First, we solved the booze problem with a very nice wood liquior cabinet. All I need is to get some glass cut for the top to keep the bar-tending nice and tidy and we're all set. Photos.

I just got back from the mysterious land that is Canada. I was up there teaching a course about Sun's hardware to a bunch of former MS-centric support people. Well, I hope former, several seem to be easily convertable when topics like OBP, ALOM, RSC, and RISC showed them the power that is Sun. Photos of the trip.

There's also been some new, funny kitty kitty photos added. Link - text, punctuation.

Also, while in Canada, and drunk off of Alexander Keith's beer, I got this Sun-centric (aka heliocentric) tattoo. Photos of tat.

And, last but certainly least, I have a section of the gallery for "hot chicks" where you are free to vote. Some are there as more of "base line" to ensure you're not seeing all 100% hot meat all the time. Photos of hotties.

As a relatively new alcoholic I've been enjoying many of the fruits from the booze tree. The libations have been enjoyed frequently and we're always seeking out new things.

To grow our collection we follow some simple rules for replacement. When a bottle goes empty, at least one of the following conditions must be met when purchasing a replacement:

1) A larger bottle of the same alcohol is to be purchased. (This is called the Super Size rule)
2) A better brand or version of the same alcohol is to be purchased. (This is called the Upgrade rule)
3) A new kind of alcoholic substance is to be purchased in addition to the replacement. (This is called the Expansion rule)

By following these rules you'll be well on your way to drunkenness is no time. After a few months to a year, you'll have a collection that would make any frat envious, but where should you keep it?

The perfect solution now would be to have an actual bar. Entertaining would be easy, storage a snap, and hey - it's just darn cool. But this would require lots of capital (impacting the booze budget) and space at the sacrifice of part of my trains or computers setup. Trust me, you can't get me drunk enough to want to sacrifice either of those.

Our current solution is to store the alcohol under the kitchen sink. That's right, it's down there with the cleaning products. Palmolive-tini, anyone? Comet shooter? How about some Formula 409 on the rocks? Fantastik boilermaker? No? Well, now you see the problem. (But you really should try the Buttery-AJAX -Nipples mmm-mmmmm).

Thus, what I'd like to find would be a nice "liquor cabinet." Something that would look nice in the living room, provide storage for the bottles in use (backup storage can still be kept elsewhere), and allow easy access for the user(s). Look out Martha Stewart, easy entertaining would be just around the corner!

My vision is for an approximately 4-foot tall bookcase-sized device with two doors. The doors would be wood frame with glass and wooden cross-lattice stuff to make it pretty. This would allow a guest to see into the goodies and invite enjoyment, but keep the dust off of things and provide organization. As we have no children (and generally despise them) a lock is not needed, but I can live with one being there. An inner shelf would be nice for maximizing the storage, and I'd prefer wood here for strength.

We already have a nice wine rack that holds all of our bottles of wine, wine glasses, and even the martini glasses, too. Thus, storage of these things is not needed, but martini shaker, shot glasses, and an ice bucket on top of the liquor cabient would be great. We already have these items; they just live in kitchen cabinets.

The sad thing is that in this day of political correctness, AA, and rising gas prices such a creature doesn't seem to exist. Check out this article over on modern drunkard. What a shame! It seems a good liquor cabinet just doesn't belong in today's "modern" society.

What's a boozehound to do? Any of you know where I can find something like what I'm looking for? Please, save us from the Brillo bongs!

I checked the FAQ, I searched a bit on google, and I posted to the mozilla/firefox forum, but I still haven't found anything. Thus, I turn to the JE community.

Downloading, use of shortcuts (windows)

This seems to be a problem with the newer mozilla/firefox releases, but I'm not sure when it crept in.

I have a shortcut on my desktop to a repository for some images. When I'm in Mozilla/Firefox, if I click to save a file or an image and I navigate to my desktop and I pick the shortcut I am asked if I want to overwrite this shortcut with the file - it does not follow the link to the destination folder/directory.

