Dude, chaffed butt-cheeks are the signs of a successful weekend ;-)

Welp, still missing the fuck out of my ex-girlfriend... Thinking about her every day... Now my plans for the next 4 years of my life went to shit because my university of choice turned out to be absolute bogus... So it turns out I'll be studying in my craphole of a city... Add to that some financial problems... And I think I'll go get another drink of whisky.

There are qualitative differences, to be sure, on whose they are and how they got that way! :-)

You know, now that SImonG mentions it I can think of a few successful weekends... again, as you say, the "who and how" of it do play a role in the fun of it all.

Some customers....

I really do like most of my customers but there are a couple notable people out there that I just want to tear up the invoice in front of them and say, "This one's on me if you promise never to call me again." Buuut, that's not the smart way of doing things and it's usually just one or two irritating people and not the whole company.

So I was at a place earlier this week, doing some work on a (well-abused) used machine I installed a few months back. The facility engineer is my old boss from several years ago and we just happened to cross paths again. We get along fine. The head maintenance guy at this facility used to have a job similar to one I previously held, machine technician for an OEM (I'm now independent). The thing is, he worked for a competing brand of the same type of machine.

From the maintenance man standpoint, there are two ways of looking at these things:

- ah, something similar, but new, to learn
- ah, this other brand is shit and anything that might ever go wrong with the machine, regardless of the cause, is a sign of its complete and utter inferiority. Anyone associated with it in any way, shape, or form, is thus also inferior. Being inferior, I will not apply my superior knowledge of a similar machine in order to find solutions to the hiccups on this machine.

This guy chooses the latter tack.

So it goes back and forth between him sympathizing with the trials and tribulations of the traveling tech life (I like visiting the customers so I have no idea what his problems are) and how similar things are, and then bitching about how his Brand A version is the best and only way to do things compared to the Brand B stuff I specialize in.

I gave up on him Wednesday morning. Watching the machine run (flawlessly, I might add), I noted that the lubricant reservoir was dry for the pneumatic input - it drips a tiny bit of oil periodically to circulate throughout the air system to keep rubber seals and pistons lubed, similar to a combustion motor. It's a simple maintenance item that got missed. He happened to come by a couple minutes later so I asked if he had any lube I could put into the reservoir. Dude goes off on me, saying that Brand A studied the air system and discovered that oiling the system leads to the introduction of contaminants. For three minutes he was just short of yelling at me about it when all I did, quite literally, was ask if he had any oil I could put into the empty cup. I finally got a word in edgewise and asked, "So you prefer to run it without oil, then?" "Yes, I'm not putting any fucking contaminating oil in the machine." "No problem. Call me in a few months when you need to order new seals and pistons for the entire machine." I turned around and walked off.

Yeah, dipshit, when you put the WRONG stuff in there you might get problems... eventually. I wasn't suggesting the wrong stuff. Either way, it goes in my report: maintenance department chooses to run the machine without pneumatic lubricant.

And I do appreciate that Brand A does some stuff differently (Brand A is quite respected, as is the Brand B that I work on). That's what you get when more than one company makes the same type of equipment: trade-offs and differing design philosophies. Not a single one of the brands can lay claim to having the perfect solution for the manufacturing process this type of machine is intended to accomplish. But being hung-up on the old brand when dealing with a new brand? That's not going to make for successful maintenance and upkeep.

A few days ago, I decided to purge my email inbox, as it was getting a little cluttered. I just now realised that my Realms of Arkania 1 + 2 gift code was in there, and it's no longer in the deleted emails folder.

I was hoping to trade that for something nice once the general community is no longer saturated with Realms of Arkania 1 + 2 gift codes. Ah well, live and learn I suppose.

Fuck life, seriously.
Sorry that the school turned out bogus. Fuck bogus schools.

Yeah, there's nothing like getting to your school of choice that you had planned for 2 years in advance and realizing it's exactly the same crap as the school next door -_- Ah, the crushed expectations...

I've felt like a zombie for most of today. Took some coffee since I'd need to study, but it gave me a weird headache, and I still feel like going to bed. Coffee, why have you forsaken meee..

/edit: I'm sorry for doubting you, coffee. My headache passed and now I feel like I can keep my eyes open and mouth closed.

@ those at Microsoft in charge of this...

Thank you for bringing that disaster called JavaScript on the desktop through Windows Runtime. If the web wasn't crappy enough already, why does the desktop has to suffer the same, cruel fate?

When you have such smart and brilliant developers, please, for the love of everything related to software, use the damn C++ or C# that work so well, and not that pathetic crap that keeps pissing me off.

Dammit, constantly getting crashes and disconnects in these crappy JS applications, too bad there's not an alternative right now for Messaging.

I'm tired.

I'm out of toilet paper.
You mean JScript, right? Or has Microsoft stopped pretending that they have developed their own language which happens to be identical with JavaScript?

An administrative act I helped to write goes into effect today. _A lot_ of people will be pissed. Ah well, they can blame the city council, as they enacted it ;-P.

But it reminds me ho much I miss that stuff. :-(

Damn corrupting file transfers, grrrrr....! Today:

- I downloaded e.g. Divine Divinity and Beyond Divinity from GOG at my work (ultra fast internet)
- checked that they are not corrupted by running the setup files once
- compressed both with PeaZip, using 7zip with ultra compression (just so that I can check easily on the target machine too that they are not corrupted)
- move the 7z files into two USB memory sticks (FAT formatted)
- at home move the 7z files to my home machine
- uncompress them: both files are corrupted.

WTF?!?! And this isn't the first time either. Now I am trying to find the culprit:

- PeaZip? (creating corrupted 7z files, or for some reason failing the uncompression even though the files are ok?)
- FAT filesystem on USB sticks corrupting them (the files are not over 4GB, which is the file size limitation of FAT; maybe I should format all my USB memory sticks to NTFS, just in case?)
- copying over USB is unreliable?
- something running on e.g. my work machine corrupts the files while compressing them, e.g. some virus scanner?
- something else, like faulty RAM on either computer, causing file corruption?

I didn't see on the work machine any errors while creating the files and there should have been enough free space for compressing them, but I did notice that for some reason both compression runs ended at around 75%, and then the PeaZip window just disappeared. I thought they completed ok, no error or anything.

Maybe I'll uninstall PeaZip for now, and maybe try the "official" 7zip utility instead. Damn, you'd expect not to run into stupid shit like this, in this time and age... It is as if you can't tell whether all your backed up files might be corrupted, as everything seemed to go fine. You have to test and retest everything at every step, or at least checks some md5 checksums.

I'm annoyed.

Now I am re-downloading Divine/Beyond Divinity at home, over my slow 10Mbit/s ADSL line.

Quick question, why use PeaZip (or any other compression utility) as a hash checker? Use one directly, either fciv or any other of your choice. Alternatively, once you copy the installer on the usb, take the needed time to run it from there, to ensure that it's copied to usb correctly.
P.S. The gogwiki hashes for the 2 divinities should be up to date, feel free to verify against those.