The Vent and Rant Thread

[Stitchawl]

When I'm on a Life Support machine, try un-plugging it then plugging it back in. That might work...


Stitchawl

[Rumpelteazer]

I'm feeling cheated.

Last week I bought the book "The Unearthed" by Evan Ronan from Amazon for just over a dollar. Yesterday I started reading it and from the first page the story was very familiar. I checked the date it was published and that is September 2014, I know I didn't read it since then and checked my reading lists back to 2012 when I started keeping record of what I'd read. Nothing.

I continued reading, some things are familiar, others not. When the author himself turns up as a character I started to get suspicious and searched Calibre and found The Unearthed by Brian O'Rourke (published in 2009). After comparing the first couple of chapter quickly it's obvious it's the same book but more polished. Back when I first read it I gave it only one star out of five. Probably now so much because of the story, which I'm really enjoying at the moment, but because it much have been a converted PDF file where they didn 't delete the header and footer, which return over and over again. Plus the page layout is bad.

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by cromag

I suspect that my hard drive heads occasionally get stuck in the "park" position. Basically the computer equivalent of "I've fallen and I can't get up." Just a good thump right after I push the power button does it for me. YMMV



Good luck!

Sounds like a dangerous maneuver. I'd be afraid I'd scratch the disc.

[covingtoncat73]

Ugh. When I put my right contact in this morning, it felt like I put battery acid in my eye!

[kindlekitten]

Originally Posted by Hitch

I never developed a taste for any soda, although I still occasionally would like a root beer, or a cream soda. I can't remember, literally, the last time I had a soda. This isn't because of any particular reason, although, here's my story:

When I was about 5, we'd gone to Miami or thereabouts. I may have been younger, and it's even possible we were in Cuba at the time, as I was with my grandparents, who dragged me around the world as they traveled. (No, I don't really remember why; I seem to have been foisted upon them often.) Anyway, I have a clear recollection of this: a worker had been painting the pier (with waterproof paint, obviously). His hands and face were covered with paint. He had been bent over a bucket of water, and the paint wasn't coming off. His working companion returned, carrying several bottles (back then, bottles) of Coke.

Whereupon the friend opened the sodas...and washed their hands with it. The paint came off like it was wet chalk. I remember being pretty astonished by it--I was a kid--and my grandfather watched it intently. I never saw another bottle of soda, of any kind, in their houses after that. Club Soda, Tonic, and as I said, the (very) occasional root beer or cream soda, that was it. If they were throwing a party, he'd get regular sodas in for the guests, but...I never developed a taste for them. (Plus, I don't care for carbonation, so I guess I was very lucky). My sister and brother both drink the crap like it's water.

Hitch

I never developed the desire for sodas either, however I bought a case of craft root beer from a microbrewery that lasted 14 months. Last month I was in a Bodega, yes, we have them here, I picked up a 6 pack of orange Fanta in bottles and no corn syrup. I'd love to find squirt the way it used to be made, that actually tasted like grapefruit. That was one indulgence as a teen in the summer when I was working the horses. That could be some hot dusty work and squirt tasted like carbonated grapefruit juice, not a soda. When I was pregnant with my first in Germany I was sick morning, noon and night. The army hospital kept coming back with negative pregnancy tests. I was on the pill so kept having my cycle. I was sent to an internal specialist who diagnosed me as having a parasite. By then I was pretty sure I was either dying of cancer or pregnant. I'd heard horror stories about thalidomide babies growing up so refused all medication. The only thing that I could reliably keep down was mineral water. That started a lifelong addiction.

Originally Posted by Stitchawl

In 1978 I did a tour as head of security for a strike location. A newspaper went on strike, and the company's insurance required them to have an inside security detail. US law forbids armed security inside a strike location, so we were only issued batons. It was a VERY tense situation... I'd start out with a bottle of Coke at breakfast to wire me up, then 20 minutes later when my blood sugar started to drop, I'd drink another bottle. After the 4th or 5th one, I'd have to drink two bottles just to get back up. By the end of my 12-hour shift, I'd have consumed 30-40 bottles of Coke. My hair was standing on end and lightning bolts were shooting out of my eyes.

The strike lasted 13 months.

That was about 35 years ago. I don't think I've drunk 5 bottles of Coca Cola since then.


Stitchawl

I remember in the mess hall all these people drinking endless glasses of soda, beginning at breakfast. As I recall I was milk, juice and iced tea.

Originally Posted by Rumpelteazer

I'm feeling cheated.

Last week I bought the book "The Unearthed" by Evan Ronan from Amazon for just over a dollar. Yesterday I started reading it and from the first page the story was very familiar. I checked the date it was published and that is September 2014, I know I didn't read it since then and checked my reading lists back to 2012 when I started keeping record of what I'd read. Nothing.