I tried this process in IE, and it follows the shortcuts just fine. I'm not sure where I can enable or disable such a "feature" in mozilla.

Thoughts?

Following is my tale about my trip with luvsbway to NYC the other day (April 16, 2005) to try and see DRS with Joanna Gleason.

So, we get to NYC and luckily the bus drops us off on the same block as the Imperial Theater. Couldn't have been any closer. We went up and waited for the lottery that was to start in just a few minutes. I called AntiFreeze who lives in the area to see if he could join us to add his name to the lotto, thus increasing our chances of winning.

Sadly, he didn't make it in time to put his name in. Also, sadly, several obviously local New Yorkers were just walking down the street, going someplace else, and in just a few minutes prior to pulling names asked what was going on, so they decided to toss their names in. Most didn't seem to know what the show was about, or who was in it.

At this point in the story I'm sure you can guess who won and who didn't. Yup, all of the locals got in, and luvsbway and I didn't win. It looked like almost every other out-of-towner did win, however, so good for them.

So, what to do now? We have tickets for the show in two weeks, but we didn't just come all this way for nothing. So, we headed off for the TKTS booth and met AntiFreeze there. We got 50% off tickets for the rear mezzanine. Hey, it wasn't the best seat in the house, but at least we could get to see the show knowing the full cast was there that day. And for roughly $20 a seat, it's hard to argue with that... here at home it's hard to find tickets for that price to a local production.

Then AntiFreeze took us down to Hell's Kitchen for some Turkish lunch that was quite tasty and we chatted away the time we had until the show started. As we got to the theater and said bye to AntiFreeze we just entered through the set of doors there and in front of me was this scruffy looking guy with a teenagerish kid, and the guy looked just like Chris Sarandon (Joanna's husband, you may know of him as Prince Humperdink from The Princess Bride). So I say to luvsbway, "Look who is in front of me," in that quiet yet excited tone.

"Nah, it's not him."

I then overheard their conversation about how this guy saw it a few times out in CA, and was there for opening night, and that this would be his third time since it opened that he's seen it. Who else would be that obsessed... well, it seems luvsbway didn't hear any of the conversation, and didn't believe me until this guy had to have his bag checked by security and she saw the name "Sarandon" embroidered on it.

Thus, we didn't say anything to him as I had this doubter with me who wasn't helping, and I was honestly star struck. Not like that I couldn't talk to a "star;" it was that the subject matter would have been difficult. "Hi, I'm a big fan of your wife," is too corny. And, "Hi, I'm a big fan of yours and Joanna's," still wouldn't have gone anywhere.

I figure that since I mailed a letter to Joanna the other day with a playbill to autograph (and return SASE) and in the letter I mentioned that I would be there in two weeks. I figure if she wants to have any contact that is her decision to make, and she has a simple means to do it. I don't want to be pushy in the matter, and talking to Chris would have been pushy. I keep hearing that while Joanna is very kind and open to her friends she is also rather shy. My dream is to end up like the admin for Greg's site (Joanna's co-star in DRS), but only time will tell.

[Update: Joanna sent the playbill back, with a personal greeting on it.]

So, on with the show. Joanna was as captivating as everyone keeps saying. I was hoping I hadn't just been reading a lot of fan-driven hoopla, but she really is, honestly, outsider third-person feelings here, talented and an amazing performer.

The show itself is very funny, the entire cast is excellent, and the crowds just went wild for all of the jokes, satire, and pratfalls. The songs are wonderful, and I can't wait to buy the cast album. I think we're going to have to buy two as I need an original for the "Joanna Collection" and luvsbway insists on having a real copy for her "Every-Broadway-show-I've-seen-in-person Collection." Hey, her name is "luvs broadway" for a reason I guess.

After the show we hit the Edison for a bite to eat before our bus picked us up. In there we saw Paul McCrane (of Fame, RoboCop, and ER). This time luvsbway believed me when I told her someone was somebody, but she had worked next to the set of ER years ago and had seen Paul many times prior, so it wasn't like I needed his name embroidered on something as proof.

