Vanykrye's page

At least the cop was reasonable about it with the verbal. I know one city in between us where they would have gone straight to a ticket with no discussion on the matter.

I lost my humanity years ago.

Err...umm...

Hi!?

(Yes, good recovery. I'm certain no one noticed.)

gran rey de los mono wrote:

Vanykrye wrote:

Drugs.

No thanks, I'm good.

Oh, did you mean the guest? I doubt it. I assume he didn't change his previous search, and so it showed him hotels where he had last been, and since it was after midnight, he couldn't book for Monday night anymore. So, basically, he likely just wasn't paying any attention while trying to book a room.

Or he wanted to walk 4/10ths of 500 miles so he could walk 800 more.

I have never liked that song, but I like it a little bit more now just because you caused Freehold pain.

Cosmo. Dude. We've talked about this. It's Friday.

You killed power to an entire town last night. I was *eventually* able to get my client's servers to come back up and behave normally, but it took a few hours and I have to get a root cause on why the SAN took four hours to stabilize after coming back up.

Then I got notified that a different client in a different town in the complete opposite direction was having horrible noises coming from their server room. Go out there and yeah...UPS battery backups aren't supposed to make crackling sounds.

This is all on you.

Knock it off.

Yeah, 93F with 75% humidity is not doing me any favors. I'd rather do 105F in Arizona than this.

If you didn't leave a message, then it wasn't important and I'm not calling you back.

I blame Cosmo for also being one of the people who bought that corner store.

Also for picking the other buyer, who is likely Cosmo's clone.

I blame Cosmo for cloned sheep as well, obviously. The logic is sound.

Oh, I knew you were going to enjoy that one.

Today I was asked by a client to do something both creepy and also illegal in multiple countries.

It was a great day.

I have been asked again, by the same person at the same client.

The request was a report of all employees who have more than 200 unread emails in their mailbox and how much over 200.

No.

"So how am I supposed to know who is behind in their work? Open all their emails? Please advise?"

I can't tell you how to manage your employees, but I can tell you that's a useless metric for basing anything from. I can also tell you "No.". You should also STEP DOWN AS THE CEO.

Vanykrye wrote:

Today I was asked by a client to do something both creepy and also illegal in multiple countries.

It was a great day.

Obviously you agreed to do it.

No, I didn't. *I* found it creepy.

Also, I don't have the level of access needed to furnish the client with the requested data. And I'm very happy for that to remain true.

Today I was asked by a client to do something both creepy and also illegal in multiple countries.

It was a great day.

On Wednesday I worked from 8am until 6:40am Thursday.

There will be whisky.

Mieko repeatedly escaped a muzzle the vet tried putting on her last week. A cone is no challenge for her.

Some people just need to be tied up and left in a car's trunk for a day or two.

What? Why are you looking at me like that?

I had a planned 5 day weekend but I'm stretching it to 6. It's ridiculous that I can drive 7000 miles in 11 days and be fine, but put me on a plane for 2000 miles each way and suddenly my body forgets that I'm supposed to be able to walk.

And said app will have the same robust security as using pasta as a door lock.

Back at the airport. Heading to Seattle.

I did ask a parent with a leashed kid if the child was feral. I got a confused look that I took for "don't know what that means". So I rephrased. Was your kid raised by woodland animals? Not housebroken yet? I'm confused why you need a leash on your kid. Does it also come with a bell on the harness?

I may have been more than a tad upset with this person. Spent more time posing for selfies in the grocery store than actually shopping or paying attention to...the world around them in a general sense...

Friend of mine doesn't understand what I do for a living.

I ran into a strange audio issue on 2 of the three PCs in the house. Minor annoyance, I'll get to it later.

He's trying to help me troubleshoot, unasked. He's just trying to be helpful, and he is a friend. I'm trying so hard not to tell him to just go away.

I made peach sourdough discard muffins for breakfast this morning. They were freaking amazing.

You mean AI made you some peach sourdough discard muffins for breakfast.

*Waves at NH*

Ouch TOZ. Been there. You have my sympathies.

Last time Mieko went to the vet it took three people to get a simple blood draw.

Mieko was twice as successful and sent two of them through the bite protocols and showed them how drawing blood is done professionally.

See Freehold? NH gives in to the Chaos Lords on occasion.

Sophie is at her new home.