I continued reading, some things are familiar, others not. When the author himself turns up as a character I started to get suspicious and searched Calibre and found The Unearthed by Brian O'Rourke (published in 2009). After comparing the first couple of chapter quickly it's obvious it's the same book but more polished. Back when I first read it I gave it only one star out of five. Probably now so much because of the story, which I'm really enjoying at the moment, but because it much have been a converted PDF file where they didn 't delete the header and footer, which return over and over again. Plus the page layout is bad.

That repetition/rewriting of books has caught me a few times. You get through a few chapters scratching your head because it seems familiar but then there are different things that make you unsure. By the time the dime finally drops you've invested so much time that you figure you might as well finish because, what the hey! It might be awesome!

[CRussel]

Originally Posted by covingtoncat73

Ugh. When I put my right contact in this morning, it felt like I put battery acid in my eye!

ARRGH. I know that one all too well. Usually because of something on my hand. Or, if you use hydrogen peroxide cleaners, it can happen because the H2O2 hasn't all been neutralized. If that's it, and you had them in the case for at least 6 hours, it's definitely time to get a new case with a new catalyst.

[Rumpelteazer]

Originally Posted by kindlekitten

That repetition/rewriting of books has caught me a few times. You get through a few chapters scratching your head because it seems familiar but then there are different things that make you unsure. By the time the dime finally drops you've invested so much time that you figure you might as well finish because, what the hey! It might be awesome!

If I'm not sure I've read a book I'll check Calibre. When I added it Calibre did give a warning that I had a book with the same title, but different author. I've had that happen a couple of time, so thought nothing of it.

I'm still enjoying it, and if I finish liking it I might even get the next in the series (I'm a sucker for ghost haunting stories). I must have given it one star before because of the header/footer issues and because of strange layout; paragraph break in the middle of sentences.

The only thing that annoyed me is that the story is edited and more polished but the author left in a reference MySpace, for a book that's published in 2014 that should have been changed to Facebook or YouTube because I don't think many people use MySpace anymore.

[PeterT]

Originally Posted by covingtoncat73

Ugh. When I put my right contact in this morning, it felt like I put battery acid in my eye!

I know that sensation oh so well!

Hoping it's eased up now.

[kindlekitten]

My vent and Rant is about the planet.

I have a family member that has been in Beijing for a few weeks, went on to Taiwan and going to Japan.

So. .. Beijing was horrible. Going outside was greeted with a sensation of walking into a room of 500 smokers, staving standing down wind of burning tires, piles of human feces, and numerous other horrible sensations. Once outside, skin was immediately covered with grime that could be rubbed off. Children were rarely seen as they were kept indoors to be out of the poison air. The air itself looked like it was always about to rain, that's how dense the pollution was. The sun was difficult to see. There were almost no historical buildings to be found, everything was steel and glass.

This tells me that no matter how hard the rest of us try, unless and until this Chinese dragon of destruction is brought to its knees, we can't win.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by kindlekitten

This tells me that no matter how hard the rest of us try, unless and until this Chinese dragon of destruction is brought to its knees, we can't win.

This is the flip side of China's largely successful push to bootstrap itself from third world agrarian nation to first world industrial power. They were willing to accept environmental degradation as part of that process, but have arguably accepted too much.

They are aware they have a problem, and are taking the beginning steps to address it. But China is enormous, and the changes required cannot happen quickly. I'd call a decade an optimistic guess on how long it will be before Beijing becomes something we'd consider habitable.
______
Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Hitch

My customer service system, Desk (owned by Salesforce) has gone bats**t today. They've been open about it; but the short gist is that hundreds of emails have been duplicated. Not new ones, mind you, which would be easy to spot; but old, replied-to or handled emails have come up in the system, with today's date, as if they are new. HUNDREDS of them.

This is a Saleforce issue?

The last time I saw that, I was still running Outlook, and downloading email via POP. I found out the hard way what happened when your local mail store (the mailbox.pst file) got over two GB in size.

The symptoms were new mail not getting delivered, and endless dupes of old mail appearing.

I believe Outlook doesn't have that particular quirk now, but I shifted to Gmail and no longer use it.

At employer -1, we had a similar problem. A hardware failure trashed the Exchange Server machine. The hardware was repaired, and Exchange Server's mail store was restored from a backup. A bug in the MS restore procedure caused every programmed reminder that had ever been entered to reappear. Run Outlook, and hundreds of dialog boxes reminding you of events long passed spawned like cockroaches, and you had to laboriously close them all before you could proceed. We had to turn off reminder functionality till we could get a fix.
______
Dennis

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

This is a Saleforce issue?

Yes indeedy. And I would be less grumped about it if they'd had a solution inside of 48 hours. I guess I simply don't "get" that our email volume is, for such a tiny company, fairly enormous. (When they were Assistly, and we'd been early adopters, relatively speaking, my support rep told me that at that time, the ONLY other customer that they had, with a greater volume of emails than we, was Pandora. Yup, THAT Pandora. I was gobsmacked.) They cheerfully said that "we're working on it," and then the next day, said "oh, we'll have a solution in a few hours," but....I can't sit there with 400 emails in my inbox and ignore them. I just can't. Maybe it's my OCD, whatev, but....