In all it was a good day and I'm really looking forward to our orchestra tickets this Saturday.

So, I bought a mannequin.

Yes, a mannequin.

It's for my dress.

Yes, I have a dress.

Shutupaboutit.

I don't wear it. In fact I don't think it could ever fit me. It's an actual movie prop from Boogie Nights. It's Joanna's dress.

Well, we had some fun with the cat and the mannequin the day I got it.

Enjoy these pix!

FYI - it was his favorite toy, I just put it in an interesting location. Pix may or may not be safe for work depending on how you look at it.

As some of you may know I'm a big fan of the actress Joanna Gleason. Probably even more of you have never heard of her, but you've probably seen her in something. Check out joannagleason.com for bio and role information.

Well, to cut closer to the chase, she's in a Broadway musical right now called Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (it is based on the movie of the same name which is actually a remake of 1964's Bedtime Story). The cast album is going to be released soon (May 10), and a limited edition version is going to be given away for FREE on April 27 from 11:30AM to 1PM in front of the Imperial Theater (where Les Misérables ran). The theater is on 45th street.

But wait, there's more! The show's composer and entire cast will also be on hand to autograph the free albums.

This is all well and good, but I don't live in or around NYC, and I can't get up there on a Wednesday.

Is there anyone up in NYC that can take some time out of his or her day to help me out?

Obviously I have a large interest in Joanna's autograph on an album, and I certainly wouldn't mind another one of the entire cast and composer since the show is awesome (got to see it this past weekend, yay!). And if there are any other Broadway-buffs out there you might be interested in this event, too.

I would pay shipping and whatever other expenses (need to hop the subway?) or help you in any way that I can, if you can help me out here. Please, let me know if there's some way you can help.

Thanks!

As you may recall I had surgery on my wrist. This left me in a cast with three pins holding my arm together. Yay me! Well, more like, "Yay vicodin."

So, yesterday was the big day. I got my cast off and the pins removed. And, being weird, I took another weird guy from work with me and a digital camera.

Well, I've put the pictures on the 'net and I will now tell you about the experience. Note: pictures are hosted on joannagleason.com - unofficial home for the greatest actress. Hey, I already told you I was weird, so lay off already.

So, we get to the place and Porter begins learning about the camera. He tried to snag a pic of the cute traffic girl from NBC, but he soon learned taking pictures of a TV (from far away with a telephoto lens) wasn't a great idea.

I get called back and with Porter in toe I asked the first nurse if it would be okay to take pictures. His response after a long pause and stammering, "Of what?"

Well, Porter and I looked at each other, pondered saying something like, "Hey, ever see goatse?" but I spied my arm with a big cast on it and decided to instead suggest the obvious: "My arm?"

The nurse gave us several perplexed looks and sort of consented. He quickly left and then Nurse Dennis came in. To say he is a tad weird would be a gigantic understatement. Dennis is the guy who screwed up my first cast and I had to go back to get a different one.

Dennis was there to cut my cast off, and after some discussion about where he should cut (he wanted to do the sides of the arm, and I protested due to having metal pins sticking out of the sides of my arm) we got to work cutting. Then there was the reveal. Frank'n Arm!

So, with the cast off Porter and I were whisked to the X-Ray room and hung around in the waiting room. This one woman was initially grossed out by this guy sitting there with a big scar on his wrist and things sticking out of it. Her fears worsened when Porter began taking more photos of me, and photos of the posters, and photos of the drug sponsorships of the posters. She couldn't wait to get her X-Ray and leave.

Following my time with the radiation and the wait for development of the film we snagged some shots of the results. You can really see where the pins are, but I don't know about those arrow things that show up. I put my hand up next to film in this shot. Later I'll go back and lighten the hand part so you can see it better.

Then we went back to the little room to have the pins removed. Dennis set me up with a drape and went through the box of tools. Thankfully he skipped the quite rusty pair of pliers and went for a nice Stanley pair. He also got out a little metal pot with a lid and Porter wondered what was in there. Dennis explained: "Alcohol, but not the kind you drink... but I already had some of that this morning... not that you'd notice." Oh, we noticed, I assure you.

