IT's budget should be taken out of the budgets of other departments. For instance..
I've noticed sales teams suck up more of IT's time than any other department. Aside from not being totally computer savvy and requiring constant training, i've seen laptops that got mangled/dropped on the way back from trade shows, an insistance on getting every new gadget that comes out (palm pilot/GSM cellphone/marital aid)
I think this would be a much more fair way of distributing IT across a company. Engineering folks almost never call IT. Same goes for the phone support folks, but sales, marketing, accounting, and everyone on the executive level with a ditzy assistant sucks up more of IT's time than world of warcraft (which has been sucking my time away like mad as of late)
Something else i've never seen in IT is accountability for service calls. I've seen vantive databases, keeping track of what calls go where, but i've never once seen IT manager A. go to sales manager B. to tell them their underling is sucking up 5 hours a week for the same problem.
I guess i'm just jaded. For some reason taking the cost of an IT service call out of an employees paycheck seems like the best to me.
Taggart: I got it. I got it. Hedley Lamarr: You do? Taggart: We'll work up a "Number 6" on 'em. Hedley Lamarr: "Number 6"? I'm afraid I'm not familiar with that one... Taggart: Well, that's where we go a-ridin' into town, a whampin' and whompin' every livin' thing that moves within an inch of its life. Except the women folks, of course. Hedley Lamarr: You spare the women? Taggart: NAW. We rape the shit out of them at the Number 6 Dance later on. Hedley Lamarr: Marvelous.
They support MPG and MOV, but not NSV. I can sort of understand the logic behind this, you can watch mpeg anywhere, but the mov part I don't understand. You pretty much have to download the quicktime player to watch mov's.
If they're going to support one major companies streaming format, why not real, wmv and nsv?
I just think supporting any video format, that for the masses (folks that don't know better) requires a download of a player that constantly tries to take over ever file association on your system is wrong. I always tell quicktime "No, please don't try and take over my midi, I have a wavetable card, no, don't take over my other sound and movie formats, please stop bugging me to download additional components" but like a bad child it just keeps bugging me.
NSV was purely a windows thing for a while, but now mplayer and VLC support it. You can watch vp3 encoded videos on any system with those clients on any system. Also on2 has made the vp3 codec open source, and there are versions of it for anything.
Just my critique on one of the new video services. Yeah is sort of rantish, so what?
Let me address a few of the comments I see below before I go into what happened today...
Ok, mostly I see a bunch of AC comments saying the situation could have been handled better, ect. There's one about me not being a good manager, what not.
First off, this isn't the dot com boom anymore. You take what you can get in this economy. If this is what I love doing, i'm good at it, I should be happy with whatever I get paid, as long as it compensates for my costs.
Second, as far as this being a lack of management skills on my part, well, refer to answer #1. I did everything I could do right. There was a contract, I put in little clauses like "2 hour minimum for any site visit" and other things like that to make sure my time wasn't monopolized on little shit 1/2 visits. All said and done, I did a very good job of "managing" this.
Third, there are people in this world that no matter how good of a deal you're going to give them, they're always going to want more. This is a personality type. Usually I can spot these right off the bat, but when I first started working for this client, there was no indication that he was this type. I worked without a contract, just straight billing at my full non contract rate.
Three is enough responses, so onto what happened today..
So I get out to the sattelite office. This wasn't the main office with the troublesome company president. Like I said in my previous post, the manager of this office always valued my time and opinion, and would sometimes throw a little extra change my way ($100 check usually).
The VPN was totally down. He said it had been this way for months, and the president had several people out there to fix it, but none of them were able to figure it out. (hmm, gee, freeswan vpn, documentation is all over the fucking net you idiots) He told me at one point they had brought in these red vpn boxes (i'm guessing watchguard boxes) and when they didn't work, brought them back.
Apparently Bob was no longer doing work for the company because he wasn't getting paid. The last trip he made out there, the sattelite office had to make the check out, then fax it to his office before he even showed up on site.
There was the usual run of spyware on the machines. A few swipes with adaware and S&D cleaned them up fast.
There was some data in the main office he needed transferred over. See, the sattelite offices would save their data over the VPN to a server in the main office, where the data was backed up to a DLT tape every night.
