Poppy Cedes

So, a Thursday in the not too distant past I showed up for Karl‘s radio show with special guest Sheila. And in the chat room appeared Vahid.

One innocent question from me to my geek brethren, something in the phrase family of “what Netbook do you own?” and now I am the proud owner of the Samsung N110 Netbook.

I CAN COMPUTE FROM THE COUCH NOW! AND THE BED! AND THE KITCHEN COUNTER! AND THE FLOOR! AND THE… toilet. (what?)

And the shower! But why would I do that.

It even has a sucky camera! See?!?!

And Poppy did rejoice.

And so did Dawggy, because I can sit next to him now AND sit next to you, too.

There’s nothing new about me now that I’m 35.

I bought a vertical laptop bag today. I need a messenger bag because carrying the weight on my back is painful, but having a horizontal bag is really awkward on the train. Plus, if I get another laptop bag for my birthday I’ll have two! (Yah, don’t have all my presents yet, not sure what they all are, excited to find out, do not mind duplicates. :)

Geek speak is about to occur. Read through it, it might save you or your IT Guy (gender neutral) hours of annoyment. ;)

(I made that word up.)

Between yesterday and today I spent 6 hours trying to figure out why someone’s BlackBerry stopped checking in with the Black[B]erry Enterprise Server (BES) at 6:33am on Saturday, July 25. 633725 — nope, nothing significant about that, so what the hell? Today I finally got the bright idea to try to add her email account to my phone — it worked, so I knew it wasn’t her account on server that was causing the problem! So I tried adding my email account to her phone! And it got STUCK at the same spot! So I had a hunch and called the provider… They had no record of her being on a BES plan, which means her phone was NEVER, EVER going to be able to both send and receive mail through Enterprise Activation. Why had it ever worked before? I don’t know, but I have an ignorant theory (ignorant because I don’t know the details of how phones work) and it goes something like this: There is some way to allow phones to activate on a BES server without a BES plan that costs more money, but BlackBerry’s service providers (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, Nextel) would prefer that you pay for the service so if your phone randomly happens to connect even without that plan a little cleanup script is run at certain intervals that checks in with your phone and deactivates your phone’s mechanism for connecting. I think it has to do with the Desktop [CMIME] service book, personally, but again that’s just a hunch since I don’t know what I’m talking about at the granular level. My bottom line recommendation: Call your cell phone provider first and innocently say, “I’m having a little trouble connecting this phone to my BlackBerry Enterprise Server. Is my phone on a BES plan?” and if they say no tell them to add you. Don’t ask why it’s worked for forever and suddenly stopped, just accept it and move on, and once they add BES to the phone it will magically work again.

Geek speaking is over.

I went to the zoo on my birthday and took some really great photos, but my favorite one is this one:

I love that we are such little kids together. It makes my heart happy.

Technically, Dawg took that photo, as you can tell by his left arm placement, but it was at my request when I could not figure out how to angle the camera to get the totem pole from the background into the shot. He showed me how. He’s a pro. He rocks.

A few notes about my birthday weekend: I did not knock over any of my beverages at the fondue place Friday night, but Saturday I did knock an almost full scalding hot cappuccino into Dawg’s crotch area while he was telling me a story about his younger vollies days, then Sunday at Jekyll & Hyde Club my Coach purse knocked over Dawg’s mostly full soda glass after he’d already gotten up. Oh, and I totally heckled one of the J&H guys who was picking on a girl from Houston at the table next to us. He would not leave her alone, which he is supposed to do while she eats her main meal, so I finally asked, “what’cha got in that glass? Looks like a Hurricane glass! Ya got a Hurricane in there?” and he muttered something about it being water and skulked away. Apparently he did not like the implication that he appeared drunk, even though he totally did appear drunk, but then again I had consumed a Chimay White (9%) and a Chimay Red (7%) (none of my favorite, Chimay Blue (12%), in the house) so I was tipsy.

I love being me. :)

Ok, resume your day. Good to see you. :)

Thursday I received my enhanced driver license! I can now return to the United States from Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean! But Dawg still has his regular one so I won’t be leaving the country without him until he has it… or unless I am forced for work purposes to go to our Canada branch. Could happen. (Dawggy, hurry up and get one!!!)

I also applied for my EZ Pass, cuz it’s super annoying to have to slow down and get in a lane for paying with the money. By the way, don’t bother asking the people at the toll booths for EZ Pass applications like the sign says. Know why? THEY DON’T HAVE ANY. They ran out in 1987.

I had a super enjoyable train ride to work, and very successful day at work, a great not-actual-discovery-but-perhaps-rediscovery of grubhub.com which has 199 restaurants in my area that deliver to my office and means I never need to leave the office during the day ever again. I then had a very nice ride home on the train. But then I got home to no Dawggy and got bent completely out of shape and only recovered by taking a shower. I’m the reason we haven’t seen each other a lot lately, but apparently I’m still selfish and immature and need to hang out under super hot water to get rid of my frustration… and then get laid. Thank goodness for getting laid at 8:30pm, at old people doin’ it time.

You may or may not have seen my tweet that K T Ligesh — creator of LxAdmin, HyperVM, and Kloxo — took his life after a series of vulnerabilities in the products he created allowed nefariati to take down over 100,000 websites from a single web hosting company. Many of the website purchasers were not paying for a plan that included backups of the websites so those sites are *poof* gone. It is unclear what Ligesh’s specific motivations were for taking his life — if related to business troubles or the loss of both his sister and mother to suicide five years ago, but no matter what this is a sad reality.

Black Eyed Peas came out with a new album called The Energy.Never.Dies. It’s very good. And I hope it’s true. Optimism.

This was circulated around my office today. On paper. So we couldn’t click the link.

Because I’m nice, I’ll give you the link to the FBI *and* to Snopes: FBI | Snopes

Notice anything? This scam is from June 2006. It’s June 2008. Why the hell are we circulating this now? Because the administrative assistant was bored! That’s why.

I am well rounded, suck it.

70% Geek

Thanks to my girl Sour for the quiz idea.

*Not really, because I know several of you would actually enjoy that and that disturbs me.

PS – I love this blog. I love that I can future date posts and they publish themselves. I could be dead right now, but because I told this post to publish at 7:46am on December 13 it just magically will do it!!!!

moar funny pictures

My brother and I call computers ‘puters (sounding like “pewters”) between us. Do you do that?

Tools to re-affix my keyboard keys:

…which also double as serial killer tools for people pretending to be dentists.

The USB drive has the actual manual about how to use said tools with my MacBook Pro. I am giddy.

I kinda take offense to this GMail ad:

I mean, I don’t even like hot sauce. What ever gave them the idea that I do?