So, the doc came in, discussed physical therapy, donned a single rubber glove and after soaking me down in alcohol began pulling. He pulled with great ease and had this short thing in his hand. "Oh no, they broke," I worried. "Oh no, I missed it," worried Porter.

Well, it turns out those green things on the ends of my pins easily pop off. The bare metal bits were still there and with pliers in hand we began the pulling procedure.

First shot of pin-work is okay. This is my favorite shot of the de-pinning. I like all of them for obvious hardworking plier-hand (dig the white knuckles). This one is a coworker's favorite action shot.

What did it feel like to have metal spikes that have been in you for months suddenly uprooted? Well, imagine you have a HUDGE splinter in your arm, and someone is removing it by pulling it out your nose. That almost covers it.

Did I mention blood shoots out of the new holes in my arm? Yeah, that was a neat trick.

So, with pins out (which they let me keep) I went to the exit area to setup my followup appointment. While there nurse Dennis was out to call back another patient. He spotted the booty of a young mother waiting with me. Dennis then looked at Porter with a VERY approving look on his face.

While I'm still typing with a stump, I had to share two interesting train pictures.

The first one is of a neat engine set. These were recently restored, and during a night on the town with friends luvsbway spotted them and got all excited. To which the one friend, obviously not appreciating them, responded, "Yeah, two of them."

Recently luvsbway and I visited these engines in Altoona, PA and we got in the cab and luvsbway got to blow the horn.

Second picture is a hunt-and-peck. See if you can find the funny part of this shot.

So, I thought Wednesday was sole trying when I learned that I need surgery. I was all mope-y around the house. Scared, then annoyed and worried, and then really worried and scared again. Recovery time it going to be enormous, so there's no way I'll be reading or writing anything on the computer for quite some time to come. I'm not worried about the operation, just the arduous recovery.

What I'll be getting is a whole new wrist. Going to do arthroscopy on the cartilage (what little is left) and cut all of the tendons and shorten them. What else, oh yeah, put some sort of set of pins in (which will be left sticking out of my arm) and then get a cast until roughly the end of the year. After which the months of therapy will begin.

I have to learn how to do things with my other hand. Like: shave, eat, write, use the mouse, "bathroom activities," etcetera. Going to have to drive with one hand for a while, too. I probably won't have any use of my fingers on my bad hand for a long period of time as well due to the tendon separation. Fun stuff.

I'm figuring I can get over all that crap Thursday by going to work, and on the drive into work I get into a car accident. I'm only going 5 miles door-to-door to get to work. Sheesh. Now, I have to deal with the car insurance people, and the health people, and file for time off from work, and coordinate all of that... ::sigh:: It is totally the other person's fault, but I still haven't heard from her insurance company about things. Basically, she made a right turn from the left hand lane and cut me off as I was also turning right, but legally, from the right hand lane. My car was made in the early 80s, in America, from metal. Hers is from 2002, plastic, Hyundia. Mine is missing a turn signal. Hers has a long dent down the side. Ding, I win!

At least so far today, Friday, nothing terribly bad has happened to me. I went out for some sushi to work my mind off of things. I'm going to pour some stiff drinks here soon and fade away in a drunken blur from reality.

So, I'm going away for a long while. Not that I've really been posting all that much lately, but I do read over 5 JEs a day from you guys. However, now I'll *really* be going to be away. FFL guys, do whatever you can or want to with my team in my absence. I have a little time left to set lineups.

I will leave you with this thought. This is a passage of a typo from a friend of mine.

him: its like playing with a loaded guy you know its only a matter of time before it goes off in your face
him: loaded gun rather
me: lol
him: LMFAO

Steam - it is the greatest lure of railroading. It is a mystery: part danger, part love. When a train runs on steam there is a different smell, a taste to the air, and definitely a deeper feeling.

Sorry, I just love steam power. Sure, it is nearly Flintstone Technology (TM) with its age, but any one of the latter steam engines had more horsepower than two or three modern super diesels put together. Steam wasn't replaced due to lack of power; it was the maintenance costs that got it.