Right before I left, I set up PPTP on their PDC so they could remote in while on the road. I just simply fired up the PPTP client, connected, downloaded the data and put it on the local BDC. Then I went around and changed all the drive mappings in the local office to point to the BDC on the local site instead of the PDC in the main office.
It was a cool hours worth of my time. Clean up 5 machines, set up some new accounts, bring the data they needed back to them, ect.
After an hour, I told him that's all that really needed to be done. I walked out with a nice check for $100 bucks for an hour of work. Well worth the trip.
Before I left, the office manager told me that the sattelite offices were planning a coup, that the company president had been flaking on everything, missing deadlines, pretending not to be in the office when he was, and making promises that he couldn't keep. Apparently they're talking to the investors / aka board of directors about this in secret meetings.
When the coup finally does happen, they want me back taking care of things with a substancial pay raise.
So again, there's another moral to be learned out of all of this.
Just because things fall apart, it doesn't mean that you will always get the blame. Do good work, and people will notice you.
I've read some comments saying "Oh the PSP screen isn't big enough, memory sticks are too small"
My guess is that sony will make this as an option for the psp via an addon accessory. Some kind of cartridge connected to a base unit that connects to a hard drive that snaps onto the bottom of the unit.
It will probably have video out, stereo out via a Y cable plugged into the headphone jack.
Also folks aren't taking into consideration the modern codecs we have availiable to us these days. As an internet broadcaster, I know just how nice on2's vp6-7 series codecs look at low bittrates. I'm able to push out a full D1 res stream (720x480) at 15 FPS with stereo AAC 64kbps sound(cd quality). Altogether the stream runs at 360kbps, or about a CD for 4 hours of video.
I just got a call from one of our remote offices 5 minutes ago. Since the 2 months i've been gone this is what's happened.
Apparently, after I let the contract run out the company president hired the phone guy to do the IT stuff. He went around to all the offices badmouthing me, saying I didn't do this professionally, didn't do that right, this wrong ect.
The guy tried to add another office to the VPN. Right after trying, all the offices went offline. Without even looking, I know what happened because I made the same mistake myself.
In a freeswan VPN you have a CA or central authority cert. You make this cert once, then copy it to all the client machines in the VPN. You should in the very least know how to ssh to these other boxes to make it work.
My guess is BOB (no really, thats this guys name) regenned the CA, and didn't copy it to the other machines.
On top of being more expensive than I was ($95@hr) he was grossly unqualified. His services are no longer being used by the company.
I agreed to go out to the site tomorrow because of the office managers begging. It didn't take too much begging, I always liked this guy, and he always treated me with respect. Just one condition, he can't tell any of the other offices he had me out there servicing his PC's.
Maybe i'll write tomorrow about the fine mess i'm going to see.
I thought about posting a story like this many many times since 2001.
Yah, we're no longer cool. It was happening before 2001, anyone working in a dying dot com could tell you that. More recently however it just seems like folks do not want to pay for my services.
Back around 98, I had no problems negotiating a good salary. If a company wasn't treating me right, i'd simple put my resume out on monster.com or fax it out, and i'd have 1/2 a dozen job offers within a week.
Some of the first few companies I worked at were great. My opinions were valued, and I was often given enough freedom in my job to do what was needed for a smooth running network.
Then around 99-2k things started falling apart. More and more my job function was being scrutinized. It felt like I was in constant competition with my managers to prove my worth.
2001, 9/11, massive layoffs, I just sort of got lost in the sea of resumes that were being pumped out by people not even in IT trying to get a decent paying job. I think this is where folks really started losing respect for IT as a whole. It wasn't the whole phony plumbers with a MCSE making it bad for us, it was the accountants, MBAs, former executives, and salespeople getting these positions, simply because they could put on a better face to HR and hiring managers than most of us socially inept geeks could. They were taking our jobs, and making us look bad with their lack of understanding for the role.
Eventually, I went into private consulting. Started my own company and picked up a few clients here and there. At first my rate was $75@hr, then $60, then $50. I went as low as $30 for one of my clients (They would pre-pay 10 hours a month) Even there, I got myself into a contract that was definetly more benificial for the client than it was myself.
The last client I dropped had 5 offices spread around the bay area, with one all the way in Redding. God damn, what a mess though.
