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What you of the CHOAM directorate seem unable to understand is that you seldom find real loyalties in commerce. When did you last hear of a clerk giving his life for the company? Perhaps your deficiency rests in the false assumption that you can order men to think and cooperate. This has been a failure of everything from religions to general staffs throughout history. General staffs have a long record of destroying their own nations. As to religions, I recommend a rereading of Thomas Aquinas. As to you of CHOAM, what nonsense you believe? Men must want to do things out of their own innermost drives. People, not commercial organizations or chains of command, are what make great civilizations work. Every civilization depends upon the quality of the individuals it produces. If you over-organize humans, over-legalize them, suppress their urge to greatness—they cannot work and their civilization collapses.” ~ Attributed to The Preacher, DUNE MESSIAH

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#Mood

Alternating between this…
…and this. 

I do not like being back in the office. To minimize my possible exposure to the Covid, I am isolated from the few people who also have to physically be present within these walls, but that’s not really the issue. What has sent me into a tailspin this week is the frustration I’m feeling at this whole process that I have to physically be present for. I suppose it’s at least partly my own fault, setting up what I see now was an entirely unrealistic expectation that somehow I’d be able to crank out 150 (now mysteriously increased to over 200) machines in one week and be back in the safety of my own home thereafter.

But alas, that was not meant to be. An entire day was wasted because none of the jacks in the lab were live. Makes it hard to talk to the server that’s serving up the images to be laid down on the machines. While waiting,  I went ahead and hooked up eight laptops to the switch and power strip—only to be informed once the jacks were live that I was now supposed to concentrate on getting the tablets out first. So everything had to be disconnected.

The image for the tablets had problems with the audio driver. Not insurmountable; I could always manually install it after the fact, but it was just one more roadblock that stood in the way of me getting back home. So I went ahead and prepped 10 tablets for our field workers, and as I was getting ready to provide the cellular info to our phone person…discovered these tablets had been ordered without any cellular capability. “Oh, we’ll have to get with Emily to see if she has any cell-equipped tablets we can swap these out for.”

So another day wasted. “Go ahead and start the laptops until we get the other tablets.”

(It turns out that none of the tablets that were ordered came with cellular. Go figger.)

The laptop image was completely fucked. The guy who builds the images was fucking around with the image and uploading it to the server while I was downloading them. (Of course I didn’t know this until the whole process hung and reached out to him to find out what the FUCK was going on.)

“Go ahead and start over. I made some changes to the audio drivers on both the laptops and the tablets.”

The laptops ran through the install process…and then would hang when rebooting. Consistently.

Meanwhile there’s all this pressure coming down from my supervisor wondering how soon they can start rolling these out. (Thankfully I’m not involved in that process.)

There seems to be a lot going on behind the scenes that I’m not privy to. As I wrote earlier, we’ve been without a department supervisor for a month now, and the woman who is reluctantly acting as “interim” supervisor is a micromanaging [fill in appropriate descriptive word of your choosing].

For the life of me, I do not understand the urgency at getting this equipment out. Everyone has been doing just fine with the machines main ITS gave out back in May, so I simply don’t get why this has suddenly become a hair-on-fire emergency to get all the desktops swapped out with portable devices right now. It’s not like there’s going to be a cost savings on VPN licensing or anything.

So as of today I’m still dead in the water with the laptops. The audio driver issue with the tablets still hasn’t been fully resolved, but a manual uninstall and reinstall seems to take care of it. I had been simply joining the machines to the domain and adding the various administrative accounts to the machine before handing them off to my colleagues, but after today’s barely tolerable department meeting I said fuck it and decided to do it the right way, and went back to doing the “normal” amount of post-imaging work (installing specific applications, etc.) before passing them on. It slows the process down a bit, but at least I know they’re going out the door with everything installed and working the way it should be. I’ll not have us being accused of rushing crap out the door the way main ITS was back in May. (Things that still aren’t working because they’re locked down and they refuse to give us admin rights on the machines so we can—you know—actually fix their messes.)

