Month: September 2012

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Oh Suh-NAP!

This is gonna leave a mark:

"Barney Frank is a distinguished and honorable public servant. He has faced nearly 40 years of unspeakable hatred and persecution for being the most prominent and outspoken openly gay elected official in the country. Regardless of what he has to say about Log Cabin Republicans, the notion that they would suggest a man as brave and upstanding as Congressman Frank is either cowardly or a bully is both deluded and absurd.

"The true bullies are the hate-mongers in the GOP who want to strip us of our rights and shove us back into the closet. And 'cowardly'? Cowardly is making pathetic excuses for the backward and misguided anti-LGBT policies of your Party. The Log Cabin Republicans are the most weak-kneed, sycophantic apologists I've ever encountered. After their dismal performance at the RNC convention driving the GOP platform even farther to the right, they should give back all the money they've fleeced from their donors and close the doors." ~ Jerame Davis, National Stonewall Democrats executive director, via press release, in response to this.

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One of Those Days

Today started out—before I even left the house—with me putting my thumb through one of the flimsy styrofoam cups you get drinks in from Sonic. Iced tea all over the floor.

This forced me to stop at Starbucks on the way to work. First time I've been to this particular store, and I wasn't impressed.  Line to the door and the baristas seemed unconcerned about getting people in and out in a hurry.

I arrived at work to discover that my Windows password was no longer working. I had just changed it a couple weeks ago, so it's not like it expired, or (like a lot of the people that work here) that I'd forgotten it over the span of a 3 day weekend. It was no big deal; I went into the server room and logged into the admin workstation there as administrator and went to fire up AD "Users and Computers" so I could reset the password.  I clicked on the link and waited. And waited. And waited. Oh, it seems Flash decided to update at that very moment.  Waited some more. Machine locked up. Tried to shut down and restart. MMC wasn't shutting down.  Fuck it.  I pulled the power cord.

Once it had rebooted, I logged in—again as administrator—and went to start up "Users and Computers."

It absolutely refused.

All right, I thought.  I'll try it from our data server.

AD Tools not installed.

SERIOUSLY?

Next stop, our old mail server.  I knew the tools were installed there.

ANOTHER machine that locked up when accessing the tools.

By this time I was cursing more than halfway under my breath.

I moved onto our Domain Controller—a twelve year old Dell Pentium 3 desktop with 512MB RAM. Ten minutes later I was finally logged in and able to reset my account.

Of course, just as I was getting ready to go back to my desk, one of the most annoying, clueless users in the entire company started pounding on the server room door. When I answered he said, "I can't get into my computer. I need you to fix this NOW."

Had he tried rebooting?  Of course not. That's too HARD.

And that's exactly what fixed his connectivity issue.

I work with fucking idiots.

And the day only went downhill from there.

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New Beginnings

We're moved.

The only casualties as far as I can tell (everything isn't yet totally unpacked) are two light bulbs and the tip of my right middle (mouse wheel!) finger when it received the equivalent of being caught in a car door. (Some IKEA furniture is quite heavy.)

The new place is fabulous. Both Ben and I look around and think, "Equity finally got it right." The difference between this complex and the previous one we lived in is like day and night. There are none of the WTF?!? design quirks that riddled the old place, and it is evident that the architect actually put some thought into the design. Everything about our new place is high end (or in the parlance of Auntie Mame "really top drawer!" In fact, if you didn't know better you'd think the place was a condo.

The kitchen is huge. We actually have unused cabinets and drawers. (I'm sure that won't last, but for now it's kind of neat to know we have space.)

For a change, the bathroom exhaust fans don't sound like jets taking off, and they even have moisture sensors that automatically turn them on and off as needed. I'm impressed. The toilets are dual-flush (half or full tank), and the fit and finish of everything is light years beyond what we had at Colorado Pointe.

All the light bulbs in the apartment are CFLs—that the complex replaces if they burn out. (Probably not that big a deal since I have CFLs that I purchased back in 2005 that are still going strong.)

While we don't have real hardwood floors (they're vinyl), they look like wood, and it's nice not to have nasty old apartment-grade carpet in the main living areas. The cobalt blue rug that Ben bought for the living room a year ago looks really good against them.

We had a stacked washer/dryer at the old place. Now we're back to having regular separates that seem to do everything except fold the clothes when they're done. No more multiple hour-long dry cycles for a single load of clothes!

And did I mention the second bedroom that has a walk-in closet that's as big as the separate storage room we had at the old place? We finally have a proper home office/guest room. (Or will have as soon as we get rid of the piles of boxes stacked there.)

And no more fucking parking garage!