The owner of the company insisted his employees had administrative access to their own machines. Every month those 10 hours of support would be eaten up by running ad-aware on thier spyware laden machines. Originally the contract was just for 3 offices, but when the new offices were brought online, their employees would call me for support. Being I'm a nice guy, i'd happily do what I could over the phone for them.
Things really fell apart when the Redding office came online though.
I had an injury that made me immobile. The office manager for the Redding office, and the owner of the company kept calling me up saying it needed to be done that week, and they were threatening to bring in another tech if I couldn't get that office online that week. I asked many times, "Hey, are you sure that office is ready?" I didn't want to lose that customer, so I told them I would subcontract another tech to go up there and be my remote hands.
Part of their setup is homebuilt routers and freeswan VPN's. Despite my debilitating condition, I spent the night before sending my tech up there preparing the client machines. They had no data for me on the DSL. The office manager LIED and told me they had DSL ready to go up there, but she just pretended to be a ditz and couldn't click start>run>cmd>ipconfig. She just kept telling me it wasn't working but she could browse the web just fine.
Well, Redding is about 500 miles from where I live. Did I mention that yet? No, I guess not..
My tech gets up there and the building has no power. There are no phone lines set up. Construction guys are working on generators. The floor was still bare uncarpeted cement. No furniture, No DSL, no desks to set the client PC's up on, nothing. Just a bare building. My tech called me up freaking out. There wasn't anything he could do.
So he did the best he could, even staying an extra day to wait for the DSL company (frontiernet I think) to get out there and at least get us a dial tone into the building.
With other computing snafus recently making headlines, are universities too careless with their data?"
Yes i'm careless for having windows made of regular glass instead of tempered. While we're on that note, lets fault me for having a wooden door instead of a steel one, and dirt in my crawlspace someone can tunnel into.
I think the university did the best it could here. No matter how high/tall/hard you build it, folks are always gonna try and break it. It's just a fact of life.
I think the only person careless in this whole shebang is the girl that did the grade changing. I doubt this is the most morally devoid thing that has ever happened in this professors class
I can't recall how many times I had girls that liked me offering to do my homework in school, or how many times I saw someone blatenly fuck another persons report up by checking all the books pertaining to their subject from all the local libraries. I think the worse i've seen is the prefferential treatment some students get, weather it's because of being on the football team, or some other popular school group.
There's a lot worse that goes on in schools, it's just she got caught.
I'm actually typing this live at my work... Which is kind of funny.
For about a year now i've used the overlay mode in the winamp AVS to put trippy backgrounds behind the karaoke lyrics. The overlay mode basically works by replacing a RGB value with the AVS output. Really keen.
I fear clicking the link and RTFA might give me a popup (i'm on the DJ machine, I hate it when a website unexpectedly puts a popup on the karaoke window) But hopefully AVS, and overlays has something to do with transparent backgrounds.
Anyways, all you late night geeks up like I am, Happy easter. If you wanna see what the heck im talkin about, just tune into toqerTV on winamp. Its a nifty transparent background trick with winamp. Stupid hackers took down the server my sig is on:./
I find your comment completely unempathetic towards your fellow geek. Let me start by asking, why would a persons professions determine who is/isn't a geek?
Now if someone was, oh I dunno, a bricklayer, but during the late 90's got an MCSE and started doing tech work, then stopped when the market dried up, sure, that's a poser.
I do what I do because I love it. Never went to school for it. I am desktop support. I'm also a streaming karaoke jockey. But wait, why do I stream karaoke now if i'm desktop support?
I also have my own consulting company. I built a freeswan VPN for my current customer using mandrake MNF boxes. Am I geek enough yet?
If someone is working in a screwdriver shop, or has a support job after the dot bomb, good for them, good hustle. Way to be on the ball so long as they love what they are doing.
Your post is a troll dude. Bah, i'm done pointing that out. I bit.
Re:Hi I use IRC legitimately for business purposes
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Ok answers for 1234
1. AOL/TW sponsors the shoutcast server which I broadcast too. I still have to pick up my DSL and webhosting costs.
2. Hold a picture of one of my singers to the original. Is there any likeness? Do they even sound like the original artist? Is their attempts to mimic the original artist funny? That's the parody.
3. Bullshit, there's a section of the copyright law that deals specifically with tribute bands in reference to parody. There is an all male review that sings madonna songs that does not pay, as well as a van halen tribute band that I know of.