There is a definite romance with steam. I have models of steam engines that run on my electric track and I can hear the clack of the wheels as they go across sections of track, and I can remember how trains used to be, but this is like Real Doll (TM), a simulation.

Give me fuel, give me fire, give me that which I desire - STEAM!

Well, until now steam was restricted to "larger" environments. There are some full-size running steam locomotives out there - nice to look at and admire, these are like the fashion models: they are all over magazines, famous internationally, you can look, but don't touch. I want something I can touch.

Then there are the smaller scale live steam things, most of which you can ride. These are typically reserved for the rich or for clubs. Clubs are like the brothels of trains, you go there for your fix, but you pay lots of money to use something now and then that isn't yours and you can't keep. I guess they work well, but I still lust for more.

Next down in size would have to be G-Scale live steam. G-Scale is what you put in the garden. It is large enough to be fun and handle the outdoor environments, but I don't have a garden, and I'm no gardener. I have a G-Scale train that runs out on the porch, it is fun and all, but I don't have my own railroad. I recently met up with a guy who lives not too far from me who has a spectacular G-Scale setup in his garden, but no live steam. I guess I could get my fix with buying an engine to run at his place, but this is sort of like being in a club.

Well, surprise surprise, there's a new train in town. Hornby has come out with a live steam engine that is HO scale (technically OO, but that's British, it is basically HO, I'll save the discuss for another day).

See, the danger of steam is the fire - an open flame doesn't make for safety these days. But Hornby has really reduced that by using an immersion electric heater. You simply put distilled water in the tender and it is heated by track power - just simple electricity. No lighting flames that go out, or keeping the fuel topped off.

A major draw back of the G-Scale live steam is control. The tiny engines have tiny control valves in their tiny cabs, and I have big fingers. Plus, when the engine goes by you at faster-than-you-can-walk speed how are you going to cut the throttle back? Well, most G'ers use hacked up RC Car parts to control the levers. But, this Hornby engine uses pulses sent on the track power to control mechanisms to set the engine forward or reverse and to control the speed. (To stop use reverse to decelerate)

Now, I have the potential for real steam, which I can run safely indoors without the pains and hassles of so many of the drawbacks of other live steam engines. This is like getting a sexy woman for at home that isn't high maintenance.

Oh, and did I mention it has a whistle? Yup, she screams in bed, too!

Have I pushed this analogy too far, yet?

Only thing keeping me from getting one right now is the price. While reasonable given all that you get and it is less than what I paid for the famous engine, it is British looking (sorry, chaps, I'm an American railroader). The price is on par with what a decent brass model in the scale would cost. A good value when you consider it is an actual working steam engine with advanced electronic controls.

But what I am really hoping for is that this engine is a sign of things to come. To train people this is like seeing a windowing environment when all you've seen thus far is DOS 6.22. Just look how far Windows has come since 3.1 days... I can only imagine the neato live steam trains to appear on the market 10 years from now.

A video of the first model released can be found here (link goes to site for Scale Electric USA)

So, if you recall, in this previous journal I was talking about a friend who made by hand four engines. You may also recall that two of them were cosmetically altered leaving only two of the style I so desperately admire. Of the two, my good friend Bob owns one. The other appeared lost to history.

Built in or around 1965 it was given to a man in the late 1960s, who had a change in jobs and was forced to move to Kentucky. Following another move (suspected to be within the region, but not sure where) everyone that I know lost touch with this lucky engine owner.

The builder spent the remaining years of his life trying to track down this one engine. Not so much to re-acquire it, but just to learn whatever happened to it.

The builder had started several more of the engines, but when his eyes got too old he consciously stopped working. Rather than sacrifice quality he'd sacrifice quantity, even though he promised several people engines when he finished more.

Following the death of the builder several of these people tried to track down the missing engine. Two even joined forces to take the remaining parts pile and try to at least complete one, using the known engine is an original to work from.