Orthos and I are not doing well.

*Hugs*

Drove to Indianapolis for Sessanta v2 tour yesterday. That was one of the best concerts I've ever been to.

Sessanta = A Perfect Circle, Puscifer, and Primus. However, they do not each play a set with long breaks between bands. Nope. They weave in and out every few songs, no breaks, and eventually you start noticing different members playing in different bands...until eventually it just doesn't matter and everybody is on stage.

Then the unfortunate part was I chose to drive straight home. That wasn't best.

As a side note, not only is the highway through gran's town a giant construction zone, so is the next major town over...all the way through to the state line.

I almost stopped at a certain hotel on the way back, but I remembered it's Memorial Day weekend and it would take longer to find a room than it would to just drive the rest of the way home.

Scintillae wrote:

Yeah, I've already looked into the tax brackets, and if I've done my math right, we're still coming out ahead. My retirement was never going to be secure, even starting on my investing as early as I did. I really hate that my generation was raised with hope only to have it ripped away right as our careers were beginning.

You're talking to an early Gen Xer:

(1) "Social Security? It will be bankrupt well before you retire. And pensions were phased out in the 1970s. You're on your own."

(2) "Medicare? Don't make me laugh!"

(3) "Oh, you think we're doing a terrible job as your leaders? Well, just try to vote us out! Oh, look at that! There are too few of you! You'll *never* have leadership positions!"

And at least #3 has come true in spades. Check for Gen Xers at any level of government and we are grossly underrepresented. An article I saw last week was titled, "GenX: The biggest loser generation" and I was wondering how someone was going to shift the blame onto us, but the entire article was, "Before you complain about your generation, this is all the ways in which GenX was screwed over."

So yep. We're legendarily bitter.

You do not summon The Latchkey Kids unless you have no other choice. We live on the edge of the woods for a reason.

Sometimes you're just at a loss for words:

Customer: When I apply a filter to the search I see fewer results. This is really impacting my work and I'd like to know whether this is expected behavior.

I punted. "This is indeed how our application works. I'm sorry that's not working for you. Can you let us know what you expected?"

Surprising absolutely no one except likely the customer, I would have been somewhat less tactful.

"Yes, because that is, in fact, how filters work. It's the very definition of the word 'filter'."

Option 2:
"Right."

We are a terrible support group.

I was going to post a bunch of stuff about the problems caused by youth teams this weekend, but, frankly, it's so much that I feel like y'all might not believe me. Suffice to say, it really sucked and I'm glad that I didn't have to deal with it.

My mother, grandmother, mother's best friend, my ex-wife, my first ex-stepmom...all teachers.

Also there was a time I was in high school, and I know what we did.

I would believe you.

Also, we're starting to sound like a support group.

Stone-Baked Men isn't better either.

Today's gripe: Web pages that won't load unless they're active.

So, you go to your bank site. You sign in. You know it takes 30-40 seconds for the page to load so you go to a different tab. After a minute or two you go back to the bank tab. It hasn't done a thing because it won't load unless it's the active tab.

No! Bad coders! It's not "security" to prevent a page from loading when it's not active (unless Vanykrye corrects me about some exploit I don't know about), it's just forcing users to sit there while all your idiotic features I never use load.

EDIT: And it's a particular pain point for me because our new corporate UI uses the same "don't load unless active" mechanism, so I spend HUGE amounts of my day waiting on loading screens 'cause I can't switch to other applications while waiting.

That's usually not the web page. It's a newer feature of browsers, usually Chrome-based ones, to lower network bandwidth and memory usage.

It's intended to be used with people who routinely have multiple tabs open and they only look at a couple of them once every few hours or whatever. No need to auto refresh those tabs if the user is never looking at it. However, the initial page loading getting paused because you switched off would be a bit of an aggressive overreaction.

Random Dumb Old Man Crap

No need to be so melodramatic. Get your ass back in here.

It is impossible to hide food from a growing boy.

Interesting neighborhood situation

Will that fly in court, I wonder?

In my highly learned opinion, the clear answer is "Not a damned clue."

Welcome back, Dumbledore.

It is entirely possible that I'm working too much.

Don't even know how it got here.

Please just shoot me.