4. I was referring to the tracks. Most often karaoke companies have to "reverse engineer" a song, put it to musical notation, then have a studio band play it. Why should the original artist get a cut of that? Maybe if they provided the tracks to the karaoke companies, I might see a reason for it.
Again this is karaoke we're talking about here, not the same as the millions of webcasters JWZ describes. Even the NYT said I was "original material" so based on their and AOL/TW concesus, i'd be inclined to agree with them.
You sound exactly like that one representative I talked too. Ha, good luck man. I aint payin shit.
Re:Hi I use IRC legitimately for business purposes
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You forgot soundexchange and SESAC.
I give them nothing. My bandwidth is sponsored by AOL/TW since i'm like the only guy not broadcasting porn or pirated movies. I have something interesting and unique which has a social additive value to what it was originally intended.
This is karaoke we're talking about here. I've gone into political rants on this subject before. I have a bunch of reasons for not paying.
a. I define karaoke as a parody, and im sure others would agree with me. b. Do tribute bands pay licensing fee's? c. Karaoke tracks are never performed by the original artists, why are they getting royaltees for music they do not produce?
I asked these same points to a representative of one of these licensing agencies and just got the runaround. The wording in all thier contracts makes it so once I sign the agreement, I give up my rights to fight it for life (one agreement says disputes have to be settled in NYC, which is outrageous considering I live on the opposite end of the coast)
I'm one of only 2 in the world doing this. When they get a court order forcing me to pay I will, but then that would mean I could have a day in court, possibly winning a case and setting a precedent. Until then, screw em, it's only karaoke.
Hi I use IRC legitimately for business purposes
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Hihi
On friday/saturday nights I run a karaoke show where I stream video live over the internet
I just stretch a bx client across the bottom of the screen, and let folks on the net hang out in a chatroom. What they say in the chatroom, goes up on the screen right below the lyrics for the singers to read.
Sometimes we get jerks in there. Our #1 rule is no heckling the singers. We figure it takes guts to get up on stage and sing in front of the world, so we try to take care of our singers.
Luckily, I have a lot of good people watching it for me. The occasional bad comment slips through, but part of the fun is in the banning.
I checked the link to their forum, about 36 pages of "Please add support for . Going to the sourceforge page didn't reveal any files in the "files" section, and the CVS repository is pretty meager at best.
Hey, editors, lets do a story on duke nukem forever today!
The other day i'm flipping through my 250 channels of quality programming...
2-13 local stations 14-24 spanish stations 25-40 shopping stations 41-50 food network, discovery, history channel 51-60 nick, disney, cartoon network 61-70 chinese stations
I was curious about these "extra" stations I didn't really give a crap about. I don't speak spanish, I don't speak manderin, I don't shop on home shopping club, and I don't care about a good %50 of the channels on there. It's just way too much to sift through, and the interface just moves way too slow.
Why do I need all this crud? Why do I need to buy a "package" that gives me channels i'll never watch.
I have a few things that I like to watch. Adult swim on cartoon network. (since toonami is miguzi now, daytime went downhill) I like the things that come on discovery channel from time to time like modern marvels, and I like my local news. That's it, nothing more.
I'd be more than happy to pay for just those channels/programs, instead of all the waste I have to pay for. I have a feeling we're just a few years off from this type of content delivery.
Nicotine has a flavor I would akin to 10000 tiny little needles hitting your tounge. It may sound like shit, but when you're addicted it's like 10000 little syringes of herion going into you.
Just for kicks I made remote control streaming karaoke jukebox. I used WWWinamp by Justin Frankel. Pick a song, add it to the playlist, then watch it here. You'll need winamp to watch the streaming karaoke video. Kinda cool, kinda on topic, kinda free (well windows isn't but that's another slash discussion)
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IT's budget should be taken out of the budgets of other departments. For instance..
I've noticed sales teams suck up more of IT's time than any other department. Aside from not being totally computer savvy and requiring constant training, i've seen laptops that got mangled/dropped on the way back from trade shows, an insistance on getting every new gadget that comes out (palm pilot/GSM cellphone/marital aid)
I think this would be a much more fair way of distributing IT across a company. Engineering folks almost never call IT. Same goes for the phone support folks, but sales, marketing, accounting, and everyone on the executive level with a ditzy assistant sucks up more of IT's time than world of warcraft (which has been sucking my time away like mad as of late)
Something else i've never seen in IT is accountability for service calls. I've seen vantive databases, keeping track of what calls go where, but i've never once seen IT manager A. go to sales manager B. to tell them their underling is sucking up 5 hours a week for the same problem.
