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Today is System Administrator Day, so I bring you this hilarious list as posted to Slashdot:

Getting the most from your IT department

1. When you call us to have your computer moved or fixed, be sure to leave it buried under half a ton of postcards, baby pictures, stuffed animals, dried flowers, bowling trophies and children’s art. We don’t have a life, and we find it deeply moving to catch a fleeting glimpse of yours.

2. Don’t write anything down. Ever. We can play back the error messages from here.

3. When an IT person says he’s coming right over, go for coffee. That way you won’t be there when we need your password. It’s nothing for us to remember 300 user passwords.

4. When you call the help desk, state what you want, not what’s keeping you from getting it. We don’t need to know that you can’t get into your mail because your computer won’t power on at all.

6. When IT support sends you an e-mail with high importance, delete it at once. We’re just testing.

7. When an IT person is eating lunch at his desk, walk right in and spill your guts right out. We exist only to serve.

8. Send urgent email all in uppercase. The mail server picks it up and flags it as a rush delivery.

9. When the photocopier doesn’t work, call computer support. There’s electronics in it. Ditto for the microwave, timeclock, and coffee maker. Hell, if it plugs in, we’re probably in charge of it anyway.

10. When you’re getting a NO DIAL TONE message at home, call computer support. We can fix your telephone line from here.

11. When you have a dozen old computer screens to get rid of, call computer support. We’re collectors.

12. When something’s wrong with your home PC, dump it on an IT person’s chair with no name, no phone number and no description of the problem. We love a puzzle.

13. When an IT person tells you that computer screens don’t have cartridges in them, argue. We love a good argument.

14. When an IT person tells you that he’ll be there shortly, reply in a scathing tone of voice: “And just how many weeks do you mean by shortly?”. That motivates us.

15. When the printer won’t print, re-send the job at least 20 times. Print jobs frequently get sucked into black holes.

16. When the printer still won’t print after 20 tries, send the job to all 68 printers in the company. One of them is bound to work.

17. Don’t learn the proper name for anything technical. We know exactly what you mean by “my thingy blew up”.

18. Don’t use on-line help. On-line help is for wimps.

19. If the mouse cable keeps knocking down the framed picture of your dog, lift the computer and stuff the cable under it. Mouse cables were designed to have 40lb of computer sitting on top of them.

20. If the space bar on your keyboard doesn’t work, blame it on the mail upgrade. Keyboards are actually very happy with half a pound of muffin crumbs and nail clippings in them.

21. When you get a message saying “Are you sure?” click on that Yes button as fast as you can. Hell, if you weren’t sure, you wouldn’t be doing it, would you?

22. When you find an IT person on the phone with his bank, sit uninvited on the corner of his desk and stare at him until he hangs up. We don’t have any money to speak of anyway.

23. Feel perfectly free to say things like “I don’t know nothing about that computer crap”. We don’t mind at all hearing our area of professional expertise referred to as crap.

24. When you need to change the toner cartridge in a printer, call IT support. Changing a toner cartridge is an extremely complex task, and Hewlett-Packard recommends that it be performed only by a professional engineer with a master’s degree in nuclear physics.

25. When you can’t find someone in the government directory, call IT Support.

26. When you have a lock to pick on an old file cabinet, call IT Support. We love to hack.

27. When something’s the matter with your computer, ask your secretary to call the help desk. We enjoy the challenge of having to deal with a third party who doesn’t know anything about the problem.

28. When you receive a 50MB movie file, send it to everyone as a mail attachment. We’ve got lots of disk space on that mail server.

29. Don’t even think of breaking large print jobs down into smaller chunks. Somebody else might get a chance to squeeze a memo into the queue.

30. When an IT person gets on the elevator pushing $100,000 worth of computer equipment on a cart, ask in a very loud voice: “Good grief, you take the elevator to go DOWN one floor?!?” That’s another one that cracks us up no end.

31. When you lose your car keys or go to lunch, send an email to the entire company. People down in Las Vegas like to keep abreast of what’s going on.

32. When you bump into an IT person at the grocery store on a Saturday, ask a computer question. We do weekends.

33. Don’t bother to tell us when you move computers around on your own. Computer names are just a cosmetic feature.

34. When you bring your own personal home PC for repair at the office, leave the documentation at home. We’ll find all the settings and drivers somewhere.

