ramblings of a {sys,net}admin…

Hillary Clinton and her driver were cruising along a country road one evening when suddenly an ancient cow appeared in front of the car. The driver tried to avoid it but couldn’t — the aged bovine was struck and killed. Hillary told her driver to go up to the farmhouse and explain to the owners what had happened. She stayed in the car making phone calls to lobbyists.

About an hour later the driver staggered back to the car with his clothes in disarray. He was holding a half-empty bottle of expensive wine in one hand, a rare Cuban cigar in the other, and was smiling happily, smeared with lipstick.

“Oh my! What happened to you!?” asked Hillary.

“Well,” the driver replied, “the farmer gave me the cigar, his wife gave me the wine, and their beautiful twin daughters made passionate love to me!”

“My God, what did you tell them?” asked Hillary.

The driver replied, “I just stepped inside the door and said, ‘I’m Hillary Clinton’s driver and I’ve just killed the old cow’”.

Anyone know if it’s possible to pair up a Blackberry Pearl with a MacBook over Bluetooth in order to get online?

I can do this pretty easy with XP and have managed to get it to work under Ubuntu Linux after casting some ancient African spells, but once my MacBook gets here that’ll be irrelevant. I don’t have a need to do that very often, but occasionally it comes up so I thought I’d ask while I’m thinking of it.

Have any of you been able to link up your Pearl with OS X over Bluetooth in order to get online? Thanks!

A few weeks ago, eWeek ran an article by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols entitled “Cheap Laptops Bad for Vista, Good for Linux“. In the article, he talks about the number of cheap laptops that people are buying up that aren’t capable of running Vista — but are quite capable of running Linux just fine.

Working in IT at an .edu, this is something I’m all too familiar with. I wish our Help Desk had kept count of how many students had come to them for assistance with their cheap laptops running Vista. I remember just a year or two ago and we were aghast at people who were running XP on laptops with only 256MB of RAM. Now it’s Vista laptops with just 512MB of RAM that we’re seeing.

Last Friday, someone poked their head into my office to let me know that a man and woman I knew wanted to talk to me. When I went out to talk to them a few moments later, it was the same thing I’ve heard countless times before. They had a laptop running Vista and were having issues. Besides the usual “it’s slow” routine, they said it had become completely unusable after the latest round of Windows Updates (the neverending “reboot, BSOD, reboot, BSOD” cycle). The laptop had came with Vista and they suffered through it up until this point. I knew what was coming and I tried to avoid it, but I finally gave in. I told them I’d blow it away and install XP for ‘em.

I learned a long time ago never to accept payment from friends because when their laptops screw up again, they’ll expect you to fix it again — for free, of course. Since this was late in the afternoon on a Friday and I had plans for the evening, I gave ‘em the “I’ll do it, but I can’t promise when I’ll have it done” spell. That was fine with them; the laptop was useless anyways.

When I finally got around to working on it, I watched it boot up and was surprised — I don’t know why — to see it was a 1.7GHz Pentium Mobile sporting a whopping 512MB of RAM. Who in their right mind would try to run Vista on that!? Anyways, long story short, I blew away Vista, reinstalled XP, got it back to ‘em and they’re happy as hell — the laptop is running faster than it ever has.

Now, back to the eWeek article… Vaughan-Nichols goes on to talk about how any modern Linux distribution (such as Fedora) will run great on these laptops, and he’s right. Every since I started using Linux over 10 years ago, it’s been possible to run it on hardware that Windows would choke on. I get better performance from my much slower Linux machines than I do from my better equipped XP machines, and I’m much more demanding of the Linux machines.

I’d love to convince these people to use Linux instead of Windows, but I just can’t. To do that would be to volunteer myself to be their first line of “tech support” and I just don’t have the time for that. These people aren’t interested in tinkering with their PCs, they just want ‘em to work.

Ironically, that’s one of the reasons I’ve never been a big fan of “Linux on the desktop”. All that tinkering is great for a while, but it gets old pretty quick. I used to love to constantly tweak my Linux machines, always downloading, compiling, and rebooting into the latest kernel just moments after it was released. Once I started having real work to do, however, I cut that out. Now, like most consumers, I just want my computers to work so that I can get my work done.

That’s one of the reasons I just ordered a MacBook…

According to FedEx, there is a MacBook for me somewhere in China. Unfortunately, I imagine it won’t arrive until Wednesday at the earliest. =(

w00t!

According to the “Apple Order Status” page, my new MacBook’s status has changed to “Prepared for Shipment” within the last few hours. Of course, that’s little consolation when I was told on Tuesday that it was “ready to ship”. Oh well, whatever. If it goes out Friday (the 21st), there’s still a chance it’ll make it here Monday, in time for Christmas. crosses fingers

Do you love boobs? If you’re like me, you sure do.

If you could save a pair of boobs with just a few seconds of your time, would you? If you’re like me, you sure would.

Alright, well check this out…

“The Breast Cancer Site provides a feel-good way to help promote awareness of breast cancer and provide free mammograms for women in need every day — through easy and quick online activities.

With a simple, daily click of the pink “Click Here to Give - it’s FREE” button at The Breast Cancer Site, visitors help to provide free mammograms for women in need. Visitors pay nothing. Mammograms are provided by our charitable partners.”

All you have to do is, once a day, go to thebreastcancersite.com and click the pink button that says “Click Here to Give — it’s FREE!”. That’s it, it’s that easy.

thebreastcancersite.com is paid for by sponsors, and for every 45,000 clicks accumulated, a woman somewhere gets a free mammogram.

Please help support a pair of boobs (get that pun?) and click. Even if you just do it this once, you’re helping out. The boobs you save just might be your own (or your favorite pair)!

Oh, and feel free to send images of your favorite pair. =)

Well, it’s a long story but basically I had to start over on my Apple order.  Kinda.  The original order had to be cancelled and then I had to submit a new order (via purchase order this time), but at least they already had the MacBook configured how I wanted it.

The last Apple person I spoke to said it’s already been configured and is “ready to ship”, but it may not actually ship until as late as December 24th (next Monday!).  Why that is I’m not really sure, I just wish they’d get it here!

I mentioned yesterday that on Friday I ordered a MacBook from Apple. Later that evening, I called back and asked if I could upgrade the shipping. The Apple representative that I talked to (I have his name and e-mail, but I’ll keep that to myself for now) told me sure and gave me the price. I gave him the credit card number and we hung up. Problem solved, right?

Not so fast… I called back a few minutes ago because I still haven’t received any type of order confirmation or receipt. Since this was purchased on a company credit card, I sorta need that. This time, I spoke to a helpful woman named Emily. Emily pulled up the order and let me know that the representative who took my order was “an idiot”. Apparently, the MacBook is coming from overseas and, according to Emily, there’s no way they can ship it overnight. In addition, due to the closings of various schools (I work for an .edu), they’re “putting a hold” on their orders until after Christmas.

I’m not sure what that means entirely, other than it doesn’t look like I’ll be getting familiar with the new MacBook over the Christmas holiday. That kinda upsets me, to be honest — probably much more than it should, but I want my new toy now! =)

I’m gonna close my office door and cry now. =)

Just a heads-up… I moved the blog’s RSS feed over to FeedBurner (RSS feed here). Using the WordPress plugin provided by FeedBurner, everything should just work. I was able to subscribe to the feed using Google Reader, but please let me know if you run into issues. Thanks!