My mood improved somewhat this afternoon when I finally accepted that conservatively, I was probably going to be going into the office for the next month at least, even though we are still on work-from-home orders until mid October. Of course with Governor Douchebag opening up the entire state again, who knows if I’ll ever be working from home again.

Four days work. I had hoped to get this many devices done per DAY.

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Well, That Was Interesting

Today was my first day back in the office in over six months, and I have to say it was a pretty surreal experience. As I explained earlier I needed to be onsite to image approximately 150 laptops and tablets, something that for a multitude of reasons cannot be done remotely.

My colleagues spent a couple days last week getting the lab in order so I can self-isolate while performing this task, and I have to say when I walked in today I was impressed.

Unfortunately, because the room hadn’t been used in nearly a year, all the network jacks in the room had been deactivated by main I.T. and—of course—there was no one on site today to turn them back on.

So I basically spent the morning spinning my wheels until I left at noon to head home and grab lunch. I’d arranged to take the afternoon off already, and based on the emails, nothing’s getting turned on until tomorrow morning at the earliest.

The building was nearly deserted. I think I crossed paths with less than a dozen people—including my team. Even with that reality, I kept to myself behind the closed door and masked up on my infrequent trips outside.

On the plus side, it looks like I’ll be able to do eight laptops per batch instead of the five I thought I’d be able to do, so I may still be able to get everything knocked out this week—assuming I have connectivity in the morning.

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Caveat Emptor

Someday I will listen to my own advice.

I know that over the years, I’ve warned everyone I know against buying anything they see advertised on Instagram. I’d been burned more than once, yet I kept throwing caution to the wind, but since those first couple painful lessons, pretty much every subsequent purchase went off without a hitch. When the item arrived, it was as described and I never felt like I’d been cheated. The only recent exception was that poster, and even then, after providing proof that the quality of the product was shit, I got my money refunded.

So about a month ago this clock showed up on my stream:






To be honest, the price at $19.99 did seem suspiciously low. I figured the worst case would be that it was half the size it was advertised or not of the quality the photos indicated. Against my better judgment, I ordered the clock.

I didn’t really think too much about it again until I got notice that the item had shipped (from mainland China, of course).

When the package arrived—even before unwrapping it—I knew something was up.

This is what was in the package:

Okay, I thought. Maybe this wasn’t the package I was expecting, and it was a strange gift sent by someone. But there was no note enclosed, nothing to indicate who had ordered it. Then I checked the tracking number on the package against the one on the receipt for the clock.

It was the same.

Obviously it was an honest mistake, so I emailed the company (with photos and tracking numbers) and I got this response:

Dear Customer,

Sorry, I didn’t reply to your message in time.

I’m sorry to hear that you are very dissatisfied with the product you received. In order to express our sincere apologies and reduce your losses, we hope to refund 50% of your total order as compensation. can you accept it?

If you cannot accept the compensation I provide and want a full refund, you need to return our product. However, returning the product to China can be cumbersome, requires you to spend a lot of time and effort waiting for the refund, and you must ensure that the returned  product is not damaged in order to receive a full refund.

If you agree with my proposal, I can pay you immediately. Hope you consider my suggestion.

Looking forward to your reply.

What the actual fuck?

I replied that I didn’t want a refund; I wanted the product I ordered. In the meantime, I started doing some research on these Nixie Clocks as they’re called, and not only was $19.99 low, it so low as to be ridiculous. There was no way this company would be selling them at this price because they typically sell in the $200-300 range and without exception, almost all of them come from various locations in the former Soviet Union.

I’d been had.

I filed a claim with PayPal. I decided to just “let them sort it out.”

Within a day of filing the claim with Paypal, I got a second email from the seller:

Dear customer，

I’m very sorry to hear from you.

Due to the global epidemic, courier services are no longer able to be shipped abroad.

I applied for a 70% refund discount from the company. If you agree, I will give you a refund as soon as possible.

If you do not agree, please send the product back to our company, and we will give you a full refund after receiving the courier.

The address is: 7th Floor, Easy Handling Center, No. 1, Lane 3, Changtang Avenue, Yantian Village, Fenggang Town, Dongguan City, China
Thanks for your understanding.

