DLand - Proper Attire Required

I went to put my room service tray out in the hall last night and muttered “dammit” as the door hissed closed and clicked behind me. I was in a hockey jersey. I was locked out of my room in a hockey jersey. So I wandered down the hall to the elevators. I passed the concierge lounge with a sign stating “proper attire required - shirt and shoes.” I was half in compliance.As the doors to the elevator opened a man's computerized voice commanded “going down.” I thought, “gee, but we just met.” A short trip down to the lobby led me to the front desk. Standing in line behind librarians and businessmen waiting to check in, I felt a little strange. But attitude is everything, so I tried to look nonchalant as I curled my toes in the plush carpet. Front Desk Lady: “Can I help you, ma'am?” Me: “Yes, I'm GenieAlisa and I'm in room 4227. I've locked myself out of my room.” Lady: “Ok, ma'am, do you have any photo id?” Me: “Um, look at me. I don't have pants. No, I don't have any photo id.” Lady: (leaning over counter) “Ah, I see. Well, if you just tell me your address, I'll get you a new room key.” Several addresses later (old home address, new home address, corporate address, other corporate address, AH OF COURSE - Dan's home address - obvious), I was back in my room safe and sound. And I'm thankful I decided to get dressed this morning before hopping online to work, since the window washers just came rolling by my window. I waved.

DLand - Possessed PCs and Pleasant Postal Proficiency

Never reboot your machine before you leave for five days. The results could be catastrophic.It seemed simple enough. I couldn't burn these three files to a cd. I was just going to reboot and see if life would be happy again. Not only could I not burn the files, but I couldn't even eject the blank cd from the drive or open Windows Explorer without the entire machine locking up. Gah! Kevin called for some tech support during his training session and I couldn't connect to anything. Took three minutes for a browser to open and five minutes to get my icons back on the desktop. That was all fine until it spontaneously rebooted again. What the hell? Tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment here and I couldn't get where I needed to when I needed it. And as soon as I hung up with Kevin, life was great again. Machine purred along like nothing happened. Fascinating. Bossman facetiously remarked, “if this were Linux, you wouldn't have these problems.” I scanned the desk for something to throw at him. I heard enough of that on our listserv the other day. On a cheery note, the man at the post office knows exactly where Joe lives since he grew up in Toronto (go Leafs, yo!). He even gave me the name of several coffee shops I should check out when I'm ever there (most of which I can't remember now). What is it with Canadians and coffee, eh? So unless customs finds my package too dangerous to enter the Great White North, be watching your mailbox, Joey. And cross your fingers that my machine will stay in one piece while I'm gone. I'm looking forward to a sort of vacation after all this prep work for the conference.

DLand - Barking Dogs

The little listserv we have for our software product has become a war zone this morning. I suppose a list populated by techie folks and librarians is a volatile mix. The current rant doesn't even have anything to do with libraries or our software but is this holy war over Unix versus Microsoft (save your breath; I don't want to hear anything about which is better).This one guy (one I've complained about months ago) has started personally attacking a systems librarian on the list. It's just insane. He said that the guy was obviously an idiot and knew nothing about servers and spent most of his job hours working on his personal business. The list moderator (my old boss and excellent guy) sent a note reminding folks to chill the hell out and then a private email to Butthead telling him that he probably shouldn't be flaming folks on the list and that it was pretty lame. Jerkwad writes back to the list to complain about the emails. The man has the maturity and intelligence of a squirrel (no offense to any squirrel readers I may have). It's like he's posting the equivalent of “I know you are but what am I” on our listserv. I'm getting very huffy with this dude. Gary was telling me about this neighbor he had that owned a dog that barked constantly. Dog Boy apparently left him outside all the time and the dog barked at any animal, human, vehicle or leaf in his path 24 hours a day. Gary decided to go talk to the guy about the dog (hehe, going to talk to a man about a dog ... giggle). Anyways, Dog Boy not only didn't understand why Gary came over to talk to him, he became enraged and nearly violent. He started talking badly about Gary's wife and they almost came to blows in the street. It was not pretty. Gary eventually called the cops a few weeks later about the dog and Dog Boy did move out. Of course, the man who moved in also owns an obnoxious barking dog. Gary says, however, he doesn't dare go over there and talk to him but just calls animal control. The point is that if Dog Boy didn't have the sense and concern to worry about not only his dog in the yard 24/7 but his poor neighbors who had to listen to this, then he wasn't going to “see the light” just because Gary went over to talk to him. You can't talk rationally with an irrationale person. You'll just sprain your brain. So I'm studiously avoiding sending anything to our listserv Unix zealot and hope that the poor guy he unjustifiably flamed will be able to control himself as well.