All posts by rbowen

Tabor Hills “demi-red”

Possibly the worst wine I have ever tasted, bar none. It had no vintage, so, for all I know, it could have been stored poorly, and could have been way past its prime. Assuming it ever had one. It smelled of wild onions and rotten green onions, and it tasted of candied prunes, with an aftertaste of candied grapefruit. Eww, eww, eww.

Touchtone dialing on Palm?

It’s very obvious to me, and has been since I originally got a Palm device, that the address/phone book application should let you hold the palm up to a touch tone phone, and make the beeps to dial for you. Now that Palm devices have really nice speakers, this is even more obvious.

Yet I can’t find any software, at any price, that does this. The apps that claim to do touchtone dialing don’t actually do this through the speaker, but seem to assume that you have a modem attached, or that it’s a Treo or similar Palm/Phone thingy.

This is aggravating. Seems like a *very* simple thing, but I don’t have the Palm software fu to do it myself.

Bah.

Skills test

I’m sure that one of these days I’ll get in trouble for posting stuff about my job. I was thinking about this today at work. What would my employer think if he saw some of the stuff that I’ve posted? I expect that it would seem juvenile, and perhaps he’d be upset that I didn’t just approach him about it to start with. I guess, while I find many aspects of my employment to be annoying, overall, I’m glad to have a job, and I try to do it as best as I am able. And I try not to rock the boat in such a way as to terminate that employment.

But I figure I have to finish the story, and not leave folks hanging, right?

The Engineer Skills Test was heavily Microsoft- and Cisco-centric, and so I came away from it feeling that I was utterly without skills. The questions in other areas, I was at least able to make intelligent guesses, or make stuff up, or at least write what would be my troubleshooting steps. But a number of the Windows questions required that you know The Right Answer to some arbitrary “how many” or “what are they called” question, which could not possibly be guessed at.

The stuff in the Unix section was pretty basic for me. The stuff in security required theoretical knowledge that I just don’t have. And the networking, I was able to guess, calculate, or remember (I think) almost all of it.

So perhaps I scored as high as a 50%. It wasn’t an ego-boosting event, to say the least.

Darned weather

It’s like Kentucky just can’t tolerate more than one nice day in a row. Saturday, top down, sunburned nose. Sunday, nasty, rainy, and getting cold. This morning, 36 and raining.

Monthly staff meeting

Tomorrow is our monthly staff meeting, and I’m alread braceing myself for it. The purpose of the meeting, as near as I can tell it, is to lower the morale of the employees. We’re told about all the bad stuff that happened over the last month, and then carefully told how it’s our fault. And what additional duties will be added to us in order to fix the problems.

I’ve gotten to the point where I show up, tune out, and play games on my Palm.

This month, because several people were late last month, the meeting has been made 15 minutes earlier. Because, obviously, if people have trouble making it by 7:45, 7:30 is going to be easier.

Yeah. I’m looking forward to work tomorrow.

Oh, yeah, I forgot one. After the meeting, I get to take an Engineer Skills Test. I’ve been there a year, and now I get to take a test to see if I have the necessary skills to have the job. I can hardly wait.

SMTP simple open relay testing

I got fed up with telnetting to mail servers to test for open relays, so I found this today. I knew that there had to be something like that out there, and had just been too lazy to go look. But the third time I had to do this by hand, it was in fact lazier to go look for the script to do it for me.

More frustrations

I suppose that my morning wasn’t quite frustrating enough.

I went to the post office to pick up a registered letter – from the IRS, of course, probably telling me that I hadn’t paid my taxes – and waited for nearly 30 minutes while the clerk looked for it. And she could not find it.

Then I arrived at work nearly an hour later than usual, to discover that the customer visit that I thought was scheduled for today is in fact tomorrow.

Some days, it doesn’t pay to chew through the leather straps.

“Automated” my big toe

I’ve just spent an hour navigating “automated” phone menus, and websites, and have accomplished nothing. I wanted to pay my outstanding taxes, but was completely unable to accomplish this, and was unable to talk to a real live person to assist me to achieve this goal. I’m so frustrated and angry (not to mention late for work) that it’s given me a throbbing headache. So because a pack of morons (four different companies, by the way) can’t get their technology to work, I’m going to be socked with yet more fines and interest. I’m about ready to drive to the IRS office in Cincy and pay with pennies.