I’ll start with the milestone first.

It happened last month but I didn’t notice ’til today. My blog has received over 10,000 page views since I moved it to the new site in September of last year.

Now granted, it’s the same 20 people coming back over and mainly but with my posting falling off lately I’d like to thank those that still do come back and check out what I’m writing.

When push comes to shove, I think being read is why most writers write.

Now moving on to a related topic. Jason over at Clarity of Night is having another short fiction contest. It will be posted on his site on Wednesday. I have entered his last five contests and finally managed to eek out an Honorable Mention in the last one. The contests he puts on are so much fun.

He places a photo on his web site, you must come up with a story of no more than 250 words inspired by the photo. The first time I entered, I thought, pfft it’s only an internet contest I can dash something off in 15 minutes at lunch send it in and have a chance.

Well, I was little prepared for the quality of his reader’s entries. A few published authors participate, yeah, people who actually get paid to write professionally. Needless to say in the subsequent contests I took a little more time and effort in the crafting of my entry.

Go and visit his site, read all the entries, I think you will enjoy them. He has links to the past contests as well on his right sidebar.

And finally we move to the owies. I went down to the pool yesterday with book in hand intending to sit in the shade reading and shooting the shit with the wifey as she lazed in the pool.

I ended up hopping into the pool for a little while and foolishly neglected the whole sunscreen thing. I didn’t burn horribly but enough to make me cranky on the Monday following a long weekend.

I can watch this clip over and and over. It makes me laugh over and over.

You don’t even have to know the back story, although there is one that makes it even that much funnier.

The follow up video is also very funny.

We have a new employee working in our area.

He is very, very quiet.

I actually this very second asked a co-worker how long the new guy has been here. Between the 2 of us, we’ve come up that it has to be about 6 weeks now.

In that 6 weeks, I may have heard him say a maximum of 5-8 words.

He is a work machine. He comes in, he works hard his whole 8 hour shift, he does not screw around, he does a great job. If I were an employer I would clone him.

When the jokes between my co-workers are being tossed back and forth, I can see him smiling while he works, even silently holding in laughter.

But when he leaves for the day, maybe 1 time in a week as he passes me by, I will say goodnight. He has never responded. Not even a mumble.

There was a time, when this would have bugged the shit out of me.  For some reason, in this case, it’s not bothering me. Maybe he is insanely shy, maybe he just doesn’t like me. I’m not really overly concerned about it I just notice that I am reacting in a very different way than I would have 5 years ago.

The question is, am I maturing or am I just no longer giving a fuck? Are they the same thing?

The wife is out of the country for a week and I am still swamped at work.

I should be partying, drinking and carousing, but instead I am building Frankenstein computers from hobbled together components at work to keep things up and running for everybody while keeping the computer budget down.

I bet she’s  carousing right this very second as I write this….

There is no justice.

George Carlin died yesterday.

I didn’t find out til I walked in the office this morning and my co-worker told me. I didn’t watch the news yesterday.

It was like walking into a room and having someone punch you in the stomach.

The man was a genius and he will be sorely missed.

Ok, are you a big web surfer?

If so go to www.firefox.com and download the latest version of the Firefox web browser.

It is FAST.

Now you wouldn’t think a browser would make a huge difference, I mean the speed of your interent line remains as a constant right? Well, these days with the complexity of web pages and how they have to refer to a whole lot of differnt files when it comes to the placement of the images and text, the browser does make a huge difference.

Now you’ll be able to look at twice the amount of Lolcats and gossip on facebook, you’ll be downloading that fast!

Apparently this is not a skill being passed on to the general cashier populace lately.

No less than 3 times in the last 2 weeks cashiers at various outlets have tried to make me $5 richer.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’d love the extra $5 that they are trying to foist off on me, but I know that if they are short $5 on the till more than likely it’s going to come out of their paycheck at the end of the day.

I also know that it is more than likely they don’t make too much more than $10 an hour doing what they do. I am not going to screw them out of a half hour of their life at a thankless job for $5.

Now what’s really funny is in different circumstances where I know that the cashier is not going to get dinged for the mistake, I’ll take the largess.

For example a year or so ago when buying carpet protectors for around our computer desks, we bought 2 at the same time, one for each of our desks. I think they were each $30 We brought both of them up to the counter as well as an office chair and various other office supplies.

Now the clerk didn’t scan both of the carpet protectors. I noticed, the wife noticed but apparently the 3 other cashiers and 1 manager standing there watching the whole process and chatting with each other didn’t. (It was about 15 minutes before closing)

Now I know that since I noticed I didn’t pay, I was therefore shoplifting. The next 60 people buying carpet protectors will probably get hit with a .50 cent increase in price because I ended up getting one for free.

Apparently I have no issues screwing 60 people out of .50 cents but I won’t screw a single person out of $5.

I’m still swamped but I am still alive.

Looks like the trend is hitting the blogosphere though.

3 of the blogs I read regularly just closed up shop. Killer is starting a new business and is going on hiatus leaving Liz on her poor little lonesome.

I feel for ya Liz, keep a stiff upper lip and leech off Killer when he’s all rich and successful for me.

I will post more frequently and better stuff in the near future. Honest.

So the big boss comes into my little area of the office today and says, “Dave, what happened to your horse?”

My first thought is, “What in the fuck are you talking about?”

So of course I say, “What in the fuck are you talking about?” … in my head and then the self preservation filter in my head equates profanity + boss = bad and spits out the more appropriate response of , “Huh?”

He says, weren’t you a big Big Brown fan? Then it clicks into place that ok hey he’s talking about the Belmont and the failure of Big Brown to tie up the third leg of the Triple Crown. So I said, I wasn’t a Big Brown fanatic but I did feel sorry for Kent, the jockey, because I hear he’s a nice guy.

