Dear sir,

Your site saved my ass. God bless and keep you and provide you with all
the cold beer you could ever possibly need.

Now, to tell customer to write his damn passwords down next time.

Thanks a bunch!

Paul, as usual, thanks for helping out.  I really appreciate you stepping up over the past couple of weeks to help out, and have made [CEO] and Santa Barbara aware of your efforts, which are appreciated by all.

Thanks,

[Finance Director]

[Boss] cancelled the meeting for today.

[Coworker]

"That transaction has been approved and the transaction has processed, you're all paid up now, thanks."

(to self) – "Hrm, for the first time this week we have 22 open lines on the office PBX at 11am"

Go to http://mainframe.timmins.net/noweb4u.html and hit reload every once in a while. The speed and bearing don't yet work, because I've had problems uploading the newest version of my j2me applet that supports it.

WHY WORRY ABOUT WHO OWNS THE MEDIA?
MoveOn Bulletin Op-Ed
by Eli Pariser

t's like something out of a nightmare, but it really happened: At 1:30 on a cold January night, a train containing hundreds of thousands of gallons of toxic ammonia derails in Minot, North Dakota. Town officials try to sound the emergency alert system, but it isn't working. Desperate to warn townspeople about the poisonous white cloud bearing down on them, the officials call their local radio stations. But no one answers any of the phones for an hour and a half. According to the New York Times, three hundred people are hospitalized, some are partially blinded, and pets and livestock are killed.

Where were Minot's DJs on January 18th, 2002? Where was the late night station crew? As it turns out, six of the seven local radio stations had recently been purchased by Clear Channel Communications, a radio giant with over 1,200 stations nationwide. Economies of scale dictated that most of the local staff be cut: Minot stations ran more or less on auto pilot, the programming largely dictated from further up the Clear Channel food chain. No one answered the phone because hardly anyone worked at the stations any more; the songs played in Minot were the same as those played on Clear Channel stations across the Midwest.

Rest of article is here

Friday: Go with Myself248 to Michigan 2600 meeting. Had an interesting time describing ricochet to a bystander, hanging out and generally having an interesting time. Making it more interesting was the fact I hadn't slept since 3pm Thursday.
I get home on Saturday at 3am and go to sleep. I wake up on Saturday at 3pm.
Saturday: I get up, dink around until gets out of work. We decide to eat dinner, and then screw around doing evil things. On our way out the door, there was a loud pop and a smell of an electrical component releasing its magic smoke that makes it work. In seconds , and I were diving for the equipment, and within 10 seconds afterwards, I had pulled all the AC to my rack, and all battery backup was down within 20 seconds. Mainframe and hellraiser were suspects, but after ripping apart both, we can't figure out what was wrong. Mainframe was filled with asstons of just the nastiest dustballs you've ever seen, so it got well acquainted with my vacuum cleaner. Cleaned up everything, checked everything out, and applied power to the rack component by component. Everything works and is stable with no abnormalities. Bizarre. By the time my network is back up, it's 3am so I pull in to the bedroom, lay down with and watch Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's stone, and fall asleep afterwards. Sleep happened at around 6:30am.
Update: Just before the movie started, there was a strange thumping I heard. I traced it down to zer0's door to the hallway. I open it to find a panicking big black dude saying "we need to call the fire department, there's a fire down the hall. Oh, and by the way, nice to meet you, I'm the courtesy officer. Please evacuate your apartment." I run and wake up zer0 and get becky dressed, and they get out of the apartment. I stand by with the courtesy officer as he forces the door to the apartment, on the third hit he blew through and was damn near halfway in the living room of the place. Turns out the guy left something on the stove and fell asleep on the toilet or something like that. Nothing but smoke damage, pretty much. But interesting nonetheless.
(End Update)

Sunday: Wake up around 4pm, and zer0 wants to go to mongolian BBQ. I gather up my pop bottles, take them back to the store, and see that this bizarre orange mountain dew now exists, but only for the summer. Damn it's good. We go to mongolian BBQ, and on the way, these two cars line up on university drive at MLK, and just floor it when the light turns green. Zer0 gets a crazy idea that we should follow them. He proceeds to floor it and we're now going 75 down University, keeping up with the racers (!). He hits 83 by the time both shoot off seperate ways down side streets, and he decides to do likewise for good reason (nothing gets attention more than driving 4 times the posted speed limit). We then go to Mongolian BBQ, eat ourselves silly, and then get home and do the bad things we planned to do the night before. We learn alot about the Madison Heights Meijer store, and on the way back home I get this bizarre confrence call at 1am. They hang up on me, call becky and start to bother her, asking for an account on the most uninteresting machine that exists on my network. I hang up on them, and until I can get home and make sure the machine is okay, I have becky Stop-A the server. Everything is fine when we return, some suspicious usage from one of 's users, and otherwise is fine. I then talk to for a while and he finds out about some of my projects. haha, that caught his attention.
Monday: I get ready to head into the office, and one of our machines at work onsite at a very large unnamed customer begins malfunctioning. Damn it all if I can't figure out who is my POC for network issues there. Then I have problems with the monitoring server, and do alot of work that was long overdue on that server.
Then I sleep at 12:30pm, get up at 5pm.
Zer0 comes in and greets me with a cold 2 liter of the orange mountain dew. What a great guy. While we're bullshitting and I'm waking up, the weatherradio goes off, telling me that there's a Tornado Warning in my county. Hit weather.gov and see the radar shows storms to the north and the south, but none are in line with us. I grab my HT, becky grabs hers, and I turn it on just in time to hear the skywarn net go condition red, and I get dressed and hit the door towards the outside. I notice I forgot shoes, but it shouldn't matter. Becky, zer0 and I all watched the skies, saw a couple of weird clouds, but nothing particularly menacing. We go inside as the net clears to condition green. I get on the 2 meter base in the house, check into the net, and run to the store with my HT. While shopping the net goes condition red again, as the sirens yet again go off. Everyone is looking at me funny as my radio begins spewing spotter reports. "I see a funnel cloud at blah blah, medium rotation speed, blah", stuff like that. Fortunately again it wasn't near us, so I proceed to shop and carefully monitor. Get out just as the warnings are cleared and the net goes condition green, and concludes an hour later.

I don't know if my week will be any more interesting, but I figured I'd get this all out while I still remember it all clearly.