Yeah, I’ll bet you’re very sorry to hear from me.

I’m not responding. It’s up to Paypal to extract their pound of flesh from this motherfucker and issue the refund.

I guess this is just something else to be thrown in the “If It Sounds Too Good To Be True, It Is” folder—and to humbly realized I can get scammed as easily as anyone else.

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Sputnik


“There’s been an incident in space.”

I stumbled across this film yesterday via ads showing up on my Instagram stream and it looked intriguing enough that I was willing to drop the $6.99 rental fee and check it out. While I was prepared to be disappointed, I came away pleasantly surprised. It’s definitely worth rental (I watched through AppleTV, but it’s also available through Amazon and numerous other sources).

Described by some as a cross between Alien and Arrival (I wouldn’t go that far), Sputnik takes place in the Soviet Union in 1983 at the peak of Cold War tensions. It tells the story of the return of the Orbit-4 space mission and its crew. The landing site is horrific: the commander is dead, the flight engineer is in a coma. The third crew member,* Valery Basov, has survived but has lost his memory from the experience and cannot shed any light on the cause of the accent. In a secluded government facility, under the constant watch of armed guards, an upstart, outspoken psychologist Tatiana Kilmova is brought in to attempt to cure the astronaut’s amnesia and unravel the mystery. In the process, she learns that Orbit-4 has carried back with it an alien parasite that threatens to destroy them all.














The effects and cinematography are surprisingly good. The lead actor (Pytor Fyodorov) is very easy on the eyes and reminds me tangentially of 60’s heart throb Glenn Corbett. The film has the same austere, 80s-era Soviet Cold War Bureaucratic palette that was used so effectively in HBO’s “Chernobyl.”

The story moves quickly, and the film wastes very little time before revealing the parasite.

If you don’t mind subtitles or are fluent in Russian, definitely worth your time. It’s an interesting escape from the times we find ourselves in.

*I never could figure out where that third crew member was located, because in all the scenes shown on board the spacecraft before re-entry, you only see two cosmonauts.

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Unobtainium

Rarer than that Technics interconnect, ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the JBL L166 grilles in orange. Not to be confused with the L100 or L100 Classic grilles (which are to found in abundance), these are an entirely different animal altogether, and are not interchangeable with the L100 variety. In fact, this is the only photo (other than catalog images) I have been able to find online of the grilles in the wild.

Some of you may be asking, “Why not just paint the ones you have?” That has been discussed at length by others on several audio forums, but the original grilles were not painted orange; they were molded in that color. In addition, there is an acoustically transparent fabric on the inner surface of the grilles that was also supposedly in the same shade of orange. So, no. Painting my existing grilles is not an option.

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Okay, Who Had Twin Hurricanes for August?

Something more the Orange Shit Stain in the White House will undoubtedly ignore and instead head to the golf course or tweet something hateful about losers who choose to live in paths of hurricanes.

From US News & World Report:

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — Two tropical storms advanced across the Caribbean on Saturday night as potentially historic threats to the U.S. Gulf Coast, one dumping rain on Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands while the other was pushing through the gap between Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula and Cuba.

Tropical Storms Laura and Marco were both projected to approach Louisiana at or close to hurricane force just two days apart next week. A hurricane watch was issued for the New Orleans metro area, which was pummeled by Hurricane Katrina in August 2005.

Two hurricanes have never appeared in the Gulf of Mexico at the same time, according to records going back to at least 1900, said Colorado State University hurricane researcher Phil Klotzbach. The last time two tropical storms were in the Gulf together was in 1959, he said.

The last time two storms made landfall in the United States within 24 hours of each other was in 1933, Klotzbach said.

The projected tracks from the U.S. National Hurricane Center on Saturday afternoon pointed to both storms being together in the Gulf on Monday, with Marco hitting Louisiana and Laura making landfall in the same general area Wednesday. But large uncertainties remain for that time span, and forecasts have varied greatly so far for the two storms.


“We are in unprecedented times,” Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves said at a news conference Saturday as he declared a state of emergency. “We are dealing with not only two potential storms in the next few hours, we are also dealing with COVID-19.”