Apple’s official suggestion to customers in response to this problem was to pickup the Apple III system and drop it onto a desk to reseat the chips temporarily.

If you’re a total computer nerd, Apple III Chaos: What Happened When Apple Tried to Enter the Business Market will be a pretty enjoyable article.

Let me tell you a story
Conclusive, based on fact
Long ago in the morning
She left did not come back
I don’t really care anymore
I don’t really care anymore
Change the days into nights
And you will know when the feeling is right
This tale is too long
The plot is weak and the characters wrong
I don’t really care anymore
I don’t really care anymore
But she changed my life
I thought she loved me
And I will pray for you
You’ll see the truth
Cause that’s how it’s got to be
Oh oh oh yeah ooh
Let me tell you a story
About the way she was
Let me tell you a story
About the way she was

I received authorization to order a new, totally sweet laptop last Monday. As of today, I still don’t posses it. It sits, as it has for the last three days, in a UPS warehouse in North Haven. How it arrived there is a rather boring if incredibly frustrating story. It does however illustrate just how the practice of rhyming their name with hell really is.

1. Our sales rep, quit. To become a priest. Seriously. No one told us. Not surprisingly at this time, he stopped responding to emails and phone calls, however his voice mailbox and e-mail account remained active. Thus 3 days passed before we got angry enough at them to call someone else.

2. The person we eventually called became our new rep. He is both new to us, and apparently his job as well. It took him another 2 days to get a quote to us. He refused to sell us stuff at the home user price advertised on the website and instead said we must pay a considerably inflated “corporate” price, for different machines altogether. Because we apparently cannot buy home user machines, since we’re a company, even if it’s what we want. His manager didn’t seem to agree though, and after several hours on the phone and several days wasted, the laptops were supposedly on the way.

-The weekend goes by-

3. Monday morning the shipping announcement arrived in our email. The new rep decided a good idea would be to look through our account history, and pick out an address we used for 1 PC roughly 8 months ago…and ship our laptops to that address, rather than the main delivery address on the account. The fact that the most recent 48 machines were sent to our current correct address didn’t seem to both him. Clearly we wanted these laptops shipped to a ghetto in Middletown.

4. A talk to our rep’s supervisor’s supervisor resolved this…or so we thought. We were told the next day (now Tuesday of this week) that our laptops were back at the distribution center and that we should have them the next day.

5. We didn’t get them Wednesday. Instead, we checked the tracking and learned that they were waiting at the North Haven distribution center for customer pickup, at the request of the customer. We called the vendor again. We were told that we should ignore this odd tracking status and that they would be delivered on Thursday at the absolute latest.

6. They weren’t here today, they were still sitting in North Haven, with the same tracking status. Everyone at the vendor swears up and down that they will be arriving tomorrow “by the end of the business day”. So we’ll see. But I HATE them…oh so very, very much.

The vendor has taken the minimally thoughtful action of discounting the cost of shipping, and giving us a $40 dollar credit because they are oh so concerned with our happiness. I’d be happier if I had my laptop, but I guess I can survive. But holy hell has this company gone to shit. They are just getting too big to handle their business. They used to have good phone support, and would actually be capable of getting their shit together enough to deliver two fairly stock model laptops within two weeks when you pay for expedited shipping, now instead you just receive a comedy of errors.

We did however, place another order for even more equipment from them today…because they just have better deals and good equipment for the price. But damn do I wish there was a serious alternative.

“Dude, yer going to hell!”

Here is something you should really look into.

It will make your life much happier.

Tribers - I have it..if you need it, let me know and I’ll load it into your Wordpress folders. All you’ll need to do is activate it in your plugin page.

Time is a precious commodity, especially if you’re a system administrator. No other job pulls people in so many directions at once. Users interrupt you constantly with requests, preventing you from getting anything done. Your managers want you to get long-term projects done but flood you with requests for quick-fixes that prevent you from ever getting to those long-term projects. But the pressure is on you to produce and it only increases with time. What do you do?

Here’s a great link about how to manage your time better.

It’s the author of Time Management For System Administrators, Thomas A. Limoncelli, giving a talk about the book and sharing some of the ideas from it. While the title implies that it is for system administrators specifically, I feel it’s quite applicable to anyone in a computer technology field.

Maybe that’s because in my job, like many I expect, I may do system administration, but I also do many other things in many other realms.

Anyway…read it. It’s good, and quite helpful.

Check out this retarded piece of shit article.

Can the author even be serious? Witness the insanity:

It’s hard to argue with a half billion incentives. But — aside from cash — it’s hard to see what satellite could do for Stern that podcasting couldn’t do better. If his primary motivation for ditching traditional radio wasn’t money but escape from the FCC’s censors, as I believe it was, the Internet would have been a better choice, hands down.

How about, letting him have an audience besides nerdy tech people? People primarily listen to Stern in their car where satellite radio works well, and is also far cheaper than any form of I-Pod or Mp3 player.

And that’s beside the point, because anyone who listens to Stern, knows that he was leaving because he was fed up with radio all together, and was going to retire because it wasn’t fun for him anymore. Then Sirius made an offer to him, told him he wouldn’t be censored at all, and he thought about it and decided that might make it fun again, so he did it. (And boy has it made his show fun again!) Sure he also got a lot of money, but the money was hardly necessary or motivating considering he could have lived out his life filthy rich even if he had just quit when his contract with Infinity expired.

