mike says things sometimes

You’re awesome.

 

Love,

Able-X

So I’m sitting here thinking “hmm, I think I’ll go play portal on my PC”.  So I meander my way over to it, and notice the lights are on, but no one is home.  Specificially, the PC lights are on, and the blue LED in my usb wireless card are on, but none of the fans are spinning and there’s no noise at all.  Normally this thing is noisy as hell since it’s PC that used to be a server, with multiple SCSI disks and the whole bit.

So I’m all “oh shit” and try to turn the power off.  I hold the button in, no dice, won’t turn off.  So I unplug it.  Lights are still on.  WTF.  I turn off the power supply switch.  Lights are STILL on.  WTF?  I even unplug the monitor, and the led’s are still on.  So I’m like “ok, uber capacitors or something”.  It’s been 5 minutes now, and the lights are STILL on, and it’s kinda creepin’ me out, cause there’s no electricity hooked up.

Seriously.  WTF?.

Via lifehacker.com

I’ve been messing around with a way to mark my thumb drive so it will (maybe) be returned if I lose it. Chances are, I won’t actually “lose” it; I will leave it at the house of a friend or at work. But I want to get it back—ASAP—without having to call all over the universe to find it. Of course, the drive is encrypted so i don’t need to worry about data falling into the wrong hands. I only worry about having to rebuild EVERYTHING because I carry my life on my thumb drive.

After trying out a splash screen and a launch.bat file, Jill decided she wanted something simpler and more obvious. She says:

I decided to just label my drive something other than “Removable Disk” and add an eye-catching custom icon to it.

So I created a next text file in Notepad, typed the word:

[autorun]

And saved it to the root directory—the “main” area of your drive, not in a folder—as autorun.inf.

I chose a big yellow smiley face for my icon but any brightly colored, unusual icon will be easily noticed. I copied the icon to the root directory of my thumb drive and renamed it myicon.ico.

Then I opened my autorun.inf file and added this text:

icon = .\myicon.ico
label=My Name (mobile xxx-xxx-xxxx)

(Of course, you will substitute your name and your mobile number for the above text.) I saved the file and marked it “read only” and hid it (just as an added sense of security—a lot of people have not learned how to tweak their “Show hidden folders” settings and, thus, will not be tempted to delete or
edit the file.)

Once I unplugged and re-inserted my thumb drive, it looked like this:

As I’m working to consolidate the neat tips I find for a future wiki at work, here’s another neat one:

There is a feature in Windows XP and Vista that not many people know which can save you endless hours and it’s called pushd.

From the command-line if you type:

pushd \\someserver\someshare\somedirectory

Then Windows will automatically map a temporary drive to \\someserver\someshare, change to that drive, then change directory to somedirectory.

When you’re finished you can then type:

popd

Then Windows will change back to your original working directory and remove the mapped drive.

Here is an example:

C:\Temp\> pushd \\someserver\someshare\somedirectory
X:\somedirectory\> del somefile.txt
X:\somedirectory\> popd
C:\Temp\ >

Found at:

http://blog.bartholomew.id.au/2007/12/19/adhoc-mapping-of-network-drives

We are the keyboard cowboy…, originally uploaded by ABLE-X.

They needed a pic for work for this silly newsletter profile of the IT
department. So I sent in this pic for it. I also show one of our trade
secrets on how we solve problems…

Well, you’re not alone. Apparently the latest cumulative update from the 12th is causing ALOT of IE problems. Here at the office, we’ve had 2 sites affected so far, symptoms being IE 6 crashing on startup, or randomly crashing at various webpages.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/942615

That’s the troublemaker right there. If you go to add/remove programs, and remove update KB942615, it appears that the problems go away. This update is installed as part of windows automatic updates.

Here’s hoping MS gets a fix out for this soon, as this is gonna be a real freakin’ headache.

EDIT: don’t forgot to head over to windows update, select “custom”, and make sure to select “do not show this update again” for KB942615, otherwise it’ll just get pushed to your machine again next time it queries for updates.

I must have one of these

or hardly workin…

Here i sit, waiting out Microsoft time in my office. Do you have any idea how long it takes to copy a 200MB symantec installer folder across a VPN? This does not make for happy time. And apparently you’re expected to have Anti-virus on your servers and worksations…eh, who knew?

I believe the cold is finally making it’s way out of me, but my energy level is still in the shitter. I’m taking friday off, so I’ll have a day there to chill and get better, and maybe do some reading up with these IT books I downloaded. Or I’ll sit and watch Mythbusters….I think that’s far more likely.

I really hate microsoft time, it really has no bearing on reality. On the plus side of things, we’re getting closer to having all our sites on one domain finally, which means work gets easier, cause I don’t have to keep track of 4 domains, only 3, and one of those will be disappearing soon too, yay for a lightening work load!

end pointless ramblings for now while i await file copy

FYI, I’ve got a gnarly cold, so if I haven’t gotten to any music lately, it’s cause i’m in bed by like 8 at night hopped up on nyquil and shit.  It’s also making my throat really sore and I have very little energy, so I’ve just been sitting around reading and watching TV when I get home from work.

Did everyone else see Heroes finale? No spoiler here, but MAN was what Hiro did HARSH.

And I’ve made significant progress of converting my DVD’s to mp4 and boxing up the disks.  It’ll be slick as hell once it’s done, but I keep running out of hard drive space.  I was thinking about maybe getting a Wii if the Xmas bonus is decent, but I may end up buying more drive space instead.  I also need to pay down some debt, which I need to do more than I need a Wii.  Stupid life stuff.

On the plus side of things, I found an e-book reader for my blackberry, which should do nicely till the day comes that I can afford one of the slick e-ink devices.  Those things are cool, but damned expensive still.

Oh, and FYI, if you want a cheaper copy of Windows Vista (don’t know why you’d want it, but whatever) just make sure to pirate it first.  Now that SP1 is out, when you get flagged by WGA, it’ll offer you 50% off to buy a legit copy.  Go M$, way to think ahead.