35. In no way do we believe that end-users are ungrateful. It hurts our feelings that one could even think such a thing on the basis of the above statements. In truth we wish to express our deepest gratitude to the hundreds of wonderful end-users portrayed herein, without whom none of this would have been remotely possible.

We truly love you, end-users, you spice up our lives no end.

Happy System Admin Day!

It seems like the past two weeks have dragged on like a hobbit pulling a tied-up cave troll through the Misty Mountains. The weekend can’t come soon enough, and it’s only Tuesday as I write this.

Lori has been working long hours. Her team at work has started their annual killer project a few months early and so it’s been pretty rough. She had to work all last weekend and I was stuck at home. I feel bad for her; she works 9 hour days to begin with and they expect her to come in on the weekend for a project. Ouch. I stayed home this weekend cleaning the house and catching up on some projects of my own. I have a few side programming tasks I’ve been working on so I got a chance to work on those.

To top off the frustrations of late working hours, I came home last Wednesday to a broken air conditioner. It was 94 degrees in the house making it very uncomfortable. My poor cats were in the house the entire day without any AC but they took it in stride. They were lounging around like nothing was wrong. At least they had plenty of water and cool tile to lay on.

I tried a bunch of troubleshooting tips like checking breakers, kicking the compressor, and I even replaced the thermostat but still I couldn’t get it working. The problem was the outside unit thingy (that’s a technical term) wouldn’t come on. The compressor inside the furnace was working just fine though.

We ended up calling a couple people to come and look at it, but they all wanted an exhausting amount of money to make a trip to Centerton after hours. So we suffered through a night of sweltering heat to save some money. I’m glad I did, too. The next morning we got Vista Heating and Air to come and look at it and they only charged us $60 to fix it. The problem was an electrical timing circuit in the outside unit that went bad. The technician had it up and running in 20 minutes. w00t!! Now the house is nice and cold.

Yesterday was another frustrating day. Lori called me around lunch time and she couldn’t get the Cavalier started. I had her check the connections to the battery, and the battery cable had a lot of corrosion on it and wasn’t connecting very well to the battery. She was able to get it running but after work we spent the evening replacing battery cables. That’s the first time I’ve ever done anything like that and I feel like I did a good job. I had to crimp a new pigtail connector on the ground cable and put a different connector on the end of the positive cable, but in the end the cables look nice and neat, with no exposed wires. The car now runs and seems pretty spunky.

Hopefully the rest of the week is a lot easier on us. I could use a break in the stress patterns life sends down the line. The weather has been cooler so maybe we can do some more Geocaching or just veg out in front of the TV.

The last two nights we treated ourselves to some fine, homemade Japanese cuisine. Well, the incredients and dishes are Japenese, but we sprinkled them with a little bit of our own flare to make things more interesting.

Monday night we started by making sushi. Makizushi, to be more accurate (maki = roll). Makizushi is made by placing a sheet of nori (dried seaweed) onto a bamboo rolling mat (also known as a makisu). Then you put a thin layer of sushi rice on it in the middle, and then add some fresh fish, fruits/vegetables, or whatever else you want. We used crab meat and fresh avacado. Once you get the ingredients on the rice how you want it, you use the makizu to help roll the nori to create a “log” of sushi. Then you use a very sharp knife to cut the roll into about 6 pieces (the nori can become quite hard to cut when it is moist).

We also made some temaki (hand rolls, or temakizushi) with the same ingredients. Yum! Temaki is prepared by rolling the nori into a conical shape instead of a tube. It looks like an ice-cream cone when you’re finished preparing it. You can see a rough picture of our creations on my moblog.

Along with the sushi Lori made some pork tonkatsu, which is pork loin cutlets beat thin, battered in special bread crumbs called panko, and deep fried. We served it with ponzu sauce, which is like soy sauce with a citrus taste. Normally its served with a special tonkatsu sauce, but we didn’t feel like making it.

Yesterday we made shiro miso soup, soba noodles, and chicken tempura. The miso soup was made from the dried “instant soup” packages you can get at Wal-Mart in the Asian food section. For the soba noodles we just boiled the noodles like spaghetti and served them with soy sauce and wasabi. The chicken tempura was just like fried chicken.

For dessert we had chocolate pocky, one of my favorite treats. I like to dip the sticks in peanut butter for an added taste.