Dumbass Tech Writer continues:

Podcasting’s reach now dwarfs traditional terrestrial radio, which in turn towers over satellite. Next to podcasting, even Infinity, the national network that formerly carried Stern’s show, looks like my old college radio station (before it added a podcast, that is).

Read that again: “Podcasting’s reach now dwarfs traditional terrestrial radio”. Asphinctersayswhat? How is that new batch of crack going, dude? I really think this is a case of a tech writer getting so caught up in his own hype that, well, he says a bunch of really stupid things. Let’s see here, in the world do you suppose there are more people with radios than computers? Yes. Are there certainly more people that listen to radios than have the high speed Internet connections required for podcasting? Yes. My point is made.

To be fair, Stern claims Sirius is trying to offer an online stream of his show, but even then, there’ll be no way to subscribe to it in a downloadable format. The promised stream will be delivered via a Sirius receiver, so it won’t be available in a readily consumable form.

Except by, oh, say, listening to it. Or hey, since it’s already plugged into your stereo, or in my case, my computer…you can use this simple piece of software called a “sound recorder” and store it forever. Except, it is LIVE the first time you listen to it, and you can call in and interact with the show. Such things frequently happen on Howards show, where he will be talking about someone, and they will hear it and call in. That doesn’t quite work with podcasting.

He goes on to talk about how it’s too bad that podcasters aren’t live, and that that is indeed a disadvantage compared to either terrestrial or satellite radio. A big one in fact. One that makes it absolutely not similar in any way.

Podcast producers could let listeners enter a lottery (perhaps by text message); the first thousand winners would get to hear the show in real time for five minutes, live, over their cell phones, with the potential to be chosen to have their call be patched onto the “air.”

Because that doesn’t totally sound like it would suck or anything. Wow, I won the lottery and I get 5 minutes of live talk show, on my cell phone…and I might even get to say something. Yeah…that’s pretty much just like listening to a live talk show.

As for getting the show to users without computers, Stern could have set the wheels in motion to distribute his show via Wi-Fi hotspots to simple, inexpensive MP3 players (possibly even privately labeled as a Howard Stern Cube or something of the sort). It’s not a perfect solution, but neither is making people pay $100 plus $10 per month to listen to a show that was free a few weeks ago.

Not a perfect solution at all. In fact, in my business we would call that a horrendously cludgey, bound to fail, non-solution. Furthermore, the show that used to be free and shared the same name, was a different show. Not to mention Sirius has good enough programming to make it worth the price even without Howard. And not all the sirius units cost $100, as it even says else where on the page…there are cheaper ones available all over the place…making the author seem a bit disingenuous.

I could go on to point out all the stupid things about this article, but I won’t bother. Just read it for yourself. There is at least one stupid, if not downright insane statement in pretty much every paragraph.

I’ve said it before, but I hate the term podcasting. Podcasting for one, does not require an I-Pod. I liked it better when it was called Audio Blogging. Because that is indeed what it is. Put an MP3 on your blog, and people syndicate it with RSS. Big fucking deal. It is not a breakthrough. There is no reason to get all excited about it. And there is definitely no reason to claim that it now “has a bigger reach” than radio. The only bigger reach podcasting has is the one up the authors ass, where he pulls these crazy thoughts from before writing them down in Wired.

As a comment on the articles page reads, “take the white buds out of your ears and join the real world for a while.”

So I caved in and finally went with Sirius because of Howard Stern.

I was pleasantly suprised to find a ton of really good stuff besides Howard on there.

Pure Jazz 72 is a great channel. It’s exactly what you would want from a really good commercial free jazz station. It’s been playing in my office constantly for the last two days.

You also get 24 hour a day BBC news and NPR. No bullshit during midday. There’s actually 2 NPR stations, one that is constant news, and one that is their talk shows playing all day long.

It’s FUCKING AWESOME. Everyone should get Sirius. I’ve pretty much filled all my presets…and there are a lot of presets. On regular radio…I filled 3 of them…and one of the 3 was the dead air station I use to channel my IPOD into my radio. (I now also use it to channel the Sirius receiver into my radio.)

Anyhow…it’s awesome as all hell. That is all.

Ok - I’m posting this here so that I don’t forget how I did this again. It just took me about 2 hours to figure out what had changed.

If you notice my blog archives over to the right…when you click on one it takes you to the archive page for that month, and shows the oldest post first. The navigation links at the top and bottom then make sense “Next Entries” take you forward in time, previous entries take you back…and the individual posts are listed chronologically down the page, rather than in the main blog structure where to newest post is at the top, and them reverse chronological down the page. I like it much better this way. The stock way is totally retarded.

Anyhow…in the interests of remembering how to do this next time I upgrade I’ll outline the procedure, as I have to make a change to a core file that gets overwritten during upgrade.

First, you must have a permalink structure set up. I just took the default one, and after hassling with my .htaccess file for awhile, got it working.

Now my links to the archives are like this:

http://www.thetribalunderground.net/brightness/2005/04/

Instead of like this:

http://www.thetribalunderground.net/brightness/?m=200504

This is important as the old, non-permalink way will not allow the next step to work.

Then, I went in to ‘../wp-include/template-functions-general.php’ and edited the “get_archives_link” function, and added “?order=asc” just after the ‘$url’ sections of each line, so that now the archive links all look like this:

http://www.thetribalunderground.net/brightness/2005/04/?order=asc

The only other thing you need to do is edit your archive template in your theme, and reverse the navigation links, as they will now do the opposite of what you expect. For instance, the “previous entries” link will now take you forward in time, rather than to a previous time.