Monthly Archives: December 2005

Christmas vs. The Global Village

This topic just does not want to die and I need to blog about it to get the anger out of my system.

Every year, the same group of idiotic wanna-be Christian enthusiasts whine and complain that more and more people are not saying “Merry Christmas”, but instead are saying “Happy Holidays” or “Seasons Greetings”. As far as I can tell, their argument has always been “It’s Christmas time, stop taking Christ out of Christmas. This is the time of year that we celebrate the baby Jesus…”, and so on and so forth.
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A Christmas Present from Microsoft

I love Macs. I use one at work, I use one at home and I use one on the go (laptop). I also work with a lot of people and teach a lot of students who also use Macs… One of the most consistently annoying things for me about working in an Apple environment has historically been people using Internet Explorer for Mac. It’s one of those things that irks me.

“Normal” people may not understand why it bothers me and probably think I just have vendetta against Microsoft or something (which I may, but that’s besides the point), even though I try to clearly explain that Microsoft Internet Explorer for Mac, is not the same as Internet Explorer for PC. IE for Mac is ancient, under developed and in my opinion, irresponsibly available to Mac users who don’t know any better.
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A Week Unwound

This week was a crappy tech week, filled with server / network stresses, security vulnerability releases and spammers. To get some closure on these issues, I thought I’d blog about them a bit.

Our network provider, iWeb Technologies, was unable to solve an on-going router issue somewhere between their network and Pier1’s backbone. This router issue resulted in my servers primary IP address being inaccessible indefinitely until I logged in and ran a command to notify their router I was still there… highly annoying for me and my customers, I’m sure. Their only immediate solution to this problem is to have me run “arping” in cron every minute, which tells their routers my servers MAC address. The long term solution is to have me migrate from their old network to their new BGP network. Moving to the new network is a great long-term solution, but it requires a whole new set of IP addresses and moving 8 name servers with 260 domains is a bit stressful. Either way, so waking up in the morning and finding out your server is not accessible tends to ruin every day of the week. This issues has been “resolved” with the cron job now, but still.
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The Case of the Missing Brownies

When someone promises to bake you chocolate brownies with sprinkles and bring them into work for you the next day, you sort of get excited. Who doesn’t love chocolate brownies? Free ones! Homemade? Yummy.

So I come into work this morning, with my bib and a glass of milk… but where are the brownies? Catherine (our administrative assistant) decided she had better things to do last night than fulfill her promises and obligations to bake us chocolate brownies with sprinkles.

I for one am appalled and hurt; the betrayal… well, I’m not sure it will ever leave me. *sigh* Just when you think you know someone…

Best Regards,
Matt Simpson

Eating My Own Tongue

Last night my wife and I along with a friend (Greg) went out to Moxie’s for a good dinner and a beer. I can’t seem to get enough of their ranch-house chicken burger, spicy fries and basel mayo dip. Yum. Either way, while I was attempting to eat the yummy yummy fries, my teeth for whatever reason got angry at my tongue and attacked. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve bitten my lip / cheek / tongue before, but damn, this time there is actually a chunk out of the side of my tongue causing me constant pain and slurring of words.

So my two-bit piece of advice for the day: chew slowly and keep your tongue away from your teeth. Teeth aren’t always friendly, they will turn on you and attack without warning.

Best Regards,
Matt Simpson