While reading up on Processing, I found myself wondering how bezier curves worked. I’ve seen the tools to draw them in a number of applications, but the whole anchor points, controls points thing never made sense. Wikipedia has an _awesome_ explanation of them though. They animated gifs just caused it to click in my head.
Should you ever be looking for a graphics artist and you find one, only to have them say something like the following
“I have downloaded the files found at the link. The file named Thumbs.db was either corrupt or not understood by my computer. Can you tell me what this file contains? Is it an image or text file?”
Run far away. Very far.
Geez what is with people and their inability to read email!?!
Seriously. There is a potential security issue at work, emails are sent directly to those who need to deal with said issue, and NOTHING is done. So I call them and ask “wtf are you doing about this issue?” and the response I get it “oh you sent email? Oh, I didn’t read it yet.”
Seriously people, what the hell!?
I have an inbox just like everyone else, and I have no unread email…in any folder…I read it all. And I read it at all times of the day. If you send it to me, it gets read and acted on. I can’t stand these people that don’t read their crap. This is your job. Make an effort to do it correctly.
I think I understand now why Joe hates his job. Two words; risk assessment. Writing documents sucks and risk assessments are the pinnacle of boring. I want to play with action figures instead.
So it’s been a tad bit rainy around here in the midwest lately due to the effects of Ike. At my mom’s house the sump pump apparently “broke” and then proceeded to leave 2 or so inches of water on the floor. I went over to help clean up and to look at the pump. It was jimmy-rigged in a rather lame manner, so after lifting the float up and down a couple times I came to the conclusion that whoever had screwed with it last had placed the float incorrectly.
Several cable ties later and the pump was back to normal.
Greg, Dan and I flew off to Gamestop also to pick up a copy of Dead Rising. Greg showed me the gameplay on YouTube and it looked too good to pass up.
So I’m on the hook for a couple big expenses over the next month or so, two of them mandatory, and I’m not looking forward to them. In fact, now that one of them is on my mind, lemme call and make the appointment; hold on… … …ok, done. Anyways, yeah, the other one is either an oil change or a thousand mile checkup for Mr. motorcycle. I put it off and put it off and… hold on… calling them now too while it’s on my mind… … …ok done.
So yeah. I need to get the bike taken care of before winter or else I’ll forget about it again. meh
My friend Will and I hung out at my place the other day. The last time I saw him was back in high school I think. We had a great time though and he’s still a really cool guy. I look forward to hanging out with him again while he’s still in town.
In other news, I finally got around to making the broccoli and cheddar soup only to realize that the broccoli was bad. Great. Kinda hard to make broccoli and cheddar soup without broccoli. I improvised and substituted broccoli with onion and garlic. Say what? Ok, so it’s not broccoli, but it make for an interesting taste. Plus I had to get rid of the onion soon anyway.
I can’t even begin to explain how hard I got served by Joe this last week. There’s this silly program called P2P Marshal which claims to be a tool that can analyze disks/disk images for contraband gained from P2P software; warez dude.
When it was first announced (and I forget where I read about it) Joe and I had a damn good laugh because the app is such a complete waste of time. It’s a glorified “find -name *.mp3″ that runs exclusively on Windows.
Anyways, they (humorously) provide training for how to use the app. What’s more humorous is that the training costs ~500 bucks. And what’s even more humorous is that I got an email from them saying that they’re offering it, and would I like to attend.
So I forwarded the email to Joe, jokingly saying “if you sign me up for this, I will kill you”.
Well, he signed me up…not funny
I got a supposed email from them that looked like the type of reply email you might get from a conference after you have registered. Any other time I would have disregarded it as spam, but since I had received the offer so recently, I thought that the email confirmation was indeed legit.
I can only imagine the look on my face, overlaid with the shadow of total hopelessness and despair. Joe can probably explain my reaction pretty accurately.
On top of that, he said he was going to schedule me for the red-eye flight out to Georgia for the training (he knows how much I hate to fly and how much of a stickler I am for punctuality). Every word that came out of his mouth just made me sink deeper and deeper. “What the hell did I do to deserve this?” I thought. “It was a joke. An innocent joke gone horribly wrong” I said.
I tried to make the best of my obviously terrible situation by saying “oh yeah well I’d show up with my linux laptop and play stupid” or “show up with an external drive full of pirated movies and music and play it non-stop during the training”; anything to light a fire at the training.
I forget how things panned out, but at one point Joe mentioned that I check the email headers to see where the mail came from and that maybe I could poke around their site beforehand or something; I forget.
I checked out the headers and something didn’t look right. It never left our domain. In fact, it came from lolcat; Joe’s desktop.
Wait a second…
I then saw the reply-to and it was tarupp@localhost.domain.com….
I slowly turned my head around to see Mr Spanky McSpank Spank. He stared ahead at his monitor, then his eyes darted over to look at me. He obviously caught the look of “why I aught-a…” scrawled on my face because shortly after he cracked a big smile.
Dude
…
Dude…I…just…got…served.
He then proceeded to inform me that that was for the packing peanuts thing I did to him during furlough. I was totally amazed at how much I just got served. I was dazed. In fact, I needed to leave the office right then and there.
Mission accomplished. Totally owned. lol
So yeah, words cannot explain how I felt after I came to the sudden realization that it was all just a massive dose of Joe trickery. I’m glad it was Friday.
You win Joe
Man I feel crappy. Phil and some random asshole driver the other day aren’t helping things.
For one who is so in love with PHP, I think it’s kinda silly that I always turned a blind eye to the Zend Framework. Well, that ended tonight I guess. It’s really cool! It’s like PEAR…except it’s maintained! :p
It’s a bit frustrating to get down pat at first, but for a couple of the apps I maintain, I’ve cut over several critical functions that relied on outdated and buggy PEAR packages.
Cool stuff!
So the webserver was offline for a couple days while I grounded the outlet it’s UPS is plugged in to. Apparently I never did that when I installed it (it’s a really ghetto setup, lemme tell ya) so the UPS has been saying “building wiring fault” for quite some time.
I bought a new UPS (since the last one couldn’t sustain the load during the last power outage) and figured now would be as good a time as any to do the switch-a-roo and fix the lack-o-ground.
Anyways, everything should be back up for now. I’ll need to do another downtime in the near future to backup the server. It’s got some bad blocks on it, so it needs to be replaced.