The Crapolla According to Fek'Lar

You Know You're DOOMED When...

you start understanding why your favorite bars has 12 different varieties of Tequila.

You've stumbled onto another issue of The Crapolla, a journal written for software professionals. No not the managers; I mean the people who do the work.

This Crapolla is sponsored by...

In This Issue...

What do those buzzwords on the computer case really mean?

Take A Letter

Wishing to throw full cans of Diet Coke at their sorry heads,
-Harold (still a doctoral student)

Hey Harold,

The University of Nevada, Reno is, indeed, a superior institution of higher learning. For, although the topic is out of your particular area of study, the University is properly preparing you for life in the "Real World". (Not that a Ph.d. will ever set foot in it.)

I remember my days at the Klingon High Command where I was never given write access to my home directory. I later learned that having write access to a disk was a violation of the company's security policy.

This sort of non-sense happens all the time in the "Real World". And although you are attempting to over-educate yourself to the point of only being able to gain employment at the University of Nevada, Reno, it is important you understand what we lesser-degreed "little people" go through regularly.

I must admit that I was surprised by your letter. I would have thought you used to such road blocks while working on your Ph.d. My eldest Niece, who now insists I address her as "Doctor Niece", received her Ph.d. in Pigology. I remember how much bullshit (er, pigshit) she went through to get her fancy hat.

Cheer up! Soon enough, you will be a crusty old Professor complaining to freshmen that they ought not to use two spaces at the end of a typed sentence, while scrawling at the top of a sexy co-ed's paper, "See Me".

Happy to contribute this small bit to your further over-education,
Fek

Disaster Averted!

We dodged a major bullet in June. It's the sort of thing that can destroy a society. We can just thank our lucky stars this time.

Porn Star Paris Hilton was released from jail just days before the iPhone launch. Had this not happened, there would have been a critical shortage of "Journalists" who write about trivial crap. This imbalance could have triggered a time/space inversion that would have made the simultaneous flushing of all the toilets in the Pentagon a mere plumber's nightmare.

It could only have been worse if Paris Hilton had left jail, and headed straight into the arms of Steve Jobs, who presented her with an iPhone; (rich people do not pay for anything) resulting in Larry King having a fatal heart attack.

This is the sort of un-natural disaster that keeps me awake at night.

Just in From the Front

Could someone please check the calendar? This one stinks of the 1990's. The guys over at hackint0sh.org cracked the passwords on the iPhone. You would think Apple would have followed standard security protocols and used passwords with mixed case, a few numbers, a few special characters. You would think that, and you would be wrong.

The password for root is "alpine". The "mobile" user account's password is "dottie". What you can do with these, I don't know at this time, but it does tell us two things. The iPhone's Product Manager's wife's name is Dottie, and they live on Alpine Road.

If only we had learned their dog's Social Security Number.

Planning Obsolescence

I was looking at an old Sun Ultra 5 box that's taking up room in a lab, but not actually plugged in. At one time, the Ultra was ultra. Wouldn't it be great if the buzzword on the machine's case changed over time to reflect the machine's true power relative to Moore's Law?

The machine could start at Ultra, then degrade to Mega, Super, Mediocre, Slow Poke, and finally Pathetic. This would make purchasing decisions simpler and easier to justify. You could get budget to replace all Slow Poke machines before they become Pathetic. Who wouldn't agree to this?

Just What Do You Do With a Busted Computer?

I mentioned in Crap 200704 that my old iBook 700 finally took the big dirt nap. The trouble was there was a hard drive in the machine. I've stopped putting personal data on internal drives because of the security risks that crop up when computers need service. But even so, I don't believe in tossing a hard drive full of data into the scrap heap where anyone and his brother can get their paws on it.

The iBook 700 was assembled by the Keebler Elves. That's the only conclusion a sane person could come up with from seeing how it was built. Apple designed the box to only allow the end user to add memory and a WiFi card without seven years of surgery schooling.

Before the machine had gone completely tits-up, I had transferred the data to my new UMP. There's a feature in the modern Mac where, if you hold down the "T" key during boot, the machine turns into an external Firewire drive. Then you run a migration agent on the new machine, and it sucks all your stuff over to the new drive. That's way better than relying on your backup to actually work!

Now that the iBook was 100% non-critical, and in fact dead, I thought I'd open it up anyway. Either I would crack the case and find a loose connection I could fix, or I'd keep digging until I got to the drive and harvest the sucker. When I ripped the keyboard's ribbon cable, I knew we were going for the harvest. But, damn! I have a great collection of tiny screws!

For 20 bucks I bought a small drive enclosure, connected it to another computer and formatted the drive. The data is now killed. The computer has been recycled. Too bad I'm not an electrical engineer. There was a good screen on that machine that could have been used for an electronic picture frame.

So what do you do when a hard drive dies and takes data with it? In this case, the drive was still good and usable. But when a drive dies people assume everything that was on the platters has gone to the bit bucket in the sky.

I've heard stories of people whose drive died, sent the machine in for repair, got a new drive put in, and was told that the repair place grinds the drives up. Then, months later, get a phone call from someone who bought the drive at a surplus sale, repaired it, and found financial data.

For this reason, any drive that dies gets disassembled by me. I'm collecting the platters to make a wind chime.

This Issue's Headline submission to the National Daily World Enquiring Globe.

Bush Says He'll Ballance The Budget by 2012!

U.S. to Start Pillaging Countries After We Bomb The Crap Out Of Them

Let's play, "Who said this?"

Heard in the halls of various software companies.

"You know, I've done some pretty good work for this customer, and he's going to resent it."

"I can speak Sales, MBA, and Stupid."
"Isn't Sales and Stupid redundant?"
"No, it's a change in dialect."

"Please share your drugs."

"Tickets are my crack!"

"'Tricky' is British for 'Doesn't work.'"

"My phone is psychologically damaged."
"What did you say to it?"

Excuse Me

Manager Number Six seems to be missing.

Fek'Lar
They pay me to think. These are my thoughts. Do you think they are getting their money's worth?

Remember: The Crapolla contains my personal opinions. That's right they're mine, so get your own! And you kids get off my lawn!

Although written with the software professional in mind, my mind tends to wander all over the place, and I sometimes write about politics, mass stoopidity, dumb things I saw, and whatever else comes to mind.

From time to time, I use salty language, thus The Crapolla is not intended for children, or certain people in the Bush Administration.

This whole mess is copyright © 2007 by LowComDom Performances, all rights reserved. Wanna send this to your friends? Go ahead and pass out the URL.

feed available from http://www.lowcomdom.com/crapolla/index.rss

EOJ

<-- Read the previous Crapolla   or   Read the next Crapolla -->