The train treasure hunters would track down every single photograph of a model engine of this style to see if it could be the lost engine. I even got into the game in the past 5 years or so, using the internet to track down modelers whose photos appeared in magazines and ask them some questions about their locomotives in an attempt to find the engine.

Well, guess what I found on eBay?

Yup, the lost engine. Guess when said auction ended? On my birthday!

So, the lost engine has been returned. She sits in the living room right now. She needs fresh paint (was stripped by the seller, a model-train estate broker who bought out the collection from a passed-on train guy in Ohio, just on the Kentucky border), and she hasn't yet been put on the rails and tested.

That will come soon. She will also get the chance to be reunited with her sister engine and a whole lot of people who haven't seen her in roughly 30 years.

The only people thus far to really know about me having her would be my family and Bob. I figure I'll have to plan some sort of unveiling to the others soon. Tomorrow I'm going to meet a man who paints engines like this one and see if I can talk him out of retirement from painting to restore this special loco.

The seller that I got the engine from suggested we write a story about this and submit it for one of the model train magazines. While we may just do that, right now I want to get her back to home rails and let the Reading ride again.

Oh, and I bet you want to see some pictures, don't you.

Well, following are several of her that I took, some with her posed with my 3-Rail Lionel engine of the same type. It should give you an idea of what it will look like painted.

Pair
Under the hood
Drivers
Side by Side
Flip the top off
Motor

The detail level is unmatched: there is a working suspension system, chains on the tender trucks, cast bronze tender floor with ribs in it - something on the real engines but never seen unless you turn the tender over, a detail no sane person would bother modeling.

So, in my job at work I am hopefully migrating into more of a trainer role. As part of that job I will be working to better my department as well as another. This would include training new hires as well as bettering the existing staff.

In order to find weaknesses within our staff I would be monitoring some of our staff's customer interactions and then grading them. Fine and dandy.

Well, today I received a big book of Sun's customer interaction guidelines, and while most of it is lifeless banter I found one suggested phrase to be quite humorous.

"It is impressive, isn't it?"

This was listed as a good thing to say to a customer, along with other obvious choices like, "Yes, we can do that for you" and, "Thank you for choosing Sun."

For the life of me I couldn't think of an appropriate time to say that phrase when dealing with a customer. So, I shared the phrase with my co-workers. Well, I tried to, but by the time I reached that point I was laughing so hard I had to wipe away the tears... the visions of times I could have said that when I was dealing with customers... oh man.

So, my one peer, we'll call him Frank, because that's his name, said he would work the phrase into his next phone call. So, we all waited for the phone to ring.

Frank shortly got a call and was assisting a customer. At one point Frank asked the customer to run prtdiag -v and collect the output to email back to Frank. When the customer ran the command Frank interjected, "It is impressive, isn't it?" and threw the call onto muted speakerphone.

Customer: "What??? Do you have your girlfriend there or something??"

Immediately the department busted out in laughter.

Ok, so to sum up in one of those executive summary things:

I gots me a new jorb working for Sun Microsystems.

If you want to reach me at work, my email address is the pride and joy of the job:

I'm simply god at sun dot com.

That's right, I'm god.

You got a problem with that?

Didn't think so.

I spent last week up at the Sun campus in Burlington, MA. If it wasn't for the high cost of living in that area, and the rumor that 250 people got laid off in buidling 3 last week, I'd want to move up there in a heart-beat.

I'll post a few pix of me doing nerdly things (mostly along the lines of "Look what I caught" photos, only replace the marlin with a Sun [insert large number] server). Probably tomorrow during work if I get bored, which is rare.

Yeah, I guess one could say that this is heaven given my name here and all, and sadly this is the kind of job where I could easily become a work-a-holic (I already go in at 6:30AM now and stay until 5PM, pretty much being pushed out by my manger by that point, only to ponder at 8PM if I went back to work what more could I get done).

