Hacker for Hire

We went to Cedar Point today. I have to say, I am super glad that we did. We had a couple of passes that were graduation presents that I hadn’t used due to the business of the summer. And when I say business of the summer, I am referring to the bazillion weddings, outings, gatherings, and everything else that was going. I swear that there were two months in a row where we had something to do every single weekend. This led to being unable to appreciate the Cedar Point-age. That and a lack of vacation from my company that raped me from my seniority and vacation days (but that’s a different story).

It was a really nice time. Dean, Marilynn, Sara, and I got to ride everything in the park with less than an hour wait, which was really cool. Though, the price of drinks has gone up a buck to $3.00 a 20 oz. bottle, which is completely unrealistic and lead to us being starved and parched as we made our merriment. It was super good though because I needed it. You have no idea how good it is to leave the cell phone at home and drive far away from it. Even if no one was calling you, it’s the release from the electronic ball and chain that makes it worth it.

I am not generally one for caring about how the weather looks outside; however, every now and again I grow a slight appreciation for the way that it looks. Today has started out as one of those days.

Out of all the weather we get, I would have to say that fog is by far the coolest looking. It actually moves and flows around as opposed to rain which explodes in a fiery ball of kamikaze wetness when it hits something. Its also really neat in the way that the density of it changes throughout the entire fog bank.

Maybe what I like about it though was the fact that we had a boat load of fog days back in high school. That was always a great day. You wake up to your radio blaring that school has been cancelled because of fog. FOG!!! I mean, the best I can figure is that the yellow paint on the school buses spontaneously bursts into flames due to the increased friction caused by the fog. But hey, if people want to give me the day off because they are too chicken to drive in a cloud, I’m all for it. You know, I haven’t had a fog day in over 5 years. That’s a lot of fog-day-off-tastic-action that I’ve been missing out on. If 90% of people over the age of 18 weren’t stupid, I’d recommend that we let adults have fog days. But being as it took me 30 minutes to drive into work that was 5 minutes away this morning, something tells me that most of the adults are better off to be kept locked away in their cubes where they can’t pose a fire hazard.

A while ago, there was an article posted on Slashdot that was rather related. The article is located here. While I don’t necessarily agree with everything in the article, it did get me thinking about why I really considered leaving my job.
Continue reading ‘The Last Straw’ »

In the business world of today, many things change at a very rapid pace. To keep a handle on these changes, there is a process called “Change Control” or “Change Management” or whatever buzz word your company/slum likes to refer to it as. So for those of you who are unfamiliar, the process goes something like this.

P1: I would like to make a change, here is what I want to do
P2: How will it inconvenience me?
P1: It won’t
P2: OK, go ahead and do it
P1: It’s done
P2: My hair is on fire!!!

Basically, the whole principle is to notify people that there are going to be significant changes that may affect the way that business operates. So usually, you are given a notice and have X number of days/weeks/minutes to resolve your end of the bargain. Why would I rant about a system like this? Good question. The answer is I’m ranting about the system, I’m ranting about the lack of use of the system. My web server needed to be beat all to hell and dragged through a gutter before it would tell me what was wrong. After I found out that the geniuses at Gentoo had decided to un-organize the configuration for the web server and somehow magically delete my configuration, I got spend my morning recreating it.

I would like to take a moment to note that this, of course, is never a good idea for someone with an engineering mind like myself because it allows for the opportunity for “improvement.”

So I tinkered and tweaked and got the server back up to speed, but then I got it in my head to do one more thing. I decided I had to be cool like everyone else on the Internet and have my blog site be at http://blog.mystupiddomain.com instead of blah.com/blogeriffic. You wouldn’t think that it would be that hard to set something like that up…you would be right…unless you are battling through trying to remember your server configuration from a year ago. Well, obviously I got it working, but I am still not pleased with the actual file location on the server. The stupid thing had the right permissions but it still did not want to let me access the page and gave me a big fat 403 error. So it’s been hacked into functionality, but it will eventually change to be done correctly. Not that any of you will see the change.

Well, the server update is just going ever so well, for once. Though it is taking forever. That’s the one complaint I really have about Gentoo. I like the fact that everything is compiled from source…but man does it take forever to compile it. So in my downtime, I’ve been working on my laptop trying to get the wireless card to work in it. It worked at one point in time, not really sure what changed to break it though. Its like the silly thing is up and running but it doesn’t want to talk to the Interweb (thanks for that word Betsy) over the wireless. The even funnier thing is that it will allow me to ‘hack’ the wireless access point WEP and WPA keys, which…it shouldn’t be able to do if it doesn’t connect, but it works. Personally, I blame the people at Madwifi…no wait, I blame Intel. If they would have built their card to IEEE specifications and released a real Linux driver, everything would have just been peachy. Oh well, guess I’m technically not allowed to bitch because I paid for this card and i didn’t have to write any driver for it. I guess I’ll just have to sit here an wait for Sara to get back from walking the dog and watch some Inuyasha.

Well, today was just another bang-up day at work. I spent the first 1/3 of my day going over a spread sheet that could have been written by a trained monkey. Sadly, I was the trained monkey that had to write the blasted thing. I would have to say that the second most boring thing to labeling Ethernet cable and running it all over a friggen’ data center is writing down all the names of the servers and their IP addresses, something that should have been done back a long time ago. But, I will admit that it is my own fault. If I would have been the genius at VB script that I hoped I was, I could have written something that did the whole spread sheet, but Excel was not being my friend today.

