nobody asked…

Why does everybody else look down on us engineers. They think we are all nerds, nothing but nerds, with no interests or skills or knowledge other than techie stuff. This point is made and amplified over and over by Scott Adams with the wonderfully realistic Dilbert comic strip. These introductory panels from the Sunday, May 25, 2008, strip are classic… and typical…

This mindset was given legs by the dolt from the dark side who coined the phrase, It doesn’t take a rocket scientist. Well, excuse me, but yes it does. Scientists, engineers, technicians… Yes, it does…

Do you people not understand who is really in charge here? … Who is important here? The President disappears for a few days — no one cares. If a salesman or accountant or librarian takes a week off, you forget about them. If a lawyer never shows up again, it’s a good thing. But if the Engineers decided to stay at home one day, the world goes nuts and shuts down. Sure, we are cram full of techie stuff that makes the world go round and brings you all the wonderful gadgetry that you hang around your neck, stick in your ear, clip to your belt, and will soon have implanted under the skin behind the ear — by government edict, of course. And yes, we understand that you don’t understand it and don’t want to understand it and it bores the hell out of you when we talk about it. You just want it to work…

Then be nice to us. Bring us chocolate…

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A helicopter was flying around Seattle when an electrical malfunction disabled all of the aircraft’s electronic navigation and communications equipment.

Due to the clouds and haze, the pilot could not determine the helicopter’s position. The pilot saw a tall building, flew toward it, circled, and held up a handwritten sign that said “WHERE AM I?” in large letters. People in the tall building quickly responded to the aircraft, drew a large sign, and held it in a building window. Their sign said “YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER.”

The pilot smiled, waved, looked at his map, determined the course to steer to SEATAC airport, and landed safely. After they were on the ground, the copilot asked the pilot how he had done it.

“I knew it had to be the Microsoft Building because they gave me a technically correct, but completely useless answer.”

[A spin of my beanie propeller to George aka Decrepit Old Fool]

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[URGENT UPDATE: Dr. Weevil made a comment over at CGHill's dustbury site (Thank you CG for the memorial link...) that he believes September, 1997, was 10-1/2 years ago and not the 11-1/2 years I mentioned below. I gently reminded the good Doctor that he had obviously not taken three things into account:

1. Y2K
2. Daylight Savings Time
3. Here, we count using the admittedly controversial Tennessee rules.

However, in keeping with my Southern Gentlemanness, I acknowledge Dr. Weevil's eagle eye and promise not to try improving upon future calculations...]

[Hum to the tune of Simon & Garfunkle's Sound of Silence ... "Hello darkness, my old friend..."]

Have you ever had a wart or mole removed? One that had been with you for many years? One that was as familiar as it was ugly? A couple of weeks ago I had such a bittersweet experience when shutting down the last of the Novell Netware Servers that we built, sold, and supported.

When I got into the business in the mid-eighties, Netware was all the rage for small as well as big businesses. At first it was Netware 2.xx through a couple of iterations. Then came Netware 3.xx, with the almost usable 3.22 being a soft landing spot. But before we could get too cozy with that, Novell in their stupidity wisdom delivered the 4 series, partially in response to a pesky upstart in the network server business, Microsoft, who dominated the desktop, where Novell did not compete. But now, that arrogant Redmond, Washington, gang had the audacity to challenge the arrogant Provo, Utah, group with something called Windows NT Server 3.51, aimed squarely at eating Novell’s Netware lunch in the small and medium business market. 3.51 was about as big a dog as the current day Vista, but it rattled a lot of cages and paved the way for Windows NT Server 4, which ran Novell’s Netware out of town on a rail.

The Netware Server pictured here was IntraNetware 4.11 for Small Business, running on a box built by my little company. Except for shutdowns every 2 to 3 years for replacement of batteries in the UPS (battery backup), this system has stood there spinning, serving up files and managing network printing since September 15, 1997! That is 11-1/2 years, friends! They just don’t make ‘em the way we used to!

Netware was clumsy, cryptic, difficult, ornery, and unforgiving. And stable as a friggin’ boulder. This little single purpose network, with server as described, and three MS-DOS 6.22 workstations, was about as solid and trouble-free as a network can be. There was not a mouse in sight and no internet connection. There was no way for viruses to get in and no need for routine patches and fixes. Life was simple. Life was good. Enter Microsoft…

[All photos can be dimensionally exploded with a single click.]

