serinde

Context: this particular corp. customer still gives dariodevil snarling fits when their name is mentioned. They call weekly, on average, with some kind of mail problem that is some form of PEBKAC, usually lost passwords. (They're also the ones who asked for an "SSI certificate" for their web site.) It's almost always the same cranky old(-sounding) secretary-ish woman calling, too. Naturally she's the one who has the least grasp on these difficult new technologies.

[Wrong password, usual changing ritual, all is well until:]
Your humble correspondent: ...so that'll work within 5 minutes or so.
Madam Wahmbulance: Thank you, but I just want you to know that you're driving us crazy with this code business.
YHC: [assuming she means the alphabet soup-ism of the random generator] Well, of course you can change the password to whatever you like--
MW: NO, I mean having it at all! Why do we have to type in a code every time we want to get our mail? It's such a hassle!
YHC: ...........Because if a mail account were not password protected, anyone on the Internet would be able to read your mail?
MW: I don't care, it's ridiculous! It's driving us crazy! Thank you for the new code but this is completely unreasonable. *click*

In the spirit of the first sign of emotional recovery in our office being someone wedging a Nerf glider in between the twin towers in our Puzz 3-D of the New York skyline, I declare a contest: Post here your suggestions for the relabeling of the eleventh of September.

I have opened the bidding with the modest contribution of "NEVAR FORGETT!!1 Day".
elibalin upped the ante with "The Feast of St. Zomg".
What've you got?

As threatened, we are going to attempt this Newark goth club and see if it fits our exacting standards. This will almost certainly occur Saturday night. Please to notify if you want to meet up.

ObEasilyDelighted: they also have an LJ, such as it is; and the moderator has a Watership Down icon. Excellent!

news-xfer started randomly hanging. No indication of why in the logs. No nothing in the logs. innfeed still running. At first we thought some kind of RAID issue ("oh no, not again") but that did not seem to be so. Since the only thing that changed today was cleanfeed, I removed the local config file, and lo it was joyous again.

There were only about three defaults that'd been changed in our version of the file. So?

Whereupon I went back to the package as downloaded in the build directory and looked more closely. Oh, because the format has CHANGED COMPLETELY but is ENTIRELY UNDOCUMENTED. The README file advises you to consult the source code. I can't even justly complain because, really, what am I expecting of a package maintained by a registered BOFH? If you can't handle the tool, then put it back in the shed, am I right? Only all the upper gardeners are nowhere to be found and that leaves little ol' apprentice me.

At which point I grabbed my fork, yelled "Fuck your canoe", and edited filter_innd.pl directly which there are all sorts of ONOZ DO NOT WANT warnings about and changed the stupid 1 to a stupid 0 and now everything is doing what it should be doing and I am done.

...between "I don't feel anything" and "OH GOD MY ARM" is often of monofilament thickness in aikido, even when your partner is being careful & cautious. As often is the case when Luis is teaching, we were doing a lot of interesting, funky techniques that will Fuck Your Shit Up, and indeed my wrist is now fucked up after my hand was folded into sundry unnatural poses. It didn't feel too bad at the time, but by the time I got home last night I couldn't really grasp anything in my left hand. I applied an ice pack (by which I mean "a sack of frozen blueberries") and wrapped it and took ibuprofen, all of which helped, but it's still pretty stiff and sore.

It remains to be seen whether I will be able to hold a bokken today.

Either there is no truth to the tale that cat pee glows under black light, or the bulb I have that the packaging labels "Black Light Bulb -- For Parties!" is not in fact black light[tm]. I sort of suspect the latter, because a white T-shirt wasn't looking funky under the bulb either. Snarl.

[Context: One of the cats, most likely Mage, expressed unhappiness during the recent unpleasantness by several rounds of peeing on the bedroom carpet. There is at least one spot, based on smell, that I didn't manage to find either when fresh or by lucky aim of the Nature's Miracle since. And the carpet is sufficiently shag and pale to not show it up. Hence, other forensic methods are called for.]

...Or something. I didn't seem to get the memo, so I'm guessing.

Prequel: the primary reader crashed Friday night. Rebooted, no big deal. However, since then the natives have been woeful, noting that posting times are increased--that is, you post the article and it takes anywhere up to a minute and change for your newsreader to come back and get on with its life. At first I thought it might be related to said crash, but it was happening on both readers, and with any news client, including just talking directly to the NNTP port. (Which I still remember how to do, because I am awesome.) And then sweh reminded me that, even though it doesn't look like what's happening, when our users post to the readers it doesn't actually post the article per se; it gets passed through shogun and then fed back to news-xfer which actually posts the article, so logically the nose goblins must be on news-xfer. But how does the article get there since it's not through the usual method?

I keep expecting someone whose job title officially says "sysadmin" to deal with the deep magic of news-related troubles, but that keeps not happening. I am in fact the one with the biggest INN clue except for El Jefe himself, and although he had a wizard's knowledge of it in the day, he hasn't actually touched it in years. So here am I with the leader badge.

The hunt goes through dark places, because our news setup is weird and mystical and somewhat ill-documented: that is, parts of it are meticulously documented, and others were Not Got Around To before the people who knew them left. Happily for me, many of those people are still around my world. So I got jdev's help on ktrace and ktruss, and 5tonsflax kindly spent 40+ minutes on the phone with me as we unravelled the silliness together. And as often happens, the solution is very simple once you know where to look: the history database had gotten frightfully bloated (even for modern history databases), because expire hadn't run in $SOMETIME, because for some reason /news/db had become owned by root. None of the files in it, mind you, which I woulda noticed. Just the directory. Which is the more odd because the mount point in the dist structure is correctly permissioned, so this breakage should have been fixed at any of the times we've disted news-xfer in the last $SOMETIME (including this morning).

So, fixed that, was about to run expire when I realized there is probably not enough space on the partition. Phoned El Jefe. He thought there was, because he thought that the re-written database would be smaller. I didn't think it would be smaller enough. What a stupid time to be right... It's now running and dumping the new copy in a really silly part of the filesystem that nevertheless has scads of space, and hopefully it will finish in time for me to make sure it is all okay before I GO HOME.

Also, some Usenet performance artists are splashing their poo on various walls, and making a clumsy attempt to joe-job Supernews with it. Anyone know if "usenetserver.com" takes action against this kind of crap? And had to explain some basic newsgroup functionality relating to this to a guy who says he's been moderating for 11+ years. THEN YOU SHOULD KNOW WHAT I AM TELLING YOU, BUNKY, AND YOU SHOULD NOT ACT LIKE YOU KNOW MORE THAN ME BECAUSE CLEARLY YOU DO NOT.

Wikipedia's featured article du jour is for you.

Himself has been all NOM NOM NOM with his kibble for several days now, and that in preference to wetfood. (He seems to swallow it whole.) I think we can declare this crisis weathered.

Thank you all for your kind words, thoughts, suggestions &c. I appreciate it more'n I can say.