Some of you may have seen my post about Nazca Solutions from a couple weeks back. The issue is now public. See County still waiting for Mondale’s software.
Political connections used to sell vaporware
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Tag Archives: computers
A busy weekend
Friday evening I spent a lot of time configuring two Linux systems here at home. It may be a reaction from having to work with MS Windows at my day job. I am actually very pleased with what I can do with a Linux 2.6 kernel and the XFCE desktop environment, even on a P-III system.
Saturday our big event was seeing Tom. He is doing well. He has lost some weight, or at least it has been redirected from horizontal to vertical. We took him for a walk around Lake Calhoun (SW Minneapolis) and had to work a lot to keep his pants from falling down. He is doing well. We did this in the morning. A good call, because the rain came in after lunch.
Today we went down to Albert Lea. The setup for colgaffneyis big event there next weekend was scheduled for today, but because of stormy weather it was severely cut back. The last 40 miles driving into Albert Lea were quite scary. We got our tent almost completely set up before twolodge arrived with the corporate trailer. After that the big project was to set up the tavern tent, reinforce it with storm stakes and ropes, and then park the trailer in it for further setup later this week. A lot got done, but it was quite tiring.
Note to self
I actually knew this, but thought I could get away with a few small changes….
Do not ever, under any circumstances, use Microsoft Word as an HTML editor! It will take a clean and simple page, bloat it by an order of magnitude, and make it less portable to the viewer, and far less understandable to the maintainer at the same time.
If you have to use a Microsoft product, use Notepad. It does not have a lot of features, but at least it is honest about what it is doing to your work.
Busy day at work
It always is, the first business day after one of these server replacements. Several minor glitches surfaced, but we could cope with all of them, and none of them made me feel stupid because I had forgotten something obvious. One was an actual Microsoft problem, but a quick look at Google found the answer. Another was mysterious at first, but turned out to be an issue with the PATH environment variable–which of two executable programs with the same name should be used? The classics never go out of style :-)>
There were a couple of totally unrelated problems that landed on my desk, simply because the people who would normally have dealt with them were out. One got a lot of management attention–manually fixing some data because the application did not have the appropriate code in place. That should not happen. However I coped with it and everything else, and when I walked out of the building at the end of the day I realized I was smiling.
Success!
It worked. The most complicated and highest risk computer task I have ever been responsible for. Continue reading
Calm before the Storm
After that scramble yesterday at work to prepare for tomorrow’s server move I have nothing to do there. Everything has to wait until tomorrow. So I have today to myself, except for such household chores as need doing.
Better Now
It was quite a scramble, but Sunday’s server move is back on track. Everything that can be done in advance is complete. I may yet make it to Big Island.
Protected: Getting some attention
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The weekend
What I love about my job
From an e-mail about something I did this morning:
I did not expect that Glenn would have had the time to play Super DBA and get it out there so fast. Seriously… somebody needs to get that guy a cape.
From Hilbert Space to Dilbert Space, and beyond 