Guess who has the most days on-call in our department? For an almost exclusively windows-based environment, no less? (The highest is 40 days for the year, lowest is 30 days. Some people are just more equal than others.)
Does this make sense? I’m a UNIX geek, not a windows cleaner…
It’s System [Administrator Appreciation day](http://www.sysadminday.com/). Alright, so I know that is not to be taken seriously.
But so far today for me meant a record number of tedious tasks and moronic incident tickets. All because people are either unwilling or unable to do those things themselves – and I am not sure which is worse.
We just had a meeting talking about the introduction of RBLs and other anti-spam technologies. One thing that was discussed was of course user reaction to not receiving some email. I was laughed at loudly by all my coworkers for expecting even casual users to be able to call their email or internet providers and to tell them “I cannot send Mail to company L., please look into it.”
Am I really that much behind the times? Am I really expecting too much of people?
I mean if someone cannot even pick up the phone when there’s a problem and call the company you purchase the service in question from, then that really should _not_ be _our_ problem.
So who’s wrong here, my co-workers or I?
I’m enabling comments for good. The layout still sucks, I know. Unfortunately a lot of it is hardcoded into [Textpattern](http://textpattern.com). Use your newfound powers wisely. Oh, I _will_ censor abusive comments.
No work today from about 3:15pm to 5:15pm. Announcement on company PA speakers:
“Please remain calm, and leave the building via your assigned emergency exists”.
Just another fire drill.
A natural thought. However, we quickly found out that this was not the case.
It appears that someone discovered a black backpack in the cafeteria / canteen. I think any normal person would have simply picked the bag up and brought it to the Lost & Found – for some reason this does not happen at our place. First police arrived, then the bomb squad. Took them a total of about 2 hours to pronounce the bag harmless and to allow us back into the offices. We didn’t even get to see any cool bomb disposal robots.
Ah, aviation! A life of adventure and thrills.
The BBC has a story about [Apple's profits](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3895363.stm).
Before Nils gets involved it read:
> “The company, which produces the must-have gadget as well as brightly coloured computers, also said it would meet earnings targets for this quarter.”
After Nils sends an email pointing out that those brightly coloured computers are a thing of the past:
> “The company, which produces the must-have gadget as well as computers famous for their stylish design, also said it would meet earnings targets for this quarter.”
Haha.
It looks like I may be going to [Nice](http://wikitravel.org/en/Nice) sometime between August 21st to August 28th. We’ll see if that works out.
Thursday night. Sachsenhausen is quiet and dark. I am sitting at my desk. Food: Trolli “Soft Ice” gum candy. I feel a little hyper-active from the sugar, taken in also in the form of the remaining contents of a 1.5 litres bottle of lemon diet coke I downed earlier. In front of me: 21″ screen with OpenOffice (for note-taking), Mozilla (for posting to my weblog) and iTunes (for Music, doh!) running. iTunes is running an endless loop of some geeky music. Falco’s _Sound of Musik_ right now. Before that: _Konya wa Harikeen_ sung by Ohmori Kinuko of Bubble Gum Crisis fame. To my left: my iBook as my switchboard to the outside world, running Fire.app and a ssh session with pine for eMail.
And what am I doing besides posting? Reading up on [quantum physics](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics) (not that I could do any of the math), [Robert A. Heinlein](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinlein) (I’ll have to write a review of _The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress_ soon), and the Japanese [Unit 731](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731). I’m jotting down notes about [parallel worlds](http://www.hep.upenn.edu/~max/multiverse.pdf) and [powered armor](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powered_armor) and a horribly mutated version of the [biblical Apocalypse](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocalypse) as described by the [Book of Revelations](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Revelation) that involves all of the above (except for Mr. Heinlein, that is).
It’s just one of those creative brainstorming sessions I sometimes get. Will I ever do anything with the results? Probably not. But who knows. You’ll recognize it when and if I ever get that stuff done and out into the public.
Hahaha. [Germany lost](http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/euro_2004/3787551.stm) and got kicked out of the European Championship. Normally, I wouldn’t care. But we have a world championship coming up in a few years. I figure that if Germany gets kicked out of that as well, the annoyances and stress I expect to be subjected to may turn out to be just a little bit less.
In the past few days I have been receiving several 419 Nigeria type scam offers via email. Nothing unusual about that, except they were written in – more or less faulty – German. Just on the odd chance that any of these scammers comes across this site: You may wish to omit me from your mailings; I am reporting each and every incident to the police.