For the terminally curious, the server box was built around an Intel Server Board with a genuine Intel Pentium 166 MHz Processor, a whopping 32 MB of RAM, and a 1.2 GB Seagate IDE Hard Drive, housed in a heavy-duty server grade enclosure with 200 Power Supply. Network was 10BaseT Ethernet, all 3Com gear. And with that pitifully low horsepower, which would not be enough to display Windows’ opening splash screen, this server ran like a scared rabbit…

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Understand the motivation of the liar and you will recognize and understand the lie.

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Read this sentence, then stop and think about what you’re doing right now. Go ahead, I’ll wait…

.

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You are sitting in front of a very complex piece of equipment — something that did not exist when you were a child — reading this material which resides on a server — another even more complicated piece of equipment — somewhere on the planet — written by someone you’ve likely never met or seen — all connected with wires and cables and wireless radio signals and satellites orbiting the Earth. In 1907, 100 years ago, none of this existed, and only a few brave but thought-to-be-wacko science fiction writers dared even dream of such. Fifty years ago, in 1957, when I was in high school, none of this existed.

Now stop and think what you were doing in 1987, just twenty years ago, when Reagan was President, Nine Inch Nails (the band) had not yet been formed, Paul Simon’s Graceland was the album of the year, Read more

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This was just too good to not steal from TechRepublic blogger Jay Garmon. Billy Gates and the Redmond Banditos won’t like this a bit. They’ll probably go buy up the FEATURE vanity plate rights in the other 49 states.

[UPDATE: 08/25/07. For the non-techies among you, an apology and an explanation: It seems every time Microsoft comes out with a new product, update, or service pack, there are things that do not work as expected. These are the software potholes we mere mortals call bugs, but Microsoft claims that oh, no, they are features... Yeah, right...]

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After reading the earlier post, The Key To Mastering Windows… , my friend Dr. Stu Savory contributed this additional key which might make it easier for all of us to do our thang. Maybe Stu can let us know if keyboards with the Blog key are already available in Europe.

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A couple of days back I lamented the technical difficulties that had taken on a life of their own with apparent intent of burying BlogCentral and me along with it. They were solved. Then they weren’t. Then they were fixed. Then they returned. They hovered like a dark cloud over mine head and my cup of frustration runneth over. Yea, verily, they fled like nocturnal predators when sol began his (her?) daily march from horizon to horizon. And therein hides the key to the solution, finding the wooden stake, as it were.

When swapping out computers, I decided to also switch over from Wi-Fi to a powerline networking connection. I had recently done this for a customer and was very impressed with the ease of installation, the improved speed, and security of the connection. It worked right out of the box. Quick security config and I was cooking… That was Saturday. That night, connection disappeared. After fighting it for awhile, I gave up and moved on to less stressful activities. Sunday morning, determined to conquer it, I found that the connection was back. Later in the day, I switched the desk lamp on to make the final change — adding a USB (an USB?) hub that sits on my desk, eliminating the crawling around with the dustbunnies everytime I want to plug in my USB thumb drive. Got that done and — boom — no internet.

Brain cells may at times need some help and coaxing to work together. For me, a nice chardonnay does a credible job as prime mover in an instance like this. So after exhausting all the normal troubleshooting techniques I use daily in my chosen incarceration profession, I sat back with a glass of synaptic lubricant and examined the dilemma from outside the box. Like turning a light on (pun intended) it came to me. My work getting everything working had occurred during the day when there was plenty of natural light streaming through the windows. Disruption of the internet connection was only in the evening or any other time I had the desk lamp on. A quick experiment validated my theory. Something in the high-intensity lamp’s little power transformer must be feeding enough of the wrong kind of garbage back through the powerline to interfere with the signal.

