substitute

The MacBook developed one of those great Permanent Vertical Lines on its display this evening. It's a shimmering kind of emerald green a fifth of the way over from the right.

This means that I will have to spit 'n' shine up the laptop and remove the memory I put in it so I can go into the Apple Store and play "don't ask don't tell" about the fact that I actually use the thing, because the "geniuses" are instructed to deny service by any means necessary including mockery and insinuations of sabotage. If I have any luck, they'll agree to fix it instead of declaring that I must have thrown it off the back of a horse because my wrist sweat corroded the unobtainium finish.

I'm tired of broken stuff. Especially when it's stuff I need to survive, like wheels on my car or the only tool of my trade, and especially when it's still in its prime and way before any problems are "expected."

Grump!

Folks,

Could someone in I.T. take a look at Diane's PC. She's out on vacation this week, but it's been acting funny and no one on 8 West can print. Also, we stranded tens of thousands of people for a whole day and brought international travel to a halt and caused worldwide news. Whenever you stop by 8 West next could you check her pc? thanks

Guys if you could look at this right now it would be great.

---

(AP) LOS ANGELES The source of last weekend's system breakdown at Los Angeles International Airport has been traced to a malfunctioning network interface card on a single desktop computer.

U.S. Customs officials say the card -- -- which allows computers to connect to a local area network -- experienced a partial failure around 12:50 p.m. Saturday that had a domino effect with other computer network cards.

A total system failure occurred a little after 2 p.m., leaving more than 17,000 inbound international travelers stranded in the terminal or on airplanes because authorities were unable to screen them.

The malfunction prompted city and state leaders to request briefings and reports from customs and aviation officials.

The system was up and running again by 4 a.m. Sunday, but experienced a second 80 minute outage late Sunday into early Monday, which was blamed on a power supply failure.

Dear Lazyweb:

I may need to buy/build a new linux box soon, for home server use. So, I probably need to get an x86 box because I don't want the new hobby of making PPCLinux replace the iggy box on the blue G3. Therefore, I need either to buy a prebuilt system or all the parts in a sack so I can screw them together.

I don't need:

great graphics
sound
gamer anything
windows anything

I do need:

hardware that plays nice with recent linux
a decent processor, preferably dualcore
lots of RAM
good I/O so I'm not always horking because the disk is running
good cooling features
expandibility for drives and cards
ports ports, ports, ports

I might end up just doing a Dell BYO box because I have credit with them and I'd never pay interest on their plan, it's no interest for 18 months. I'm sure I'd be paying extra because brand name, but I also get 6% off and no shipping cost there because of a corporate deal. It won't be perfect and it'll be about $1800 for what I want to do, but it will be on payment and done.

But If someone has a preferred vendor for this kind of thing or a suggestion of how to do this way better for way cheaper, I'd be delighted. What I don't want is to go to Fry's, or spend six weeks nerdinating learning all about exactly the best combination to get 0.05% more efficiency. I'm going to upgrade from a 300MHz Gateway Pentium II box from 1997 that's been doing good service for years, so I don't need my edge to cut much less bleed.

When I was a young child in the long-ago 1970s, computers were used for something called Data Processing.

Data Processing was done with large machines the size of cars or at least major appliances. In order to make use of it, a customer would bring a problem to a person called a Systems Analyst, who would help the customer understand how Data Processing might help. Then the customer and the Systems Analyst would come up with a plan on how to get the customer's work done.

The Systems Analyst would bring the customer's problem into the Data Processing place, and give it to computer programmers. Along with other helpful people called Punch Card Clerks and Computer Operators, the programmers would produce software that helped the customer.

After that, when the customer had more data to be processed, it could be dropped off at the Data Processing place, where the Punch Card Clerks would put data in the software, and the Computer Operators would make sure the machines worked, and then finally the data would be all processed and given back to the customer in a neatly rubber-banded set of printouts on fanfold paper.

In the 1990s it was discovered that everything had changed. A customer could often mash fingers on keys and make the data process right there at the desk, without visiting the Data Processing people. Computers were interactive and talked right back to people, so that dropping off data and picking up printouts wasn't necessary. And worst of all, customers could talk directly to programmers, it was discovered, and tell them what they wanted, and these new quick interactive computers could give results very fast. The programs were then given to the customers who took them off and used them in their own offices.

So the Punch Card Clerks and the Computer Operators and the nice person at the desk who took the data and gave back the printouts were no longer useful, and they had to go home and stop working at the Data Processing place.