I was hoping to come into this job to learn a lot of Sun things, to be the low man on the rank of UNIX weenies. I'm sad to report I'm the technical person everyone now goes to in the group with questions. I had a week of training, and I honestly think I was more qualified than the instructor for that course. That's been the most depressing thing: to get to work for the company I held so high to find out the people there (at least the ones I deal with) aren't who I thought they were. I'm sure the good ones are around somewhere, I just haven't found what rock to look under yet. I really want to get some training in some other things, hopefully I can get approval to get that stuff (the training I got was forced stuff, decided before I was even hired that I would do, couldn't get out of it, teacher did a fine job for the subject, it just wasn't a good subject for me at this time).

Well, one customer of Sun did put me in my place when he sent me a scathing email proclaiming his genius to my idiocy. At one point he did appologize when I pointed out to him the gigantic flaw in his entire design of "logic." * But that was quickly followed up with more calling me an idiot and complaining how poorly educated Sun people are. Ahhhh, put in my place again. I should post that email, it's true genius in action.

Ever notice how the people who are so quick to talk up their expereince, to tell you they used to work for [your company] and blah blah blah really are idiots? Yeah, I just love to let them continue to tell me they are high and mighty and at carefully planned times subtly point out that the empreror has no clothes. Idiocy I can handle, in fact sometimes I aprecate it when presented with honesty as compared to the other way true idiocy presents itself: arrogance. Idiocy coupled with arrogance is a joyous marriage. I'll be the first person to tell you what I don't know, but I'll never tell you what you don't know. Deal?

Well, I'm going to get some rest to get to work bright and early tomorrow. Look for my handy work on future sunsolve docs.

* - This genius apparently calls into the Sun Helpdesk all the time (I researched him after he went off on me), I got him because he called in about a known bug report involving adding drives to a particular type of storage array. I suggested he run some commands to work around the problem (these commands were listed in the sun solve bug report), and his responce was that they wouldn't work. Not that they didn't, just that they wouldn't. He never did run the commands as this supposed machine wasn't put together yet. I then asked for some more specifics about his setup to anticipate anything unique he perhaps hadn't told me to this point that could infere with the info I gave him, when I quickly learned that the hardware he had was infact something other than what was listed for this bug. Sort of the automotive equivalent of "Hey, I heard there's this problem with distributors in V8 cars..." "Sir, you have to find top dead center..." "No, that won't work..." "Okay, open your hood and tell me what you see" "I see something that says 'Dodge Neon'" "Umm, sir, you have a neon, that's not a V8, this problem doesn't apply to you." He still insisted I tell him the commands that would solve the problem. Sort of like "Well, okay, fine, so I have a neon, how do I change the distributor for the V8." At this point I suggested perhaps a course from Sun Education Services might do him a little good. My job isn't teaching customers how to make their happy little arrays. I know that in reading that line there it sounds like I was being arrogant, but really it was said as a suggestion for furthering the use of Sun tools and other nice ways of putting it. Trust me, I can have tact when I want to. This guy was a real piece of work, getting far enough with help desk people pretending he knew what he was talking about and not even attempting the suggestions I made. I noticed after I pointed out he didn't even have a system capable of doing what he initially wanted he called the Sun helpdesk again and opened another case for the same issue. (He wanted to create a RAID array using drives of different sizes in a 1+0 format, using a device that only has no controller, well, he thought he had another storage device that had an extra controller and had a bug, but he didn't).

Aserejé, ja de je de jebe tu de jebere sebiunouva
majavi an a bugui an a buididipí

Oh what wonders we develop when we link trains and computers. The Union Pacific engine 3895 (called a Challenger) is on the move, and you can track its current position live via the Internet.

From this page you can see the overall planned route and the current location. If you zoom all the way in you can get street level maps of the area and see how the tracks flow across the country.

The train is moving to Houston for some fund raising activities for the George Bush Presidential Library, M. D. Anderson Cancer Center and Points of Light Foundation. You can also check out a detailed planned schedule online as well.

UP has two really nice (and large for you modem users) shots of 3895 that you may enjoy: here and here.

Yup, rejected from front page. I didn't think it had a chance, but it may still be interesting to some of you here.