All of the sudden Tino pops in to the conversation and says, “So, THAT”S why he finished last!”

So my trivia calendar a couple of days ago asked, “When it comes to music, what is a Mondegreen?”

A Mondegreen is a misheard musical lyric. When I think of misheard lyrics, it always reminds me of a comedy skit that I saw on a Just For Laughs “best of” show about 8 years ago. The skit is embedded below in a slightly different format.

The funny thing about today’s post is this; I thought the skit was performed by a great comedy troupe called Radio Free Vestibule. Now Radio Free Vestibule have changed their name to just, “The Vestibules” and I scoured their web site looking for a recording of the skit below. As it turns out it wasn’t there because the people in the skit are The Vacant Lot.

The cool part is that I really wanted to hear the skit again, so I wrote to The Vestibules via their website describing the skit and asking if it was them. I got a reply, “Nope not us, The Vacant Lot maybe?” I think it was great that they didn’t get offended at my confusion, they pointed me in the right direction and that they replied the same day. So go to the Vestibules page and buy something if you like the free samples they have because they were nice to me and I fully support that.

Damn it has been really busy at work.

It doesn’t look to get much better for a couple of weeks.

Today 2 top officials resigned over the topic I wrote about on Sept 11th of last year.

It took 9 months for the investigation and something to be done about the people in charge of accidentally flying nuclear missiles around the country improperly.

Wonder what else happened in those 9 months?

So I play this horribly addictive online game called World of Warcraft.

It is an MMORPG which stands for Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. There are 5 million other people all over the world that play.

Essentially it is thousands of people playing a “Dungeons and Dragons” type of game together on the computer at the same time. Whenever you see another person walk by you in the game 99% of the time it’s a real person controlling it in a different part of the country or in the apartment next door, you just never know.

Your character in the game does little missions to make money and get better gear like armor and swords and wands and such.

If you want the better swords and armor and gear and such, you get a group of people together to beat up one of the big monsters in the game that you could never beat by yourself.

The people that get together on a regular basis tend to join a guild together so they can pool resources, hang out an help each other. I run such a little group.

There are places in the game that you just can’t get to unless you have 10 people with all the right little bits of armor and swords and jewelry to beat the big bad monsters. The 10 people all have to do different things in the right order and at the right time. It’s a bit harder than it sounds.

Well tonight 10 of the people in my little club got together and beat one of the harder monsters in the game.

Now a lot of guilds have done it; it’s not considered a big deal to anyone that has played the game for a long time because so many people have already done it, but it was really cool for me because a) it was the first time I had done it and b) I got to help people that never would have been able to do it with a different group.

The other guilds that do these 10 or 25 person parts of the game tend to be incredibly serious about the game. It makes me happy that we can at least do some of the harder 10 man parts and still be just a group of friends having fun.

Now I’ll be ecstatically happy if I can ever get to the point where I can get 25 people on at the same time with the same laid back fun attitude.

I’ve been working for the last week and a half to recover from the crash of an e-mail server at work.

The process has covered 3 stages.

Stage 1

Emergency Mode. Show everyone that even though their saved e-mails and calendars are not accessible, they can still e-mail in and out using a web browser.

Stage 1 took less than an hour

Stage 2

Order parts for hardware failure.

Completely fuck up and order the wrong parts.

Wait an extra day to get new parts, rma wrong parts.

Replace bad hardware. Try to do a full restore of data that does not work. Decide that up and running with all tools if more important than saved data at the moment. Restore all users to blank slate calendars and inbox. Some users had cached copies of data on local drives and lost nothing.

Total Time 6 days, 2 waiting for parts.

Stage 3

Actual Data recovery.

Total Time 4 days.

Total amount of Time that I thought I may be completely screwed and wasn’t going to get a stitch of data back 3.9 days.

In stage 2 and 3 total number of requests, “Are the e-mails and calendars restored yet?” 3,837.

How close did I come to hitting co-workers in stage 2 and 3? .76 microns.

Tech articles read on the subject of restoring exchange databases in 2 weeks? 1,873.

Number of tech articles that offered valuable insightful knowledge that helped me restore the data? 2

Number of those articles put out by Microsoft or Symantec the creators of the software that I am using? 0

I’m going home early today. I deserve it.

While not completely crushed by the weight of the world anymore, I’m still by no means caught up.

Projects due the week of “the big crash” have now become overdue and more than urgent.

I hope that I will get back to blogging about more interesting and upbeat topics soon and on more of a daily basis.

Today I feel as if it’s almost safe to raise my head out of my foxhole.

It is the first time I’ve had a breather this week.

My last couple of posts had been rather abrupt and plaintive. I had suffered the nastiest of plights that an IT guy can suffer, the loss of the main e-mail server.

My, my, what did we ever do before e-mail? Apparently no one around here can remember either.

There were 2 things that really got me down about the whole situation. The first was that the situation was considered earth shattering. I didn’t agree with this assessment. E-mail never stopped. I had set up such a system that even if our e-mail server committed hari-kari like it did, all users could still send and receive e-mail through their browsers. Not one minute went by that we were not able to send and receive e-mails.

The second thing that bothered me was the assumption that everything is a 10 minute fix in the computer world. If your car breaks down on the freeway and you have it towed to the mechanic, do you expect to have it back within the hour? I don’t think so.

But through the entire experience I have to say my boss as always was a complete trooper. She stood up for me, she understood what was going on at every step and she went to bat for me every time someone started breathing down my neck looking for answers.

So 3 cheers for the good bosses out there.