Category: Diary (Page 9 of 38)

OK, so network throughput on my computers totally sucked all day, even at work in the office at WonkaTech. Finally, remembering Lisa’s exhortations over the last week or so to run Stinger, McAfee’s new antivirus tool, I did so.

Both my laptop and my desktop at home were infected with W32/Nachi, which is a RPC/DCOM exploit based Internet worm that actually tries to de-infect computers of *another* worm, W32/Lovesan.

Embarassing to say the least.

Anyway, I’m now fully patched on both machines, and internet access is back to normal. We don’t know if I caught it from machines at Wonka (quite possible, they’ve been riddled with virus problems recently) or if it was related to the problems our broadband service experienced over the weekend.

We all drag ourselves out of bed this morning with a real feeling of “back to school”, probably legitimate in at least one person’s case.

Traffic is light, and we park at McCarran and get Derek checked in for his flight without problems. Actually, he checks himself in, we just stand around looking like, well, parents I guess. Hopefully we’re not too embarrassing.

It’s been a fantastic three weeks, but now it’s time to go back to the office and deal with a regular routine again. And perhaps it’s coincidental, but it looks like Our Other Client is going to want us to ramp up work on StigmaBase for the next month or so. In some ways it’s good to be working. In other ways I’m embarrassed by how little I managed to leverage the free time I had into some worth while pursuits. We’ve got a tremendous backlog of photos to assemble into online format, for example.

We left D as he went through security and drove to the Wonka office. Almost the first thing we noticed upon sitting down at our desks was that Lisa’s computer was on, and was announcing that “220 imminent hard disk failure”.

By the end of the day it was in a continuous spontaneous reboot cycle, but fortunately we had already copied her important data on to another machine. The good news is that they are going to replace the machine with a much better one.

We set out on the drive back to Vegas at around 10:00 am, later than ideal but still fine – no matter how early we left, we’d still have to deal with some sun in the desert stretches.

As tradition requires, we stopped at Peggy Sue’s Diner for lunch at around 1:00, and arrived home around 3:30 pm.

Almost straight-away, Derek and I go out to Creature Comforts to pick up the cats. They were very happy to be home, and, strangely, seem to enjoy each other’s company more than they did. Perhaps they finally got used to living together in their 4-cube condo.

We went out for Chinese food for dinner, then did a bit of food shopping to fill the fridge up again. Home to email, and sleep.

We get up bright and early (relatively speaking), load up the car with Teresa’s and Mitchell’s luggage, then drive out to the San Diego airport to see Mitchell off. Wah! We’ve had a great time enjoying his company, and we are so grateful that he could make it out here for Josh and Anna. We miss him already.

We find a nice place on the Bay to have a quick brunch, then we drive up I-5 to visit an old friend of Lisa’s: Anita. She has a gorgeous house, a talent for cooking, and some networking issues.

We get her computers hooked up to the Internet, and install a wireless access point, then enjoy her swimming pool and rice soup. Before we know it, it’s time to head back South to San Diego airport and see Teresa off.

Dinner consists of foraging in the terminal food court, but actually it’s not as bad as it sounds. We still you a decent meal out, though, D&T!

Teresa catches her flight back to the East Coast, and we return to the hotel, exhausted.

It’s the day before the wedding, and we’re responsible for the “Out of Towners” pre-wedding dinner and get-together.

We actually had some free time this morning in that we weren’t due to be at the venue (Scripp’s Cottage in San Diego University Campus) until 4:00 pm. So, after looking at some brochures, we decide to drive up to Mount Palomar observatory. I didn’t even know that Mount Palomar was anywhere near San Diego!  …and it’s not, really, but it is only about an hour’s drive distant.

It was pretty cool, seeing the astronomers working on installing instrument packages into the cage below the big 200 inch tube.

It’s amazing, the top of Palomar mountain is flat and broad, despite being 5500 feet up in the sky. It’s an ideal location for an observatory.  One sad thing – they don’t do straight optical imaging so much now because of the increase in light pollution from the rapidly growing San Diego area. It’s mostly spectrum analysis stuff now.

After taking a circuituous and scenic route back to the hotel, we arrived back in enough time to check Stan and Jeanne in, who were driving down from Vegas that morning, and to clean up, arrange transportation and driving directions for everyone, and head off to the venue.

It turned out that despite our best efforts, the driving instructions from the hotel to Scripp’s Cottage did not exactly match up with reality. This was partly my fault (relying on EarthViewer again!), and partly the fault of the Scripp’s Cotttage university venue people. But eventually everyone we were expecting showed up, roughly about 80 people in total

The event came out really well.  The food was good and tasty, despite the constraints of diet, etc, and the venue was really great, with a pond containing fishes and turtles, and lots of decking for tables and stuff.

Kudos to all those involved in the organizing and making-it-happen.

We drove out of the Vegas Valley as the sun rose, stopping for brunch at Peggy Sue’s 50’s Diner just North of Barstow, not quite half-way.

We also stopped at the Carvin Factory in North San Diego to play some different models of bass guitar, for future reference.

We arrived at the Ramada Inn in good time, ahead of everyone else who would be staying there. Eventually Josh’s friends from the Northern California / San Francisco Bay area: Kevin, Merlin, Jess, Lisa, along with Derek and Teresa arrived having made their own road trip in a rented van. We bustled about, making sure everyone was checked in to their rooms and had keys, including Josh who would be staying with us at the hotel for the few days prior to the actual wedding.

Mitchell, Lisa, and I got some (useless) advice from the registration clerk at the desk about where to go for decent Mexican food for dinner but after driving around for a little while (and not getting lost, I might add) we found a place called El Torito, which was pretty much exactly what we were looking for.