Problem solved. New problem found. Despite the fact that I’m a fairly decent touch typist, I can’t do it so well in the dark. If you encounter any strange spellings or characters floating around on my posts, it probably means I was composing in the dark. Now I’m in the market for a new desk lamp — maybe a nice, simple little incandescent model. And another bottle of chardonnay. Sometimes the problems and solutions are where we least, or last, expect to find them…

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BlogCentral here at nobodyasked recently received a much needed upgrade, oil change, and tire rotation with a bigger, meaner, faster, badder system. Well, badder anyway. One problem after another. Poke it down one place and it pops up somewhere else. Working through it. Slowly. Frustrated. Pissed off. I’m in this business fer crissakes. Anybody know a good technician? Hope to be productive again soon. Very soon…

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Arriving on-site to apply mouth-to-mouse resuscitation to a computer reported to be running ver-r-r-r-y slow (lot of that going around these days) I donned my bio-chem hazard suit, checked the oxygen level in my tanks, and went at it mano a mano. The first thing I noted was that the antivirus software license had expired two months ago. The program was merrily chugging along, scanning incoming email realtime and the entire drive every night just the way I taught it to, but with virus definitions that were two months old. Not good. I got the user’s attention and pointed to a warning box that had just popped up above the clock. The dialog went approximately like this…

ME: Have you noticed this little warning box before?

HER: Oh, yeah, all the time. That thing has been driving me nuts for weeks.

ME: What have you done when it popped up?

HER: Oh, I just click it off. But it keeps coming back. Do you think it is the problem?

ME: Did you ever read the message?

HER: Yeah, but I didn’t know what it meant, so I just clicked it off.

ME: Come over here and let’s read it together. It says… Read more

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Dang it, sometimes I wish I was not so damn stupid. I mean, I know some stuff. If it’s got wires attached, I understand it and can fix it. I understand the concepts and theories of information technology, data streams, distributed processing (dumbest idea of our generation), and can talk about those in general terms and chart things out on a white board (engineers can’t talk without a pencil or marker in hand) and explain them in layman’s terms so that even the least illuminated among us can understand.

But misaligned squigglies on a screen, the gibberish that underlies everything we do here in the blogosphere and on the internet… I’m lost. I’m talking about html, css, and php coding, the stuff that blogs are made of. Oh, I can dig my way through a piece of code and make a change in background color. Or change the title of a sidebar section from ‘About’ to ‘Who? Why?’. Or remark out an unwanted calendar. But that’s about it.

Since ungrading to WordPress 2.1 and changing to the current theme, I’ve had two problems, one major, one minor. The designer of the theme, whose name appears at the bottom of this page, is for whatever reason no longer available or interested in helping those who have chosen to use his themes, plugins, etc. That’s a pity as he does wonderful work. Bottom line is, I need some help. I am almost desperate enough to pay some nominal and reasonable charge to get things fixed. Here are the problems I currently have:

MAJOR: This theme, which I really like, for some reason does not have a Links list or Blogroll coded in. I have tried lifting the code from several other themes and dropping it into the sidebar.php file. Nothing. Or a parse error of some kind. I need to get my Links List back, preferably like I had it before, with hierarchical categories. By the way, this is not a WordPress problem since the links show fine with other themes.

MINOR: Look back a couple of days at The Haircut.. and the thick brownish line I use as a separator. Been using it for at least a year with other themes and never had a problem. It’s just a little gif file, although I converted it to a jpg, part of my shooting in the dark to solve the problem. The problem is that the separator image has a faint box or frame around it. The other images don’t have that. How do I get rid of the frame?

If anyone reading this has a clue and is willing to share it, I will personally see that the fabled Bird of Paradise drops glamorous gifts beyond imagination upon your head. If anyone can really fix this and feels compelled to charge for your time, give me an estimate by email.

All suggestions by email please. Use address shown on the Contact page. Thank you for listening…

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Meanwhile, over at the ZDNet ranch, Dan Farber reflects about the first decade of blogging , with prominent mention of pioneers Dave Winer and Doc Searls. There are now about 70 million of us (but who’s counting?). While the noise-to-signal ratio in the blogosphere has gotten all out of whack, we have now entered the mainstream as blogging has become a democratizing force.

Farber also gives a brief review of a new book he calls very engaging, and quite controversial and provocative. Andrew Keen’s book has the formidable title: The Cult of the Amateur: how the democratization of the digital world is assaulting our economy, our culture, and our values (available June 5).

Keen’s book sounds like a worthwhile read, though from Farber’s review it sounds as if we ordinary, everyday bloggers need to maintain a thick skin and guard against becoming pissed off in the face of some of Keen’s observations.

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