A random musing….
Posted by phlll in Uncategorized on February 24, 2010
Somehow, I’m not sure a cartoon propane tank holding fire is quite the image this company would want to portray.
Or maybe I’m wrong.
APC Battery Fun!
So we had a couple UPSes die back in the summer. No big deal, we just migrated the servers off of the affected UPSes onto others. We looked at the batteries, but didn’t have anything in stock to replace them.
Saddened but unbroken, we shoved the old batteries back into the UPSes so we wouldn’t trip over them. Then we finally ordered some new battery units after a couple incidents of really nasty weather (although a new power generator is due to be installed soon.)
Today they finally came in. But for some reason, I couldn’t get the old tray out of our 1400XL.
Not being one to allow a UPS to tell me who the boss is, I yanked until it came out, placing my feet on the rack and tugging. I’m sure it would have looked great to anyone wandering down the hall.
And soon I saw why it was so hard to remove… because we all could have died.
And maybe if we didn’t all tragically die in a fire due to overheating batteries and electrical fires, they still could have exploded and sprayed acid all over the place. It would have eaten through the walls of the server room (or our flesh) and smelled really bad. Like rotten egg bad, or burn-victim bad.
Remember all those warnings about not overcharging batteries? It looks like the battery people aren’t just blowing smoke with this one. They actually will swell up.
In fact, one of the batteries may actually be a little weepy. Of course, that could be from the nasty gouge the lower-right battery got from the UPS frame.
Displaying my inner geek.
A few months ago we decided to have some fun with our intern Scooter.
He’d been mocking us with a “Max Headroom” wallpaper. He’s too young to remember “Max Headroom: Twenty Minutes Into The Future”. And by “too young”, I mean “he wasn’t born yet.” He just didn’t realize how good that show was, at least to a teenaged geek.
So I decided to teach him a gentle lesson by changing his wallpaper. While I could have done something like copying all the files on his computer to his desktop, I wanted to be nice. Nice is just changing his wallpaper so that he isn’t looking at Max Headroom anymore.
A few simple changes to the WindowsXP graphic (to make it WinpwndXP) and a simple registry edit and we were all ready to go. Scooter came into work and fired up his PC. We watched anxiously, and….
Max Headroom showed up.
Puzzled, I dug into the registry. Everything looked fine. I changed it on mine, and the wallpaper changed, but it wasn’t working on his! Puzzled, my coworker and I decided to just berate Scooter instead. He has no relevant work experience and badly needed a haircut. That was enough to entertain us. The wallpaper change prank was forgotten.
Until today.
Another coworker mentioned someone with the same name as Scooter had issues with a wallpaper he couldn’t change. One that says “Winpwnd”, coincidentally enough. He thought another computer geek was pranking him, and was waiting for months for the other geek to say something.
At least now I know it worked. And that Max Headroom still rules.
Fingernails
Our dog Hoot has needed an e-collar (those lampshade things) for a while now. Like me, he has a problem with gnawing on his fingernails. Or claws. You know what I mean. We take it off, and he goes back to the chewing. The vet isn’t sure what’s going on, but none of the drugs are as effective as not letting him get to his feet.
Hoot also has a fascination with eating dirt, or at least smearing it all over his lampshade. Then he comes inside and bumps into stuff, leaving black marks on walls, furniture, and the fiancee. This drives her insane, because she feels I’m not checking the ridge of the e-collar for mud. I wipe the collar off with a paper towel, but the dog is very tricky and (probably) hides mud under his toungue until he gets past me. Then he spits it onto the collar and smears it everywhere.
It isn’t out of the question that Hoot would be this clever. Our other dogs are actually able to hold grass and mud in between their toes and sneak it into the house. I’ve seen it happen, even after I carefully clean their paws.
However much I try to convince Mags of this, she just says I’m being inattentive to details. That isn’t true though. I seldom forget a dog when I let them go outside to pee. Maybe it helps that they bark at the neighbors, but I still get them back inside. I tell her that should count for something. She disagrees. She thinks that if you sometimes forget that a dog is afraid of thunder and you leave him outside during a storm, somehow this proves that you will forget to make sure a child is wearing shoes before you send them to school.
Since I’ve only ever watched nieces and nephews, I think it’s way too early to be assuming that level of dereliction from me. Give me a chance to prove my neglect!
I promise I won’t disappoint.