I guess i'm just jaded. For some reason taking the cost of an IT service call out of an employees paycheck seems like the best to me.
You need a girlfriend.
http://www.caligari.com/ yah.
Quote from the movie blazing saddles.
Taggart: I got it. I got it.
Hedley Lamarr: You do?
Taggart: We'll work up a "Number 6" on 'em.
Hedley Lamarr: "Number 6"? I'm afraid I'm not familiar with that one...
Taggart: Well, that's where we go a-ridin' into town, a whampin' and whompin' every livin' thing that moves within an inch of its life. Except the women folks, of course.
Hedley Lamarr: You spare the women?
Taggart: NAW. We rape the shit out of them at the Number 6 Dance later on.
Hedley Lamarr: Marvelous.
Nullsoft Streaming Video.
They support MPG and MOV, but not NSV. I can sort of understand the logic behind this, you can watch mpeg anywhere, but the mov part I don't understand. You pretty much have to download the quicktime player to watch mov's.
If they're going to support one major companies streaming format, why not real, wmv and nsv?
I just think supporting any video format, that for the masses (folks that don't know better) requires a download of a player that constantly tries to take over ever file association on your system is wrong. I always tell quicktime "No, please don't try and take over my midi, I have a wavetable card, no, don't take over my other sound and movie formats, please stop bugging me to download additional components" but like a bad child it just keeps bugging me.
NSV was purely a windows thing for a while, but now mplayer and VLC support it. You can watch vp3 encoded videos on any system with those clients on any system. Also on2 has made the vp3 codec open source, and there are versions of it for anything.
Just my critique on one of the new video services. Yeah is sort of rantish, so what?
--toq
Let me address a few of the comments I see below before I go into what happened today...
Ok, mostly I see a bunch of AC comments saying the situation could have been handled better, ect. There's one about me not being a good manager, what not.
First off, this isn't the dot com boom anymore. You take what you can get in this economy. If this is what I love doing, i'm good at it, I should be happy with whatever I get paid, as long as it compensates for my costs.
Second, as far as this being a lack of management skills on my part, well, refer to answer #1. I did everything I could do right. There was a contract, I put in little clauses like "2 hour minimum for any site visit" and other things like that to make sure my time wasn't monopolized on little shit 1/2 visits. All said and done, I did a very good job of "managing" this.
Third, there are people in this world that no matter how good of a deal you're going to give them, they're always going to want more. This is a personality type. Usually I can spot these right off the bat, but when I first started working for this client, there was no indication that he was this type. I worked without a contract, just straight billing at my full non contract rate.
Three is enough responses, so onto what happened today..
So I get out to the sattelite office. This wasn't the main office with the troublesome company president. Like I said in my previous post, the manager of this office always valued my time and opinion, and would sometimes throw a little extra change my way ($100 check usually).
The VPN was totally down. He said it had been this way for months, and the president had several people out there to fix it, but none of them were able to figure it out. (hmm, gee, freeswan vpn, documentation is all over the fucking net you idiots) He told me at one point they had brought in these red vpn boxes (i'm guessing watchguard boxes) and when they didn't work, brought them back.
Apparently Bob was no longer doing work for the company because he wasn't getting paid. The last trip he made out there, the sattelite office had to make the check out, then fax it to his office before he even showed up on site.
There was the usual run of spyware on the machines. A few swipes with adaware and S&D cleaned them up fast.
There was some data in the main office he needed transferred over. See, the sattelite offices would save their data over the VPN to a server in the main office, where the data was backed up to a DLT tape every night.
Right before I left, I set up PPTP on their PDC so they could remote in while on the road. I just simply fired up the PPTP client, connected, downloaded the data and put it on the local BDC. Then I went around and changed all the drive mappings in the local office to point to the BDC on the local site instead of the PDC in the main office.
It was a cool hours worth of my time. Clean up 5 machines, set up some new accounts, bring the data they needed back to them, ect.
After an hour, I told him that's all that really needed to be done. I walked out with a nice check for $100 bucks for an hour of work. Well worth the trip.
