Are You Notaninja?

I trust you all had a good Christmas and will hopefully ring in a Happy New Year.

In preparation for the upcoming new year you really should check out this site. Desktop-sized versions of siege engines and other dangerous things. If you want to get me a gift for any reason whatsoever these items would be a great idea! A proper work cubicle can never be too heavily defended.

Here is a list of my regular RSS feeds. Check them out, and hopefully enjoy!

• Boing Boing – lots of good items here, from the strange to the political
• Fark – ’nuff said. I like the RSS feed because it isn’t blocked at work, whereas the website is
• I Need Coffee – if you are a coffee drinker you should check out this site
• Slashdot – news for nerds
• The Sneeze – some funny stuff
• And of course, the various Notaninja feeds. There’s a feed for the main page, the debate section, and Entertainment.
  

So is the fact that Target is not allowing Salvation Army bell ringers outside it’s stores such a big deal that every time a Salvation Army story shows up in the news that it needs to be mentioned?

I was just reading a story about a donation of $14+K that was left in a kettle, and the final sentences of this story go on to harp on the fact that this won’t cover the losses from not being in front of every damn Target store.

Enough already! We know you aren’t in front of Target! I applaud Target for having the guts to say they won’t make an exception for you any longer. Now if they would just drop their passive agressive United Way fundraiser.

(also posted in the debate section in case anyone cares to add their thoughts)

So I am assigned to help one of our sites that is having trouble with a replaced modem. Basically the request form states that they recently had a modem replaced and now the computer is unable to see the network drive needed to run the main application.

Where to begin? This site shouldn’t have a modem on a user’s computer, much less need to have one replaced. My thought is that they meant a network card but I can’t reach the contact person to find out. I leave a message and go back to doing other things.

I’m called back a few hours later and start asking questions. They have almost no understanding of fairly basic computer terms. The modem they mentioned when logging the problem was the PC itself (“the thing the monitor sits on”). I can only imagine they called it a modem because that is where the phone line (network cable) is connected.

Anyway, I was able to get around that and to the actual problem. When they launch the program it is from a shortcut placed on the desktop, which points to the application on the C: drive. This program will go out to a network drive and copy any updated or missing files locally. It would seem that our fine desktop support staff didn’t install the one program our site actually needs on the hard drive of the computer they replaced. I copied the old shortcut, pointed everything to the network drive and let it copy everything it needed to the local machine. Now they can use the proper shortcut to run the program.

Problem solved and a funny (scary?) story to pass on to our loyal readers. Both of you.