More shoe talk. (with photos!)

Several years ago, I was shopping with my girlfriend at the time (we’ll call her “A”) and her 15 year-old daughter (whom we’ll call “T”). As we walked into Dick’s Sporting Goods, “A”, a strait-laced minister’s daughter, took a big whiff and announced, “I love the smell of Dick’s! It reminds me of Christmas time.” I responded “Please don’t ever say that again, honey.” She looked at me quizzically and said “What? I just said that I love the smell of…” her voice trailing off. Blushing, she burst into hysterical laughter.

Naturally, this didn’t go unnoticed by her daughter, who wanted to know what was so funny. Between peals of laughter she managed to repeat the exchange, whereupon “T” also burst into fits of uncontrollable laughter. They excused themselves to the restroom to attempt to compose themselves, but came out several minutes later, still laughing uncontrollably, the humor of the situation further compounded by the alarmed reactions of the other ladies room patrons.

Sadly, we had to cut our trip to Dick’s short, but I got the funniest story ever out of the deal. Seems like a fair trade.

As in: “Where my knitches at?”

Seriously, that toaster isn’t going to cozy itself.

This is a 28 day graph of my website’s traffic through Feb. 5. Normally my site transfers between 5 and 50MB per day. A distributed bot called “80 legs” (or user-agent: 008) crawled the site on the 5th, sucking up 391MB of my bandwidth for God knows what purpose. Since this is a distributed bot for-hire, it could conceivably crawl my site like this every damned day or even multiple times per day. No thanks! I immediately blocked it in my robots.txt, we’ll see if it obeys or not.

I found this thread about “80 legs” to be informative.

It would be nice if you made the grill ribs run at a 45 degree angle, rather than perpendicular. I like for my panini to have aesthetically-pleasing diagonal grill marks. Food just tastes better when it looks nice.

I can achieve this with perpendicular grill lines, but it means putting my sandwich in catty-corner and sacrificing valuable grill real estate (grill estate?) thus making it nigh on impossible to prepare two sandwiches at the same time. I shouldn’t be forced to make this concession. Just make the grill ridges run at a 45 degree angle and we’re one step closer to panini perfection, and one problem closer to solving all the world’s problems.

Thanks.

Your friend,
Greg

Earlier my power went out, just for a minute. Once it came back on I discovered an issue with my file server. It would power up briefly then shut down. It wasn’t even making it into POST, no beeps, no nuthin’. Immediately panic starts to set in as I imagine all of the expensive, time consuming, pain in the ass possibilities. I try it several more times, each with the same result. Then, after I got ahold of myself, I decided maybe it was the power supply, as that seemed the most likely culprit.

So… I retrieved my power supply tester, turned off the power supply, opened up the case and disconnected the 20-pin connector from the motherboard. I plug it into the tester, power it up, and it’s fine. Hmm…
must be the 4 pin connector for the CPU, that’s the only other line I can think of that might keep the computer from POST-ing. Again it tests as good.

Puzzled, I plug the connectors back in and give it another try. Just as before the power LED lights and the fans spin up, but this time, one short beep! Hallelujah! I punch it up on the KVM switch and see this message: CMOS Checksum error. Hmm… could the battery be dead? I pull the battery, grab my multi-meter, and sure enough, it’s dead. Completely, 100%, graveyard dead. Happily, I have a spare battery on hand. I replace the battery and it boots right up, happy as a clam.

Hooray for successful trouble-shooting (and a bit of luck). The “experts” on the internet seem to be split as to whether or not a dead CMOS battery can stop a computer from powering up. Some say yes, some say absolutely not. Well, I now know for a fact that it can. So, if you have a computer that powers up then right back down and isn’t giving any beep codes, test the power supply and the CMOS battery before letting visions of fried CPUs, dead motherboards, or bad RAM dance through your head.

After about the fourth or fifth time this happened, it started to really annoy me. “Why the hell would you have the guy who doesn’t speak any English answering the phone? That’s just stupid.” I groused.

Imagine my chagrin when I discovered that I had been calling their fax number, which evidently rings in the kitchen, where English fluency isn’t so much a requirement. I had to laugh as I imagined the dialogue at their end: “Why the hell does that guy keep calling the fax machine? That’s just stupid.”

Let’s look at this from another angle - imagine for a moment that instead of a football coach, we were talking about, let’s say, a History professor. Would he be allowed to retire at the end of the year knowing what he knew and having not notified the proper authorities? Hell no! They’d fire his ass like a cannon (and rightly so).

It’s morally repugnant when the Catholic church shelters child abusers and those who facilitate or ignore the abuse, and it’s just as disgusting when it’s done by Penn State University, or any other organization.

Paterno must go.