We knew we would be taking Mitchell to see the Blue Man Group, and earlier this week we had snaffled some good seats for the Sunday early evening show. So, yesterday we drove down to the Strip in the afternoon to explore some of the more interesting places.

We parked at Caesar’s Palace and wandered around the Forum Shops (particularly the Virgin Megastore) before walking to the Belagio. We debated trying to get into the Belagio Buffet, but at 5:00 the queue was quite long already, so we decided to go back to the car and stick to the original plan, which was to have dinner at the Mandalay Bay buffet.

After negotiating stupid strip traffic, we finally travelled the 3 blocks South and parked under the Mandalay Bay. There was no queue at all at the M.B. buffet. There never is – and it is a perfectly great buffet. I don’t understand it.

We were shown to a nice table by the window which made for very pleasent eating conditions.

After dinner we caught the tram from Mandalay Bay to the Luxor for the Blue Man Group show, and arrived in plenty of time for the 7:00pm show. (It does not pay to be late at a Blue Man show.)

I’ve written about the Blue Man Group before, and so I won’t repeat myself here, except to say it’s always great, and Mitchell really enjoyed it, as we knew that he would.

OK, so we go into the strip yesterday to do stuff, park at Caesars, see forum shops, walk to Bellagio, then walk back to the car, drive to park at Mandalay for the buffet, then catch the tram to Luxor for the Blue Man Group. Mitchell enjoyed it, as we knew he would, and so did we.

After show we caught the tram back to the Mandalay Bay (in fact, due to a mistake of mine, we took the tram in the wrong direction, to the Excalabur, instead. Lisa then found the walkway back to the Luxor, upon which we took the tram back in the right direction to the Mandalay Bay.)

We sat for a while in the Island Lounge in the middle of the Mandalay Bay, and listened to some passable music by a covers band. It was pretty good.

*

As I write this, it’s Monday, and we’re still on holiday of course but other people at work are going back to find that the computer room move performed so admirably by the permanent IT staff over the weekend has 1) reset the phone voicemail system, 2) disabled the VPN access. 3) knocked out one of the main Novell servers into intermittent mode, 4) resulted in 95% of all computers in the Vegas office being “visited” and their configuration “checked”.

Oh, and they announced all this with a PostMaster message saying “the computer room move was completed successfully”.

Big whoop. We don’t know if any of our machines are still working, because we can’t connect through the VPN and find out. We can get email, though, enough to see that many, many of our users are having problems.

I feel confident that the new IT support person will be able to handle the situation – if she hasn’t quit by the end of the day.

Today was our last day at WonkaTech before taking our three week break, and by design it was also the day Mitchell was due to show up. Originally we weren’t sure if he was to be flying in to McCarran airport, or driving from LA, but either way the WonkaTech offices are close to where we would be picking him up from. His last email confirmed the driving plan.

He showed up at Terminal 2 at around 4:15 pm, which gave me just enough time to zoom out and pick him up and get back to the Wonka office before 5:00 pm, at which time my ID swipe card stops working. As it turned out, we got back just a few seconds after 5 which confirmed that, yes indeed, my swipe card stopped working at 5:00. Luckily a security guard let us in.

After we’d finished up at the office, we drove into the ‘Strip and parked at the Aladdin and walked to Paris for a buffet dinner.

I got the following email today:

Hello,

I’m a time traveler stuck here in 2003. Upon arriving here my dimensional warp generator stopped working. I trusted a company here by the name of LLC Lasers to repair my Generation 3 52 4350A watch unit, and they fled on me. I am going to need a new DWG unit, prefereably the rechargeable AMD wrist watch model with the GRC79 induction motor, four I80200 warp stabilizers, 512GB of SRAM and the menu driven GUI with front panel XID display.

I will take whatever model you have in stock, as long as its received certification for being safe on carbon based life forms.

In terms of payment:

Payment can be made in Galactic Credits, Platinum gold, or 2003 currency upon safe delivery of unit.

INSTRUCTIONS MUST BE FOLLOWED EXACTLY:

Please transport unit in either a brown paper bag or box to below coordinates on Saturday August 9th at (exactly 3:00pm) Eastern Standard Time on the dot. A few minutes prior will be ok, but it cannot be after. If you miss this timeframe please email me. I will not be there prior to 2:45pm EST, (so do not transport before then).

Item is to be delivered at Majority Lane in Woburn, Massachusetts located at: Latitude N 42.49430 & Longitude W 071.14275 and the Elevation is 140 feet.

WARNING: DO NOT ATTEMPT TO TRANSPORT ITEM BY REGULAR MEANS OF TELEPORTATION. THEY ARE MONITORING AND WILL REDIRECT THE SIGNAL!! I DO NOT CARE HOW YOU HAVE TO GET IT HERE, JUST DO IT IN A WAY THAT NO SPYING EYES WILL POSSIBLY BE ABLE TO REDIRECT or BLOCK THE TRANSFERENCE. IT IS VERY IMPORTANT THAT YOU BE ABLE TO MONITOR THE TRANSFER. HOW ARE YOU GOING TO SEND IT SO THAT THEY CANNOT REDIRECT OR BLOCK IT??? If in doubt do not transport actual unit until your method of transfer can be confirmed as a success. You just might need to send a intergalactic courier to deliver item safely to me. If so be VERY careful at how they approach me.

It is best if you send a intergalactic courier to deliver, this way you can be certain the unit arrives ok, However If you are certain that you have the means to teleport unit in a safe manner please send a (separate) email to me at: webmaster@federalfundingprogram.com only after unit has been safely delivered with payment instructions.

Do not reply directly back to this email as it will only be bounced back to you.

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Interestingly, Lisa got one just like it a couple of days ago. What can it mean?