Worzie's blog

I somehow got "voluntwisted" into fixing a coworkers Sony laptop. Well okay maybe it was my own doing. I love to recover data from presumed dead hard drives. His had been dead and powered up for so long, I presumed it was toast like so many laptop drives usually are. Much to my surprise it was mountable using an old Live Knoppix disk. So I simply plugged in my USB drive and with MC I did mass copies to it. Since it was a bad disk it did take about 8 hours to move about 2GB of data (music and pictures).

So next the coworker produced a replacement drive. One dilemma though... he didn't have his recovery CD's since he just moved here and having a tough time finding anything really. So I thought I'd try using my home Dell PC. OEM CD's tend to require you to use their own hardware to do the installs so my XP Home disk would have to be installed using my PC. Ordered a laptop to IDE converter from RadioShack online; as they don't carry them in the stores. All is well. Got that installed and next I plopped it back in the Sony. No go. CRAP! It's an AMD. I used an Intel PC not to mention possible disk parameter differences. Back to the drawing board.

Okay I said I would do some explaining. I don't want this to get long so I'll try to summarize.

My coworker who does GIS work here is using a workstation formerly used by another former employee. This PC has seen its day I think. All the form boxes in applications and websites are out of proportion and sorta smooshed into other text. I took a stab at figuring out what it was to no avail. Okay that was short and sweet. Then recently a couple apps started popping up the Windows installer every time the Desktop was accessed. Thinking he must have some spyware or virus, I scanned his machine and ultimately uninstalling one of the two troubling apps to work with one at a time popping up. As administrator things seem to work fine after going through the install motions but only for that session and IT has these locked down so that users can't do installs. So in one effort to fix that dang form box monitor resolution issue, I install a different video driver and viola! it is fixed. Install one of the pissy apps and wham it's all crap again.

Damn those company computer guys!

Forgot to bring lunch today from home and was left without my backup stock of Ramen Noodles. Running low on cash I decided to head to Wendy's or to some of our cohorts "Wenchies". I slapped down the Discover card as a means to get by. This time of the year I seem to always fall into the rut of waiting until the last moments to make those special purchases our loved ones "expect" of us to achieve. But I digress... that isn't what todays post is about.

Today I was reminded of one of Jesus' stories about what it takes to be welcomed into the kingdom of Heaven in Matthew and Luke. As I sat eating my lunch I was reminded of this because I saw this man there who I see there all the time. He wears a watch on both wrists and loves to clap his hands out of joy as he reaches over his head. To many he is a nuisance and move away; to others they ignore and still others watch as if at the zoo. But I thought that this man; like the classroom of children visiting there for lunch today, didn't really care much about what others were thinking of him. To think what we could accomplish if we only were like a child who does not worry about what others think. As adults we tend to hold back answering a question in front of an audience for fear of screwing up. He seems so innocent as he should because he is in the eyes of God.

Yeah I'm gonna burn out doing blogs soon enough. But I have so much to say! Earlier was just a follow up to yesterday so here is what I've been working on since noon.

Well last year around Thanksgiving my email server secure certificates expired and so I dreaded having to re-learn how to do this. I figured renewing would be cake. I really couldn't find much in howto's for doing this. So last year I just created a new one and oddly with an expired CA to the best of my knowledge. At any rate I just did a one year since I figured I would/should have upgraded or moved on by this time now. Trust me I have been trying to but very slowly. So I found a howto for renewing your certs. First off I followed the directions and all was swell. Then trying to get Thunderbird (TB) to take/see the new certs didn't fare as well. Then I found that my CA expired in like August of 2004! Then after creating new ca and certs TB still didn't see the new one. Aha! Forgot about the flip side of SMTP... IMAP. I thought I would cheat and just do a symlink to the existing postfix cert but that didn't go well. Then I found the makeimapcert script and used that to renew one more year.

As usual with most tech support I deal with they tend to have you rehash much of what you already have done; assuming you are technically savvy yourself. It infuriates me further to have to jump though their hoops to get any cooperation. The first reply this morning from IT is to "power down the printer and retry the same documents and report what the error logs say". Well the only thing that proved was that this issue did not produce those error logs. Those errors were probably legit.

So on my own I attempt to print to file and use DOS to copy the file to the device. Here I get "The system cannot write to the specified device." This sounds like a write permissions problem. Just before I even got the email off to report this to them, I got a message back stating they changed the spool settings and reboot our server.

I've been able to print to our Lanier multi function printer all morning. This afternoon, my coworker starts having trouble printing to any printer on the network. He can print Word documents fine but nothing graphical. I tested and can't print graphics either now. I keep getting a balloon pop-up saying it failed consistently until it is removed from the spool.

Well with my history in dealing with IT issues in our corporate world IT team hasn't been pleasant recently. So I decided not to dig too deep and called, left a message with them. I mentioned the error logs on the printer show different errors stating the stapler failed or the hole punch failed. Since this is a problem on at least three Windows boxes and two network printers I suspected the Windows server as the culprit. In my VMWare Player running Linux, I can print directly just fine.

I have decided to change my favorite color from blue to a burnt orange I like to called chumber. Not sure why I call it that. I suppose because it's sort of an amber look. Actually I like the combination of black and orange with grays. My current favorite Firefox theme is the Orange Shift which displays a great example. Also you could see my main website sandersonline.org and see another subtle usage with the logo and Firefox logo I created.

I think I first noticed I like chumber when I keep looking at cars of this color especially