Before I left, the office manager told me that the sattelite offices were planning a coup, that the company president had been flaking on everything, missing deadlines, pretending not to be in the office when he was, and making promises that he couldn't keep. Apparently they're talking to the investors / aka board of directors about this in secret meetings.
When the coup finally does happen, they want me back taking care of things with a substancial pay raise.
So again, there's another moral to be learned out of all of this.
Just because things fall apart, it doesn't mean that you will always get the blame. Do good work, and people will notice you.
I've read some comments saying "Oh the PSP screen isn't big enough, memory sticks are too small"
My guess is that sony will make this as an option for the psp via an addon accessory. Some kind of cartridge connected to a base unit that connects to a hard drive that snaps onto the bottom of the unit.
It will probably have video out, stereo out via a Y cable plugged into the headphone jack.
Also folks aren't taking into consideration the modern codecs we have availiable to us these days. As an internet broadcaster, I know just how nice on2's vp6-7 series codecs look at low bittrates. I'm able to push out a full D1 res stream (720x480) at 15 FPS with stereo AAC 64kbps sound(cd quality). Altogether the stream runs at 360kbps, or about a CD for 4 hours of video.
I just got a call from one of our remote offices 5 minutes ago. Since the 2 months i've been gone this is what's happened.
Apparently, after I let the contract run out the company president hired the phone guy to do the IT stuff. He went around to all the offices badmouthing me, saying I didn't do this professionally, didn't do that right, this wrong ect.
The guy tried to add another office to the VPN. Right after trying, all the offices went offline. Without even looking, I know what happened because I made the same mistake myself.
In a freeswan VPN you have a CA or central authority cert. You make this cert once, then copy it to all the client machines in the VPN. You should in the very least know how to ssh to these other boxes to make it work.
My guess is BOB (no really, thats this guys name) regenned the CA, and didn't copy it to the other machines.
On top of being more expensive than I was ($95@hr) he was grossly unqualified. His services are no longer being used by the company.
I agreed to go out to the site tomorrow because of the office managers begging. It didn't take too much begging, I always liked this guy, and he always treated me with respect. Just one condition, he can't tell any of the other offices he had me out there servicing his PC's.
Maybe i'll write tomorrow about the fine mess i'm going to see.
I thought about posting a story like this many many times since 2001.
Yah, we're no longer cool. It was happening before 2001, anyone working in a dying dot com could tell you that. More recently however it just seems like folks do not want to pay for my services.
Back around 98, I had no problems negotiating a good salary. If a company wasn't treating me right, i'd simple put my resume out on monster.com or fax it out, and i'd have 1/2 a dozen job offers within a week.
Some of the first few companies I worked at were great. My opinions were valued, and I was often given enough freedom in my job to do what was needed for a smooth running network.
Then around 99-2k things started falling apart. More and more my job function was being scrutinized. It felt like I was in constant competition with my managers to prove my worth.
2001, 9/11, massive layoffs, I just sort of got lost in the sea of resumes that were being pumped out by people not even in IT trying to get a decent paying job. I think this is where folks really started losing respect for IT as a whole. It wasn't the whole phony plumbers with a MCSE making it bad for us, it was the accountants, MBAs, former executives, and salespeople getting these positions, simply because they could put on a better face to HR and hiring managers than most of us socially inept geeks could. They were taking our jobs, and making us look bad with their lack of understanding for the role.
Eventually, I went into private consulting. Started my own company and picked up a few clients here and there. At first my rate was $75@hr, then $60, then $50. I went as low as $30 for one of my clients (They would pre-pay 10 hours a month) Even there, I got myself into a contract that was definetly more benificial for the client than it was myself.
The last client I dropped had 5 offices spread around the bay area, with one all the way in Redding. God damn, what a mess though.
The owner of the company insisted his employees had administrative access to their own machines. Every month those 10 hours of support would be eaten up by running ad-aware on thier spyware laden machines. Originally the contract was just for 3 offices, but when the new offices were brought online, their employees would call me for support. Being I'm a nice guy, i'd happily do what I could over the phone for them.
Things really fell apart when the Redding office came online though.