That’s it for our Japanese cooking for a while. Later this week we’re going to switch gears from Japan to Thailand and cook some pad thai. Aren’t we cultured?

I’m not usually very blunt and forceful about things in the computing world, but I have to be this once, because Microsoft is asleep at the wheel: Stop using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser. That’s the big blue “E” you click on to view web sites, in case you didn’t know. MSN Explorer is just as bad. I’m dead serious about this and you should be concerned about what this software allows to happen on your system. Read this article on Slate (ironically owned by MSN) for more details.

Internet Explorer version 6 came out two years ago, and since then there have been no new major releases, but the online world has made leaps and bounds in web-browsing technology. Features such as tabbed browsing, automatic pop-up blocking, mouse gestures, extensible plugins and themes, and advanced privacy options are popping up in browsers such as Firefox, but Internet Explorer is lagging big time.

Not only that, but Internet Explorer doesn’t play by the rules. The standards for web design are set by a group called the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), who define exactly how the code should be written to make a web page look the same on all browsers. Browsers such as Mozilla, Firefox, and Opera do their best to meet (or exceed) these standards, but Microsoft has decided to play by their own rules (as they do with everything, really). So it’s a headache for designers to
create pages that work with all browsers, and pages that are written “correctly” often look terrible in Internet Explorer.

But that’s not the main reason to switch. The real reason is the vast number of security holes. Just today four new security holes have been found in Internet Explorer allowing people to do malicious things to your computer. Right now, people with unpatched PC’s can go to major banking websites and be infected with malware that will steal your banking information. Think about
the number of spyware programs and viruses people get from using Internet Explorer. Just this weekend I went to my parent’s house and surfed the web. I noticed a search/shopping page that came up when I mis-typed the url to my website. So I ran a spyware removal program called Spybot: Search and Destroy. It found over 50 installed spyware programs! I guarantee that no one in my family knowingly installed that crap.

I strongly recommend using Firefox, the lightweight browser from the Mozilla project. It is fast, small, and contains an excellent system for extensions to add more features to your browser. Not only that, but it is way more secure. Do it. Now. Not to mention that you won’t see another unwanted popup window again, and that’s without installing any extra software such as the Google toolbar or similar programs.

Now that I’ve said my peace, I don’t want to hear ANY of my friends/family complaining to me asking for help removing a virus or spyware. If you use IE, it’s your own fault. You have a choice, so
why not make one that will help keep your system from being compromised?

take the “what’s your dark secret?” quiz
| courtesy of mewing.net. where darkness and secrecy abound.

Independence Day has come and gone, and it was an interesting weekend. Lori and I stayed in Arkansas this year instead of going to Oklahoma to watch the annual fireworks show put on by the City of Moore. Instead of traveling over the holiday, we sat outside on our back porch and watch the fireworks display put on by the church down the street. What a display it was!

It seems like everyone in our entire neighborhood lit fireworks, and I’m not just talking about sparklers and black cats. I’m talking expensive, bassy and colorful displays of pyrotechnics. It felt like a warzone at times, and my poor dogs did not know what to think.

Chloe and Butter wanted to come in the backyard with us while we watched the display. As soon as the fireworks started, my poor dogs became more frightened than I’ve ever seen them. Chloe jumped up in my lap and started shaking, and Butter growled and barked at the festive explosions.

After trying to calm them down, we put the dogs in the house. Butter really wanted back out to finish her barking, but Chloe went into the computer room to hide, that poor dog. She really must have thought the house was under siege.

Yesterday she finally got to the point where she’d go outside again, but last night someone lit a bag of black cats and she ran back inside. I had to physically pick her up and put her outside for her potty break before bed; she was too nervous to go on her own. Once the noise stopped she calmed down instantly and started running around the backyard like normal.

We had some left-over plywood from the doghouse project, so Lori and I built the dogs a hutch to store their food and water containers in, to keep them dry in the rain and to keep them in the shade during the hot part of the day. It doesn’t look as pretty as the dog house looks, but it is functional.

We also ditched cable completely, and now we have Dish Network satellite service. We have 3 receivers (two of which are PVR’s) and service in 4 rooms. It rocks, and we’re saving a lot of money compared to what we were paying for digital cable. I ordered DSL, too, so I’m waiting patiently for CenturyTel to get back in touch with me.