Hacker for Hire

Well, if you read the rant, you’ll know that travel out in the great state of California was not the highlight of my trip; however, there are a bunch of other things that are worth mentioning.
Continue reading ‘San Diego Part 2: The Trip’ »

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Well, I’m back and finally getting around to posting my rant about my trip to San Diego. I felt that since I really enjoyed a good 95% of my trip that I should separate the joviality from the wild-ass rant. To keep it clean, I’ve broken the rant into sections for easy reading :-).
Continue reading ‘San Diego Part 1: The Rant’ »

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I finally received my laptop back from Pomeroy (only took two weeks to replace a hard drive and an LCD panel). I have to say, the level of workmanship that I received was close enough to make me rethink the bad things I’ve heard/said about Pomeroy. Other than a really crappy job of putting the screw covers back on, my laptop is back to it’s previous functionality … minus any operating systems. Yeah, I was one of those people that actually DoD++ wiped my system before I handed it over the support. Call me paranoid, but I don’t want to be one of these people with their hard drive from BestBuy up for sale on eBay.

Now I’m in the process of rebuild my new primary OS (Gentoo Linux) because now I no longer have to use my system for work and I can run whatever I damn well please on it :-). I’ll have a post about my XGL experience and how awful that was when I get back from California and Rick’s wedding. And being as I’m going away, there will be no posts until probably next Monday. Have a good week.

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As you may or may not know, I purchase a new phone and switched my service to T-Mobile. I found out that the Nokia e60 will actually play video (no, I didn’t pay attention to that, I was more concerned with the SIP coolness capabilities). So I stared doing some research into making/converting video for access by mobile devices.
Continue reading ‘3gp And Other Oddities’ »

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Work is a funny thing. Most people go to it because they “have” to. The smart ones go because they want to. The funny ones are the ones that take work waaaaaay to seriously. For example, today a co-worker, Mr. X, was working with a very incompetent site and Verizon trying to resolve an issue. Mr. X was practically stomping up and down trying to get Verizon to resolve the issue while they were saying that two brand new router that replaced the old routers were both physically malfunctioning. The best part was that Mr. X and Mr. Y got into a swear off which of course drew a crowd and Mr. X ended the spat with “Do your FSCKING Job!!!”

I know that I take a lot of thing seriously and occasionally fly off in a fit of rage; however, I don’t think that I’ve ever taken my job that seriously (except when I was forced to do the cabling at Tri-Health) … and in that case, it wasn’t my job that I was taking seriously, it was the fact I was doing a bull shit job. Still though, I only wonder what I could say to stir the pot just a little more just to see where these two would take it. Does that make me evil?

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As I’ve said recently, I’ve been looking for cell phones that will be Xetron worthy (a.k.a. non-camera phones) and I’ve found a few that I liked. I liked one so much that I went and bought it off of eBay, the Nokia e60. I chose this one because I really liked the form factor, the features, and because it was selling pretty well (if I hated it, I wouldn’t have a problem chucking it back on eBay). I got my new phone and plugged in my SIM … didn’t work. Crap. So I plugged Sara’s SIM in to it … BAM! Works like a champ. Perplexed, I put mine SIM back in and receive the same nonfunctional results. Time to head off to the Cingular and see what they have to say.
Continue reading ‘Blind Dedication’ »

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OK, I admit it. The title was designed to stick that crappy Britney Spears song in your head (hey, I’ve got to get my work in too you know). But even though you’re sitting there with a horrible melody accented by bad singing and terrible lyrics, it is time for some more evil ideas. But before I go into that, I would like to thank Joe, Rick, and Mike for their thoughts and variations. If you haven’t read them, their pretty good and you’ll find them here. Moving right along, here are some more evil ideas with the usual disclaimer attached.
Continue reading ‘Opps, I’m Evil Again’ »

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Where’s the fire? In my pants? No … you pervert … my laptop hard drive burst into flames. Ever since I got my Tecra M4, I’ve had issues with it overheating and locking up. At first I thought it was the processor; however, a simple little application to monitor processor temperature showed me I was looking at the wrong place. Once again, Linux saved my ass by telling me that my S.M.A.R.T drive status was in a pseudo failed state due to the hard drive overheating about 50% of the time that I used it. Problem was that I needed my laptop at my job(s) and I couldn’t bear to part with it for more than a few days; hence, the 3 weeks Toshiba said it would take to fix … totally unacceptable.

Fortunately, now that I’m off contacting and using other people systems I could get it in for repair. The “closest” service location is basically the Cincinnati Airport (which is not in Cincinnati, go figure). The next closest place is Columbus. Well, I figured that when all the black stuff on my system’s display turned permanently red, I should take it down to Pomeroy (not that I wanted to … I don’t really trust their low level technicians from prior experience) and loose it for a week so I didn’t have the urge to kill someone (staring at a read screen with green text does that after 8 or so hours). But that’s just a side story that leads up to the real blog post.
Continue reading ‘Holy Firey Bits Batman!’ »

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After I don’t know how many hours of surgery/disaster recovery/uncontrollable swearing/whatever you want to call it, MOST of hackerforhire.org is back up and running. Email is still flaky, but that’s of no concern to anyone other than me. That’s the short
version of what happened … this is the long one.
Continue reading ‘Clear! **BVHSITTT** …. Beep, Beep’ »

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