I had an injury that made me immobile. The office manager for the Redding office, and the owner of the company kept calling me up saying it needed to be done that week, and they were threatening to bring in another tech if I couldn't get that office online that week. I asked many times, "Hey, are you sure that office is ready?" I didn't want to lose that customer, so I told them I would subcontract another tech to go up there and be my remote hands.
Part of their setup is homebuilt routers and freeswan VPN's. Despite my debilitating condition, I spent the night before sending my tech up there preparing the client machines. They had no data for me on the DSL. The office manager LIED and told me they had DSL ready to go up there, but she just pretended to be a ditz and couldn't click start>run>cmd>ipconfig. She just kept telling me it wasn't working but she could browse the web just fine.
Well, Redding is about 500 miles from where I live. Did I mention that yet? No, I guess not..
My tech gets up there and the building has no power. There are no phone lines set up. Construction guys are working on generators. The floor was still bare uncarpeted cement. No furniture, No DSL, no desks to set the client PC's up on, nothing. Just a bare building. My tech called me up freaking out. There wasn't anything he could do.
So he did the best he could, even staying an extra day to wait for the DSL company (frontiernet I think) to get out there and at least get us a dial tone into the building.
Again, just t
Yes i'm careless for having windows made of regular glass instead of tempered. While we're on that note, lets fault me for having a wooden door instead of a steel one, and dirt in my crawlspace someone can tunnel into.
I think the university did the best it could here. No matter how high/tall/hard you build it, folks are always gonna try and break it. It's just a fact of life.
I think the only person careless in this whole shebang is the girl that did the grade changing. I doubt this is the most morally devoid thing that has ever happened in this professors class
I can't recall how many times I had girls that liked me offering to do my homework in school, or how many times I saw someone blatenly fuck another persons report up by checking all the books pertaining to their subject from all the local libraries. I think the worse i've seen is the prefferential treatment some students get, weather it's because of being on the football team, or some other popular school group.
There's a lot worse that goes on in schools, it's just she got caught.
I'm actually typing this live at my work... Which is kind of funny.
:./
For about a year now i've used the overlay mode in the winamp AVS to put trippy backgrounds behind the karaoke lyrics. The overlay mode basically works by replacing a RGB value with the AVS output. Really keen.
I fear clicking the link and RTFA might give me a popup (i'm on the DJ machine, I hate it when a website unexpectedly puts a popup on the karaoke window) But hopefully AVS, and overlays has something to do with transparent backgrounds.
Anyways, all you late night geeks up like I am, Happy easter. If you wanna see what the heck im talkin about, just tune into toqerTV on winamp. Its a nifty transparent background trick with winamp. Stupid hackers took down the server my sig is on
--toq
I find your comment completely unempathetic towards your fellow geek. Let me start by asking, why would a persons professions determine who is/isn't a geek?
Now if someone was, oh I dunno, a bricklayer, but during the late 90's got an MCSE and started doing tech work, then stopped when the market dried up, sure, that's a poser.
I do what I do because I love it. Never went to school for it. I am desktop support. I'm also a streaming karaoke jockey. But wait, why do I stream karaoke now if i'm desktop support?
I also have my own consulting company. I built a freeswan VPN for my current customer using mandrake MNF boxes. Am I geek enough yet?
If someone is working in a screwdriver shop, or has a support job after the dot bomb, good for them, good hustle. Way to be on the ball so long as they love what they are doing.
There's also all kinds of geeks.
Gaming Geek
Electronics Geek
Phone Geek (Phreak)
Programming Geek
Network Hacking Geek
I can go on and on.
Your post is a troll dude. Bah, i'm done pointing that out. I bit.
Ok answers for 1234
1. AOL/TW sponsors the shoutcast server which I broadcast too. I still have to pick up my DSL and webhosting costs.
2. Hold a picture of one of my singers to the original. Is there any likeness? Do they even sound like the original artist? Is their attempts to mimic the original artist funny? That's the parody.
3. Bullshit, there's a section of the copyright law that deals specifically with tribute bands in reference to parody. There is an all male review that sings madonna songs that does not pay, as well as a van halen tribute band that I know of.
4. I was referring to the tracks. Most often karaoke companies have to "reverse engineer" a song, put it to musical notation, then have a studio band play it. Why should the original artist get a cut of that? Maybe if they provided the tracks to the karaoke companies, I might see a reason for it.