That was good part of work today. The bad part was that I’ve been tasked with migrating 100+ DHCP scopes from an old CNR system to the new and busted Microsoft solution. Now, I should probably take that dig at Microsoft back considering that if I want to make a backup copy of the configuration, it’s 1 command, where in the CNR, I’ve yet to see it done. In fact, the official documentation of the CNR says [paraphrased], “don’t worry about backing up your configuration, just buy another server, spend many hours making it redundant and you’ll never have to worry about it.” For all those geeks out there, you will chuckle, the rest of you will will just think that I’m a geek; moving on. So I found a way to get a very sketchy configuration from the CNR server so that I could actually work on writing the script that will translate the configuration to the Microsoft brand. Later in the day, after I have been working on this for awhile (yeah, I had to try learning a new programing language because I thought it was too simple of a task), I find out that they have this information stored somewhere and that the format that I’m using will be completely wrong, but that I should continue on my project and they will get me the new format as soon as they can… This is one of those what you think, what you say ordeals.

What was said:
Idiot: “I’m going to get you a new format, but keep working on using the old format until I get you the new one.”
Me: “Sure, I can do that no problem.”

What was thought:
Idiot: “I’m a stu-pud idiot and by the way, I’m going to get you a new format, but keep working on using the old format until I get you the new one.”
Me: “Sure, I can do that no problem. I mean I really love redoing all my work for no good reason. By the way, I will stab you in the jaw with a pen.”
Idiot: “Ow!…Not the blue pen! Any color but the blue pen!”

And it’s not that I really think that the blue pen would hurt a hell of a lot more than a black one, I just happen to like the color better. So now at home, I’ve nothing all that incredible to do. I think that I will finally get around to upgrading my server so that my MythTV box will work again. I dread the thought of that though. In the past, I don’t think that ‘not well’ even begins to describe how tinkering with the myth box goes. It usually goes, “Ah, now it works…wait…what the hell! Why can’t I use the remote….no I can use the remote, just not the left half of it…wait, now the left half works but my website is all pink! Stupid fricken monkey ass myth box!”

So FireFox corrupted my profile…again, for like the 123rd time. Now I have no idea why it does this, but it does give me the pain in the patella task of re-installing all of my extensions. So I go install the usual; Forecast-fox, Switch-Proxy, Ad Block, Google Toolbar, Tab Browser Prefs, and Download Manager Tweak. But then I remembered one that I hadn’t installed for a long time and I really never used it to its full potential: Greasemonkey. Greasemonkey is a cool extension that allows you to inject java script into website to get some more potential out of them. For example, the Mailto Compose in Gmail script is really awesome for me. It takes all the email addresses that it finds on the page and changes them into links that open new Gmails to that address. There are a veritable butt load of scripts for this extension all over the net, but the best place seems to be here. So I can see you are over there wondering, “Wyatt, how can I get in on this funky fresh action? I need to know!” Well, I’ll give you the step by step:

1. Install Firefox if you don’t already have it
2. Go here and seach Extensions for Greasemonkey and install
3. Restart Firefox and head off to http://userscripts.org and find some stuff you like and use it

There you go, simple as can be. Again, my favorites are under the Google or gmail section but there are tons more.

Bah…Blogs are dumb. Well, not all of them are dumb, just some things about a lot of them are dumb. Mainly, the fact that you have to click on the title of the post to leave a comment. I think i might just hack some java script in to it so that it gives you a cool little fade-in/fade-out box or some crap like that; something that parents and AOL users would forward off through an annoying email that says “Oooooo!!! Look at how it (insert whatever the hell it does here)!” Stupid bastards and their fricking monkeys…makes me want to go banana-sandwich. By the way, that’s 3 drinks talking.

So this is the product of boredom, gloomy Saturdays, and enough technology to choke a token ring connection. I honestly have no idea what I’m going to put on this thing, but apparently I got it into my head that I needed one. And on that point, I would like to say, there is a lot of crappy blog software out there. Maybe this is just for people who want to host their own blog and not use a service like Blogger, but I swear I went through about 15 different packages before I finally choose one that I liked (Kudos to Tim for letting me know about this one). But seriously, half the blogs that I installed stunk major stank. Most of them due to really bad code, but a lot of the other due to just poor layouts.

But at least it’s something that I wanted to work on unlike work has been for the last week. For those of you who don’t know, my ‘real’ title at work is ‘Technical Janitor.’ Basically, I get asked the proper way to resolve and issue, they ignore my suggestion, someone does it completely different and then after its all fscked up, I get called into fix it. According the the documentation though, I’m supposed to be a Security Analyst (I don’t see why they can’t call it Security Engineer or Architect, but whatever). And do you know what the Security Analyst has been doing the last week? Not security work. I’ve been labeling Ethernet cables and pulling them through a data center. Let me tell you, there is nothing like labeling lots of Ethernet cable to make you think about driving 90mph the wrong way down a rush hour traffic with your boss’s neck tied to your bumper by computer cables. Though on the bright side, I did get to tell my boss that I would quit his company if he every had another client try to make me do cabling again. In closing, I suggest that when you are fed up, you give your boss and ultimatum just to relieve some stress.