Worst of all, the Systems Analysts lost their jobs too. They were expensive people, since almost all of them were old programmers with experience who had been promoted. They were all fifty years old and not retrainable and didn't know much about PC computers or other new things. Their entire function had been removed, and suddenly their $60K jobs vanished. So all the System Administrators went home from the empty Data Processing places and sat in their imitation redwood veneered dens in their suburban homes and stared at the wall and drank highballs and then shot themselves in the head with large-caliber handguns.

It turns out that the computer programmers shouldn't talk to customers after all. They are very optimistic people, for whom everything is almost done all the time. They often refuse to finish things or write down how they work. And they can be mean and weird and not very easy to understand, so that customers become frightened and angry and don't want to talk to the optimistic people who don't finish things and snort a lot and wear fedoras indoors. Things like this happened during the 1990s a lot, and many customers didn't want to have any software if they had to talk to the computer programmers. It was time to bring back Systems Analysts. But they were all dead, because they had shot themselves in the head with large caliber handguns in their imitation redwood veneer dens.

So we have Project Managers now. They are different from Systems Analysts in that they are 30 years old instead of 50, they do not live in imitation redwood paneled dens, and they never did know how to program computers. They drive VW Passats and smoke marijuana and use lots of buzzwords, and they are very good at making customers feel comfortable. Many of them enjoy jam band music and are engaged to people named Chad or Alyssa. They do a lot of the same things the Systems Analysts did, so that the customers get their software but don't have to talk to the programmers after all, because that was a bad idea. They tell the programmers when things have to be done, figure out on their own how long things will take, and dress much better than the programmers.

And that's the story of how Project Managers were made.

My complication had a little complication.

May 24 02:28:43 abe crashdump[15091]: crashdump crashed
May 24 02:28:45 abe crashdump[15091]: crash report written to: /Library/Logs/CrashReporter/crashdump.crash.log

In the dmesg log on my OSX machine:

in_delmulti - ignorning invalid inm (0x656e00c0)

The local rich kids all showed up at once and began staring at this laptop, giving me the opportunity to create my own D.I.Y. Apple ad. I'm not sure whether "Think Different" or "The Power To Crush The Other Kids" would be the best slogan to use. Maybe a new slogan for emo kids with lots of cash?

Weird and cool: Coming into the living room and seeing my 76-year-old mother watching Nick Cave on the TV. And liking it.

Weird and funny: Getting two text messages from bikupan that appeared to be from a year ago, one saying "What, no potato salad? Bah!" and the other "Is something wrong?". I vaguely remembered going back and forth about my accidentally vegan potato salad recipe last year and having some technical snafus. But no, she really did send those last night, and it wasn't a temporal wormhole in the SMS system.

Neither weird, funny, nor cool: My re-discovery tonight of the fatal flaw in desktop computers nowadays: they're all I/O bound. Here I sit with an 800 MHz PowerPC and 1 gig of RAM in my lap and I can't do jack. Why? Because there's disk intensive activity going on. The window manager slows to a crawl, none of my apps respond except in annoying bursts, and inexplicable errors occur probably due to clicks and keyboard presses out of focus because windows are changing erratically. It's like I'm connecting to my own computer over a crappy old 14.4 modem link. RAAAAAAR. I want IDE to go away. [/geek]

Neither weird, funny, nor cool: I am reading a book about the Vietnam war. Bad: we're doing it again. Worse: we're doing it again much more stupidly . I'm experiencing nostalgia for the sincerity, honesty, and sense of duty of CIA and military officers from 1966. YOW!

Weird and funny but not cool: Bro 'n' ho couple arrive in D's tonight and she asks D., who is behind the counter: "Do you have Chocolate Tea?" A moment of silence, and D. says "Umm, no?" Customer says: "Could you do that, like, put mocha in tea?" D: "I guess, yeah!" Customer: "Would that be disgusting, do you think?" D: "Yes, it would."

Hi there. I'm going to talk to you today about website programming. You aren't interested, but maybe you should be, because your bank sucks at it.

Today I cancelled a credit account that had been paid off a long time ago and was no longer useful. Before I called them up, I looked at the website for my account to make sure that everything was clear and that no pending or recurring charges would show up.

The account statement looked like this:

Available Credit: [redacted]

Current balance: $0.00

Minimum payment Due: $20.00

Previous Balance: $0.00

Last Payment: $58.97, 3/5/2005

I immediately saw that I had a $20 payment due, but missed seeing that my balance was zero. Oh crap, how long has that been due? At least since March! Better pay that last $20 before I cancel. I clicked on the "Make a payment online" button.

( that's when it got funny )

Then again, after what torgo_x told me about Non-Euclidean Math at Banks (make him tell you this story some time), I shouldn't be surprised.

The punchline is that the credit account was a Citibank credit line offered through Amazon.com. LOL INTERNET!