Again this is karaoke we're talking about here, not the same as the millions of webcasters JWZ describes. Even the NYT said I was "original material" so based on their and AOL/TW concesus, i'd be inclined to agree with them.
You sound exactly like that one representative I talked too. Ha, good luck man. I aint payin shit.
You forgot soundexchange and SESAC.
I give them nothing. My bandwidth is sponsored by AOL/TW since i'm like the only guy not broadcasting porn or pirated movies. I have something interesting and unique which has a social additive value to what it was originally intended.
This is karaoke we're talking about here. I've gone into political rants on this subject before. I have a bunch of reasons for not paying.
a. I define karaoke as a parody, and im sure others would agree with me.
b. Do tribute bands pay licensing fee's?
c. Karaoke tracks are never performed by the original artists, why are they getting royaltees for music they do not produce?
I asked these same points to a representative of one of these licensing agencies and just got the runaround. The wording in all thier contracts makes it so once I sign the agreement, I give up my rights to fight it for life (one agreement says disputes have to be settled in NYC, which is outrageous considering I live on the opposite end of the coast)
I'm one of only 2 in the world doing this. When they get a court order forcing me to pay I will, but then that would mean I could have a day in court, possibly winning a case and setting a precedent. Until then, screw em, it's only karaoke.
Hihi
On friday/saturday nights I run a karaoke show where I stream video live over the internet
I just stretch a bx client across the bottom of the screen, and let folks on the net hang out in a chatroom. What they say in the chatroom, goes up on the screen right below the lyrics for the singers to read.
Sometimes we get jerks in there. Our #1 rule is no heckling the singers. We figure it takes guts to get up on stage and sing in front of the world, so we try to take care of our singers.
Luckily, I have a lot of good people watching it for me. The occasional bad comment slips through, but part of the fun is in the banning.
No warez, none of that junk. Just a cool place.
irc.landoleet.org #karaoke
www.7bamboo.com
Check my sig, according to AOL/TW Nullsoft i'm the worlds MOST DANGEROUS karaoke geek.
Not just a karaoke geek, the worlds most dangerous karaoke geek.
I think its so slashdotted you can't see the humorous message anymore, something like.
Too much traffic
probably slashdot.org
email somedude@idsoftware.com
I checked the link to their forum, about 36 pages of "Please add support for . Going to the sourceforge page didn't reveal any files in the "files" section, and the CVS repository is pretty meager at best.
Hey, editors, lets do a story on duke nukem forever today!
Bleh watch karaoke.
Seriously, this has been by far the coldest December in recent memory. It's been a while since I saw frozen puddles outside.
The other day i'm flipping through my 250 channels of quality programming...
2-13 local stations
14-24 spanish stations
25-40 shopping stations
41-50 food network, discovery, history channel
51-60 nick, disney, cartoon network
61-70 chinese stations
I was curious about these "extra" stations I didn't really give a crap about. I don't speak spanish, I don't speak manderin, I don't shop on home shopping club, and I don't care about a good %50 of the channels on there. It's just way too much to sift through, and the interface just moves way too slow.
Why do I need all this crud? Why do I need to buy a "package" that gives me channels i'll never watch.
I have a few things that I like to watch. Adult swim on cartoon network. (since toonami is miguzi now, daytime went downhill) I like the things that come on discovery channel from time to time like modern marvels, and I like my local news. That's it, nothing more.
I'd be more than happy to pay for just those channels/programs, instead of all the waste I have to pay for. I have a feeling we're just a few years off from this type of content delivery.
Pirates , the classic Sid Mier game launches today as well. It's a remake of the classic game.
With all the OCR problems, i'm sure the folks down at Project Gutenburg wouldn't mind taking this on.
You're wrong about it being tasteless.
Nicotine has a flavor I would akin to 10000 tiny little needles hitting your tounge. It may sound like shit, but when you're addicted it's like 10000 little syringes of herion going into you.
Just for kicks I made remote control streaming karaoke jukebox. I used WWWinamp by Justin Frankel. Pick a song, add it to the playlist, then watch it here. You'll need winamp to watch the streaming karaoke video. Kinda cool, kinda on topic, kinda free (well windows isn't but that's another slash discussion)
Old laptops make really nice MP3 players. There's a nice DOS mp3 player called damp that even has support for alphanumeric LCD's.
Works great in the car too.