fine whine

Google does not find any useful results for "ice cream truck versions of popular songs". I'd settle for ice-cream-truck versions of not-so-popular songs, too* or even calliope renditions, but alas, it seems to be an untapped niche, even in this modern world. I guess we're all moving to fast to mix together today's music with the music-players of yore.

Or maybe, just maybe, such a combination would be so horrendously annoying beyond mere human comprehension.

* Oft-quoted comedian Steven Wright remarked "The ice cream truck in my neighborhood
plays 'Helter Skelter'." but I think he made that up.

So much for my company's supposed security. Despite keeping us from our personal email* and desktop wallpaper our network and computers were compromised today. Apparently a hole in the plug-n-play service built into Windows 2000 was published recently, and, despite a fix appearing not long thereafter from Microsoft, our workstations were not prepared for the onslaught. Apparently in the last day or two some fourteen variants of the same exploit have been worming their way around, and it hit my computer at about noon. As far as I can discern all it did was to shut down my computer, but others didn't fare so well (one had all of her emails erased. Lucky her).

I, of course, assumed that the NT ADMINISTRATOR mentioned in the shutdown notice (which admittedly didn't look familiar) was someone in the I.T. end of things, and they were going to come after me for my custom wallpaper and unapproved software. When I began hearing cubicle mumblings about viruses and shutting down I paid attention, and slowly the rumors spread about a virus outbreak.

Of course Zotob and RBot and the others are technically worms, but who am I to argue? Some of my coworkers don't quite comprehend computers the way I do.

You see, I sought out a fix, and found the aforementioned Microsoft hotfix. I put it on a floppy and set out to find as-yet-uninfected computers to vaccinate. I gave the disk to somebody and she put it in the drive, and then asked me, "Now what do I do?". Immediately I realized that my instruction of "Run the one file on this disk" might've been insufficient so I walked her through the three click process.

Of course, less than half an hour later someone official wandered around telling us that we don't in fact need to turn off and unplug our computers (from the "blue cord" only, they'd said) but instead just reboot around 3:45.

Naturally the rumors had begun around 1pm, and there were many, many empty cubes for an hour or two while rumor and reality clashed. In the end we're all back up and running. What is really amusing is that there were whole departments of people unwilling to heed the hearsay and stubbornly kept working. Here they had an opportunity to socialize for an hour, and they turned it down. I don't know who's crazier, them, or the people supposedly securing our computers.

* Even Gmail (via https) is now blocked. Somehow they've even managed to plug that hole, much to my chagrin. I still have some tricks up my sleeve--and my own wallpaper, not theirs--but dammit, I shouldn't need to try and beat them. We should all be on the same side here, and naturally it should be my side. Stupid policies.

Generally when I receive a junk email message that finds its way through my filter it's worth checking out, or at least one in ten is. In this case, I cannot divine what it is that they are trying to sell me, other than the cryptic clue in the subject "Re: (11-94) Dru.gss" and probably some hidden HTML.

I just get a kick out of randomized emails, and not too many get past Spamassassin. This one did.

Hello,
And he tightened his lips. I'll have the rods to you, until the
France and Spain in Europe. It is the intention of France that
into the treasury opened by the Baron in the name of the King of
venture with him, they asserted, and they would go out of it with
even the things that had happened in Bridgetown were not enough t
half the peril with which it was fraught for himself. He turned
lordship can't smell a papist at four paces.
rays streamed down upon that mangled, bleeding back until he felt
misapprehension, and also tinged never so faintly by something of
it a haze which circumscribed their range of vision to something
 
Have a good day.

Hidden away in the source, of course, is a link and some more text about a pharmacy by mail, but I needed to search to find it. I suspect if I used the same diligence to find myself a real pharmacy (and everybody else did) we wouldn't be getting these messages.

I mean, how many people are really waiting for an internet pharmacy to plop into their inboxes? "Whoa, hey, now I can order that Zocor I've been waiting for!"

At just about midnight this morning my hard drive died. I was using the computer at the time, and it suddenly spun to life and started making some forlorn clicking noises. Windows shut down and when it restarted my drive wasn't recognized. You see, I need to use two hard drives to run Windows: my 20 gigabyte drive, partitioned into five or six virtual drives, filled with pictures, music, and games, and the one gig dinosaur that boots Windows because it can't recognize the bigger drive.

I'm sure that if I monkeyed with it enough, I could've gotten down to one drive, but now that is a purely hypothetical exercise. It's all gone, now, and I'm going to have to find somebody to pay to get my stuff back. I've been bad about backing stuff up, since I figured that since I bought this hard drive new it wouldn't give me a problem after a mere five years.

This is, of course, not the first drive I've lost. It's not even the fifth. It is, however, the first one that I bought new, and moreover the first one I had that was manufactured after 1997.

I've got hundred megabyte hard drives from 1992 that still work, dammit.

So I'm a fool for not making backups, and a sad fool at that. To think just a couple days ago I was so happy to be in Chicago with my friends, and now I have this instead. I want to go back; I want to go to bed and to have this all be okay in the morning.

Email is a funny medium. Every message (at least every normal one) has a header showing the sender and recipient, yet so many people (myself included) nevertheless address them anyway in the body of the text.

I've found, recently, that I feel the need to repond in kind when somebody starts with "Hi Mike," with a friendly "Hi [name of vendor person]" and I cannot address the message without being casual in return.

Even if that "Hi Mike" is atop a twenty-point email (I mean 20 issues, not a large font) that will take me an hour to respond. Go figure.

Oh boy, am I excited. Sometime today they're going to be coming to my cubicle with a new 17" monitor, to replace mine. The one I have is okay and all except for some odd quirks. Namely, it has some streaking issues whereby white windows bleed green (to the right only) over scrollbars and borders. It has something to do with the light and dark balance of what is on screen, and I've controlled it somewhat in the past with cunning use of dim or bright wallpaper, as need be.

I'd mentioned my problems to somebody a little higher up the other day (we were talking about them giving me a new desktop but keeping my plagued monitor) and today she told me to call the help desk. Before opening the ticket, the helpdesk guy could only suggest that I try degaussing. Sorry, been there, tried that. The only solution, other than ignoring it for half the day, is to fiddle with windows and wallpaper at the expense of time and efficiency. Or I can just take the day off and not deal with the monitor at all, I suppose.

Anyway, sometime this afternoon my problem will be solved.

I suppose I should move my sandwich then. Lately I've gotten into the habit of tossing my sandwich up on top of the back of the monitor (over the grilles) to warm it up and melt the cheese, in lieu of using the microwave. It gets a little bit dry, but it's still edible. Make of that what you will.