Vibe Coding

Extemp practice

Student: I'll go with the middle one. points to "Should drug cartels be on the list of international terrorist organizations?"
Me: Doing drugs today, got it. pause I cannot explain how much I wanted the principal to walk in for that.
Student: Oh, no...

One of Mom's students started claiming the tile mosaic floor was moving.

"You're either on drugs or you need to be."

We've got various counties in Illinois passing non-binding resolutions to secede and create their own state, as they feel Illinois politics is centered lopsidedly towards Chicago.

...

But...

Um...

Speaking as someone who does not live in the Chicago Metro Area...

Chicago and the surrounding suburbs is just shy of 75% of the state's population. Yeah, farm communities are important, and we need to have policies that help them, but 75% of our people are located in 10% of the state's counties. Something tells me there's a reason we focus on that part of the state more.

So...back to the secession idea...what exactly are you going to do for an economy, tax base, etc, etc, etc as your own state? Genuinely curious if anybody has logically thought that one through beyond "I hate Chicago".

Yesterday afternoon I had to drive out to Chillicothe. They were hearing a "chirping" noise and they thought it was coming from the server or UPS.

I get there, and the person who sits near the server gives me a list of all the times it went off. They are not on a regular interval.

I hear it, pretty sure it came from the server. Which is really odd. Really, really odd. Three little buzzy beeps. Not like a dryer buzz, but pitched almost like a bad electronic cricket.

I test the alarm on the UPS just to make sure. Definitely not that.

This stuff is under a desk, so I check all the drawers and boxes around, just in case it's some other device. Don't find anything.

I log into the server and start combing through the logs. Nothing looks wrong.

I note the times when I hear it beep. On the last one I noticed it went 4 times instead of 3. It hadn't done that before.

I let them know that I really don't know why it's "chirping" like this, but I'll do some more research and get back to them. About 3 hours spent driving and investigating. Also involved my boss because I was running out of ideas.

Today I spend 45 minutes on Google and go back through logs in case I missed something, and can only come up with some vague references that could be plausible, and let them know that to test the possibility I'd have to do a server reboot after hours and check some BIOS settings.

The boss from there emails me back.

They found that someone had hidden an electronic device to the underside of the desk that makes the noise.

I've never tried to knock someone out cold. Seems like a fine line between that and manslaughter. Plus, what's the point of all the speed work I've been doing the past couple years if not to enable a quick getaway from shenanigans?

Nah, it takes surprisingly little effort to knock someone out. And if the line is crossed, well, they were just as likely to be overcome by the cuteness of the dog and faint, resulting in the same outcome. Absolution.

Yes. I'm certain that's how this works.

Yeah, I would have simply knocked the owner out cold and calmly walked away with the dog. You're expending way too much energy.

When did Amtrak take over your rail system?

I'm driving with a pound of frozen haggis in a bag on my passenger seat.

Amazing what people will do just turn off that passenger airbag light.

Sometimes, learning raises more questions than it answers.

Google provided a remarkably informative video on the difference between passwords and passkeys. The HUGE difference I never saw usefully explained before is that the passkey is a huge cryptographic mess you never see -- when you're using your PIN or your thumbprint to sign in, that's NOT the passkey, that's giving your device permission to send the passkey.

So, video's great. I understand why passkeys are significantly more secure than passwords. But then...
...why does Global Megacorporation also implement an authenticator app?

So I've gone from, "Go to a corporate site, put in my password, get a code texted to me, put in the code, sign in," to, "Go to a corporate site, put in my PIN, get a notification on my authenticator app that there's an attempt to access my account, approve the attempt, sign in."

It's no easier for me, and I really don't understand the purpose of the authenticator app -- if someone's using my phone's passkey, they're already signed in to my phone, so they can just bring up the authenticator app as well.

Seems like a useless extra step to me...

Vany?

If it's all being done from the phone then the authenticator app isn't particularly useful.

If you're inputting the passkey on a different device...like a laptop...and then the auth process hits the authenticator app on the phone...well that's the way it should work.

Passkeys are supposed to be device specific. Which is where passkeys will ultimately fail as people get lazy and use their bank PIN for everything.

I know Vany will feel this across the void:

Far Too Many Admins

Erm...they want to make the default user an admin?

No.

I have spoken.

It should have been caught with a home inspection at the time of sale.

Email migrations are the spawn of Evil.

I had a teacher that threw chalkboard erasers at us. He was also the baseball coach.