Just got an automated phone call wishing me happy birthday and playing a scratchy recording of some cheesetastic birthday song. My guess is something my mother signed up for. Thoughts counting etc.
Posts Tagged ‘mystery’
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Friday, November 18th, 2011That was strange
Wednesday, October 26th, 2011Back in the days of President Clinton, when you wrote him an email, he’d send you back a physical form letter addressing your topic. When GWB took office, they stopped answering, or probably even reading them. When Obama took office, I hoped there’d be a return to the responsive, even if just in surface actions, government.
Just now, I got an email from Obama, thanking me writing. Either his response team is really slow, like months and months after the letter slow, or he’s sent out this email to every person whoever emailed something, out of some sort of OWS reaction? I dunno.
Or somebody hit the bulk-resend button on everyone who sent him emails about Egypt, back in April.
What to think?
Thursday, September 22nd, 2011The chair massage woman at work just told me my face looks all swollen on one side, but when I look in the mirror, I don’t notice anything. I would feel kinda weird going around to people at work and asking if I look funny today. Like, do I amuse you funny or about to die from alien invasion funny?
STAF + sudo + HPUX = argh!
Tuesday, May 10th, 2011Something odd going on in the interaction between STAF and sudo on an HP-UX 11.31 ia64 system. When I sudo from the command line as userx, who as a member of the wheel group, and the sudoers configured to allow no-password commands, I still get prompted for a password, or an error about no tty allocated to ask for a password from (for a while, I somehow managed to attach a random root telnet session such that it was acting as the tty for said messages). After further experimenting, determined that with sudo 1.6.9p11 everything works OK, but with sudo 1.7.4p6, I get uid/eid problems that generate spurious authentication requirements. Investigation continues.
Missing stats
Wednesday, May 4th, 2011Something hokey is going on with the ‘simple’ wordpress install at dreamhost. The stats plugin keeps disappearing and reappearing. I haven’t noticed anything odd with the site itself, but one should always be on guard for the unknown.
UPDATE: Dreamhost seems to have intentionally removed the wp-shortstat.php plugin from their system. They claim it’s not compatible with the version of wordpress they are using, a statement which ignores the weeks it was working just fine. Maybe it was thrashing the DB in the background? It wouldn’t be half as annoying if there was any other way to get stats for a ‘simple’ install, but they purposely place ‘simple’ installs in a location you can not edit at all.
Starbucks Spies at work?
Monday, April 4th, 2011We use a kanban board at work. Somewhen between friday and monday, someone put a card up in my section, as a highest-priority-customer-affecting-issue, “Get Coffee”, with a number that doesn’t appear in our bug tracking system. No one in our department admits to putting it up there, and I don’t drink actual coffee at all, haven’t for years. I did use to go with my morning breakfast buddy to the nearest Starbucks so he could drink his water down coffee (aka Americano), and I used to be able to get a half-decent hot chocolate, until they dropped the Signature line. Maybe someone from Starbucks corporate broke into the office over the weekend to encourage me to start going again?
I don’t recall doing anything stunningly sleepy last week that would provide a cognitive neighborhood in which to place such a card, as a joke, so I’m really at a loss as to why it’s there.
UPDATE: d’oh, I dunno how I spaced on Friday being april fools, or that 040111 parses into 04-01-11, not 040-111. I have marked the issue as blocked due to Starbucks no longer carrying the Signature hot chocolate.
Beyond the standards
Monday, December 27th, 2010If you do any sort of unix shell script-y-ness, you know all about STDIN, STDOUT, and STDERR. If you are a semi-advanced and above user, you know their numeric equivalents (0,1,2) and how they show up, or are implied, in some commands (ls -la 2>errs.go.here). Well it turns out there are defined slots for file descriptors 3-9 3-19, mostly left adrift on the sea of lost inside knowledge. Learning about them, it’s the first I have heard of how any process spawned by exec automatically inherits fd5, so you should avoid using it.
It definitely provides a possible explanation of why an external program being run with stdout and stderr redirected can still print a progress message on-screen.
UPDATE: Advanced Unix Programming by Marc J Rochkind
Geyer Street Sheiks of mystery – Solved
Sunday, July 11th, 2010Ebay sent me word that a CD I had on permanent search had finally been offered up for sale, and at a starting price of only one penny no less. I put in my bid and end up getting the disc for $5 when all is said and done, woo hoo. It arrives, in original shrinkwrap it looks like, and plays perfectly. Thing is, I have no idea why I had been searching for the disc now. The band is from St Louis, so could be associated with some band I knew of back then, but it’s all neo-bluegrass from 2003, not industrial/alt/techno from ’95. Strange. Sounds nice enough so far.
UPDATE2: Figured it out. This is the singer from my favorite free CD ever, “Which Dreamed It” by Three Merry Widows.
Facebook ephemra
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010I really kind of wish facebook would let me know if someone has disappeared from my network because they unfriended just me, or if they dropped their whole account. I guess it doesn’t really matter, it just seems so strange to suddenly have someone, and all the content I posted related to their wall or comments, disappear without warning. I don’t think I stuck my dick in the mashed potatoes.
UPDATE: I finally figured out a way to figure out that he’s just not on facebook at all anymore. Interesting, I’ll have to ask him about that before we rock out thursday. It did remind me to go thru everyone I cared about’s info and grab their email and birthday info to store in my gmail contacts so it won’t disappear on me again.
Waiting by the phone
Tuesday, January 26th, 2010Waiting for a phone call
I almost don’t want to come
Thank goodness for the cellphone
At least I can be miserable
And out in public
Yeah, much better than
The old days
Sitting at home.