LEARN that it’s a damn Novell issue. See, my understanding (correct me if i’m wrong) from what the support guy told us was that novell overrides anything in autoexec.bat. so even though I have all the SET PATH’s set correctly and all the bells and whistles installed, it won’t work because if you go into dos and do “path” nothing but Novell crap comes up. It’s a security issue. or some such. The hilarity of the whole situation is that when the machine logs into Novell it says “Welcome to the AI network, oh brilliant one”. *guffaw* Needless to say, with it’s been a joy attempting to fix this piece of shit. His machine is so fux0red that it won’t load windows and gives me the lovely “can’t find win.com” upon booting. I told dave this, and he said “what does this have to do with a webpage?” I said “huh?” oh! no no no oh gorgeous one, win.com is the front end gui (or something). he says oh. dave is great. he’s an unix admin who admits to know nothing about winders. Dave is leaving us for better things. *sob* We won’t have any more cute boys to look at anymore. *sob* Dave does rock though. I’m thinking about signing up to go skiing/snow boarding with him in January. Check out his webpage for more deals.
- Stupid people. I have three case studies for this:
- Walked into work on the morning of 11.18.98 and found a post-it on my monitor that said “Paige’s machine is fucked!” Walked over to said user’s machine and took a look at it. Nothing out of the ordinary. Machine booted, logged into the network, and I could route, see the network etc. Shrugged my shoulders and left. Turned out she had unplugged the power cable from the computer with her foot. Um, yeah.
- Customer brings his machine in yesterday to have fixed. It’s running winders 95 and it’s booting slow as hell. Check to see it’s a 486/25 with a 100MB hard drive. Took FIVE minutes to boot past the splash screen. Spoke with the guy last night, turns out he had bought it at an auction for $275 bucks. Um, yeah.
- One of the tech geniuses at work came to me and said that they can’t dial out on the testbed machine. I quiz him and he claims he has done everything I’ve asked. We have a machine that is set up to dial with the following: ISDN, x2/v.90, Flex/v.90. With no switch box and two comports, I emailed the geniuses and told them that they would have to unplug the cable from the isdn modem back into the back of the x2 modem. Then they would unplug the phone line from the flex modem and plug it into the back of the x2 modem. takes about 15 seconds to accomplish. He didn’t do that. I snarled and fixed it. he doesn’t like me anymore *guffaw*.
- Winders 3.x: i started thinking about hooking up the one/only winders 3.x machine to dial-out to test calls. so i start fucking with the irq’s/com ports and start moving crap around. it doesn’t work. USR’s website has no articles on it neither does M$. geesh. fucker is hooked up to the right com port but won’t recognize the modem. tried four modems and nothing works. tried settings here and there. terminal doesn’t recognize it. i hate my job.
- Toast/DAVE (not to be confused with heartthrob.slip.net): macintosh products that allow you to burn cd’s and get on the lan. spent better part of my day attempting to get it working so that i could burn cds. i had to ask pifke to allocate me space on the nt server (even though i have admin rights, i am not anywhere near the actual machine) for Oracle so that twinkletoes could install clarify/oracle at home. got it to the point where it will write the cd but now gives me hardware errors. no/little documentation and mac’s just fucking suck!
in the mood
i’ve been spending an amazing amount of time just aimlessly surfing the web. i’m incredibly bored.
i’ve been thinking about the stuff i want to write and stuff i’m missing so….
I’ve got the itch to re-do the site again. i’m frightened. 😉
a-t-t-i-t-u-d-e
the other day, one of the new sys admins said that he couldn’t see lemming (our nt domain). i told him to lean out of his cube, look behind him and he’ll see lemming. *guffaw* when i diligently got up and walked over to him and putzed around with his machine. he’s running nt workstation and i figured it would be a lmhosts issue. it was.
but what he said was that i would make great MIS managerial material. i kinda snickered and started thinking about it.
since i’ve been the position of “IS” since august officially, i’ve started getting cold sales calls on having people sell me everything from admins to dsl (I asked the guy if he knew who he was calling.. he said ‘no’. i told him he called an isp and that we sell xDSL. fucking moron). plus some companies have been shipping me shit like t-shirts and notepads to be swayed by their services.
but what i have also noticed is my attitude. i always used to say (about unix admins) that people who think their god, aren’t. there is no way in god’s green earth that they know everything about everything. and it’s true, but i do know that some admins tend to “humble” themselves for the little people and that some admins actually do know everything about everything.
but as of late, i’ve started becoming ‘god’ in terms that the people i work with are now starting to ‘ph33r’ me. i’m not kidding. i was told recently by someone i work with is that people hate coming up to me because a. i’ll grill them to see if they followed different procedures b. will be an ass towards them if i found out they haven’t.
this is a two-sided coin. Because a: i figure, i write a lot of white papers on how to do crap, and i present the information the departments once or twice, they should have the brains to figure out how to do it from there on in. why should i have to explain myself over and over again if the information is documented and within easy reach? I shouldn’t. They should use their brain cells to figure it out for themselves. It’s all there. But they won’t. And I have always loathed stupidity or the lack of trying.
it’s always been this way. I was fired from one job because i was “too aggressive” and “too independent” in getting my work done. I knew how to figure out how to fix shit and if i couldn’t figure it out, i knew how to research. IT IS NOT THAT HARD!
But obviously it is. I’ve started to have almost contempt for people who aren’t at my skill set/intelligence level. And I don’t want to have to help it! I will not dumb myself down because some moron can’t figure out how to go to support.microsoft.com and look up the answers themselves! I just can’t!!
The irony of all this is that I’m good at what I do. I have the brains to get the job done. My skill level and knowledge of computers has tripled since I’ve started doing this full time. And i know, if I got a degree somewhere I could actually make 2-3x the money I’m making now and actually have a great life.
but this isn’t what I want to do for the rest of my life. i don’t want to spend my days teaching stupid people how to map a fucking printer. i need a challenge. anything will do.
I’m just so happy i’m going back to college in January. yeah! If i never have to work on computers again for the rest of my life, i will be happy! 😉