Title: Unix hates me today
Music du jour: Melissa Etheridge, Breakdown
Does anyone want to explain to me why the date command has to be so fucking cryptic? Huh? It should not be this hard to change the damn time zone to GMT. No, it should not. When I run the world, date will make sense. Don't laugh; I'm coming up with a plan right now.
I'm stuck at work until I get xntpd put on ALL of our Unix servers. Of course, this has to be done TONIGHT, because all of a sudden the developers can't save any of their changes, because none of the servers have the same time. This is a project I was working on weeks ago, but it got shoved to the side, as does happen. So here I sit. Ian fell sway to my whining, so he dropped by work so we could go woof down some chow. Applebee's isn't the best, but it'll do. I have to get this done so I can go see Cynthia tomorrow for her graduation this weekend. Updates may be sporadic, but I will attempt to drag myself away from the breathtaking entertainment offered by Emporia, KS, long enough to entertain y'all with my scintillating wit and deathless prose. See the sacrifices I make for you people? You just don't know.
Your Prayers Are Appreciated:
In other news, the Speak & Spell is sick. It seems the CD-ROM drive had intestinal flu and hence puked on EVERY CD I put in the drive. Finally impatience got the better of me and I put it in the shop at CompUSSR under warranty. I expect to have my bathtub floatie back in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, my old P100 Linux box has been brought back from the dead -- it's a miracle! -- so I won't be going through total withdrawal. Will I be using Ian's Windows 2000 box, you ask? What do you think?
If our hearts are pure, we can stamp out Microsoft in our lifetime.
And speaking of He Who Shall Not Be Named, check this out. Apparently Mickeysoft has forgotten all about the First Amendment -- or, more likely, they think they're above all that trivial Constitutional nonsense. It's getting to the point any more where you can't criticize anyone without getting the Wrath of God^H^H^HCorporate America (or the government) visited upon your head. "Mommy, he hurt my feelings! Wah!" Fucking get over it already. If you don't like what someone says, either post a rebuttal or do something to prove them wrong. Don't whine about not liking what someone says and try to take away their constitutional right to say it. That's how it starts... first you can't speak about certain topics, then the list of what you can speak about gets narrower and narrower, until the Thought Police have an inextricable grip on society. Am I paranoid? You bet. Why? I know history. This is how it starts.
I'll get off the soapbox now. Moving right along.
I Wish My Mom Would Write This:
This letter has been circulating around the Net for a couple of weeks following the decision in Vermont to treat gays and lesbians like the rest of the human race. (Go Vermont.) I'm such a girl that I cried when I read it. Finally someone telling it like it is. Who knew. No, my mother would never write this; she's too busy desperately denying reality. Yes, that bothers me. A lot. I'm not going to talk about this any more.
Sob, Moan, Groan, Whine:
Fucking whining developers. There's this... woman at work. She wants Internet Explorer 5 installed on my Solaris box for some dark purpose which I currently forget (thank God). So she came groveling to the Altar of the Unix Gods (my desk, thank you) two weeks to get this thing put on the Sun box. Fine and dandy. I download the damn binary from the damn Web site. It's a fifteen meg installation binary. Which means you stick it in a temp directory somewhere, run it, pick an installation directory and -- supposedly -- life is fun and happy. Only, of fucking COURSE it doesn't work. Since you don't get the source, you can't configure anything before installation, and there are no errors other than "Uh, we couldn't install this. Try again, shithead" (okay, I paraphrase. A little.), which DRIVES ME INSANE. Remove and reinstall (the total Mickeysoft solution). No workie. I tried everything I could think of to get this piece of shit to install, including and not limited to: sneaking up on it to catch it by surprise, waving my hands and shouting spells in an ancient Latin dialect (to cast the daemons out, perhaps), and finally kicking things. Finally I gave up and went on to other, more urgent matters.
Well, days went by. As they do. And the Whiny Developer Bitch would occasionally grace me with her presence to ask, like a small child, "Is it done yet? Is it done yet? Have you looked on the Web? Have you looked in Microsoft's knowledge base? Have you read the FAQ?" Blow me, all right? I didn't get to this position by not knowing how to look up documentation. Finally, sadly, I had to resort to the ultimate: calling Microsoft tech support. Which I did on Monday. Surprisingly, I got a droid with a clue. We went back and forth for a couple of days. He sent me a patch, I installed it, it didn't work. I mailed him back, he went, "Hrm," we went for another round. You know the story.
Yesterday Whiny Developer Bitch came by again. This time, she wanted the case number and the number for the MS weenie so she could call him herself, since this project is so urgent, don't you know. (Not as urgent as the need to put my left Doc Marten up your ass, bitch.) "I can call him because I really don't have anything to do right now!!" Must be nice. Said I, "You realize you'll need to have root to do anything with this, and you don't have that, nor do you know what I've been doing to fix this problem. It's going to be difficult for you to speak with the Microsoft guy without a real idea of the history of the troubleshooting." She sputtered, "But but but..." And then... the dreaded words: "I used to be a system administrator, so I can handle this."
Oh, how I so doubt that.
So today I got sick of her whining and forwarded her an e-mail with everything I had done to fix the thing, and the MS weenie's responses. Frankly, it's one more thing I don't have to deal with. Did she have root? No. Did she come back an hour later whining about needing it? Oh, yes. "Um, I need an account and root on this machine to fix this, and you didn't tell me." "Actually, I told you that yesterday, remember?" *scribble scribble scribble* "Oh... uhm, yeah..."
Fucking MORONS. All developers need to be taken out and shot. Yes, they do, and you know it. If you're a developer, I mean you specifically. Hate mail goes here.
-- marcie.