The last time I saw that, I was still running Outlook, and downloading email via POP. I found out the hard way what happened when your local mail store (the mailbox.pst file) got over two GB in size.

Ah, yes, been there, too. My personal email is still in Outlook, via POP. I get unbelievable amounts of crap mail over there. UN-freaking-believable, I'm constantly cleaning it out.

The symptoms were new mail not getting delivered, and endless dupes of old mail appearing.

I believe Outlook doesn't have that particular quirk now, but I shifted to Gmail and no longer use it.

At employer -1, we had a similar problem. A hardware failure trashed the Exchange Server machine. The hardware was repaired, and Exchange Server's mail store was restored from a backup. A bug in the MS restore procedure caused every programmed reminder that had ever been entered to reappear. Run Outlook, and hundreds of dialog boxes reminding you of events long passed spawned like cockroaches, and you had to laboriously close them all before you could proceed. We had to turn off reminder functionality till we could get a fix.

Mother of God, Dennis, what a mess. Our mess was at least *somewhat* limited, but I'm still, today, on Saturday, playing catch-up. And, of course--because it was just fated to be this way--I'd given my #2 the week off. I couldn't bring myself to call her to come back in, just to work on that crap, so I plowed through it myself, with another several hundred a day (our usual burden) coming in Thurs-Fri, atop the being-worked-through dupes. {sigh}.

Thanks, though, for reminding me: it coulda been worse!!!

Hitch

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Yes indeedy. And I would be less grumped about it if they'd had a solution inside of 48 hours. I guess I simply don't "get" that our email volume is, for such a tiny company, fairly enormous. (When they were Assistly, and we'd been early adopters, relatively speaking, my support rep told me that at that time, the ONLY other customer that they had, with a greater volume of emails than we, was Pandora. Yup, THAT Pandora. I was gobsmacked.) They cheerfully said that "we're working on it," and then the next day, said "oh, we'll have a solution in a few hours," but....I can't sit there with 400 emails in my inbox and ignore them. I just can't. Maybe it's my OCD, whatev, but....

It's not all that enormous. Are you the only one it's biting? There are much larger Salesforce customers out there. I can imagine how much fun they are having if likewise bitten.

Ah, yes, been there, too. My personal email is still in Outlook, via POP. I get unbelievable amounts of crap mail over there. UN-freaking-believable, I'm constantly cleaning it out.

Are you running 32 bit or 64 bit Office?

Back when I still used Outlook, I used an open source Bayesian spam filter called Spambayes. It installed as an Outlook plugin. You trained it by putting about 50 known good emails in one folder (ham), 50 known spam emails in another (junk), and telling it to compare. It built a database of the characteristics of spam, and classified incoming mail against it. It worked quite well, and I never saw it make an error on mail it was sure was spam. It made only a few false positive errors on mail it wasn't sure about. The more you used it, the better trained it got.

It's still out there, though not actively developed, and still works. The issue is that it's built for 32 bit Office, and will not work as a plugin in the 64 bit version. You can still install and use it on a 64 bit machine, but you need to install it as a proxy server sitting between your ISP connection and Outlook, so it filters mail before Outlook ever sees it.

See http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/

Mother of God, Dennis, what a mess.
<...>

And worse because we lived in shared Outlook calendars and made extensive use of programmed reminders.

Thanks, though, for reminding me: it coulda been worse!!!

It always can. If you're lucky, it doesn't.
______
Dennis

[CRussel]

I've been running my own Exchange Server since before forever (started at 4.0, for goodness sakes, when it was useless!) I've also had the exact same email address since 1992 or 1993, and it's been published in myriad books over the years. The ONE thing that saves me from a mailbox full of CRAP is ExchangeDefender. Is it perfect? No, I need to check the quarantine about once a week or so, just to make sure I didn't miss something. But it gets 100% of what it decides is "SureSpam" and sends it to /dev/null, and then the stuff it mostly thinks is spam, but not absolutely sure, it puts in quarantine. (That's all configurable, of course.) The stuff that gets eaten is thousands of messages a week. The number of clearly spam that get through? Probably 5-6 a day, almost all then caught by Outlook, given how I have Outlook set. And about 2-4 a month of "real" messages get put into ExchangeDefender quarantine. Less as you teach it.

[PeterT]

Sigh... Went to cook a frozen pizza tonight; turned the oven on to pre-heat. After a few minutes heard a POP and looking at the oven saw a BRIGHT glare. The element had made contact with the oven floor and was arcing. Turned it off, reset the "foot" that had slipped on the element and tried again. No go..

Dead element