Posted: July 5th, 2011 | Author: rthomson | Filed under: Fun | Tags: fail, pen, swag | No Comments »
My experience is a little limited in this regard, but I’ve received three notable fairly nice looking, heavy and comfortable swag pens in my life as a sysadmin: IBM, Microsoft and Atempo.
So why is it that none of these pens actually work as a pen? The Microsoft and Atempo pens have what appear to be normal, decent quality cartridges and the IBM pen has a super average cartridge but none of them are able to place a solid a line of ink on a clean piece a paper.
The IBM pen also sports a stylus, LED flashlight and laser pointer and all of those functions work properly… so why can’t the pen function also work? Because it’s a swag pen, that’s why.
“The pens never work.” -rthomson
Posted: July 5th, 2011 | Author: rthomson | Filed under: Fun, Sysadmin | Tags: funny, microsoft | No Comments »
My friend just linked me to an amazing example of Microsoft nomenclature that he came across while diagnosing a boot problem on his Windows 7 PC. The phrase “WTF?” comes to mind.
From http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314470:
System Volume
The system volume refers to the disk volume that contains the hardware-specific files that are needed to start Windows, such as Ntldr, Boot.ini, and Ntdetect.com.
On computers that are running the Intel x86 line of CPU processors and later versions, the system volume must be a primary volume that is marked as active. This requirement can be fulfilled on any drive on the computer that the system BIOS searches when the operating system starts.
The system volume can be the same volume as the boot volume. However, this configuration is not required.
and
Boot volume
The boot volume refers to the disk volume that contains the Windows operating system files and the supporting files. By default, the Windows operating system files are in the WINDOWS folder, and the supporting files are in the WINDOWS\System32 folder.
The boot volume can be the same volume as the system volume. However, this configuration is not required.
There is only one system volume. However, there is one boot volume for each operating system in a multiboot system.
So… the “system volume” is the volume that contains the boot files and the “boot volume” is the volume that contains the system files. It might have been opposite day when this was named. Yikes.
Thanks for the laugh, Microsoft.
Posted: March 23rd, 2011 | Author: rthomson | Filed under: Fun, Updates | 2 Comments »
It’s coming up on one year since migrating techslaves.org from the failed community driven SMF/TinyPortal site to the unoriginal WordPress powered sysadmin focused blog you see today. The jury is out on whether this incarnation is failed as well but the parameters for failure are more loosely defined for a random blog than for a community. Without a community, there is no community. For this iteration of techslaves.org to be the same kind of failure the community version was, I would have to be getting negative page views.
As far as WordPress is concerned, it’s much better for the new found purposes of techslaves.org than TinyPortal. Not that TP (hehe, TP) is bad or anything. It’s just not as slick for blog/article publication. WordPress allows me to spend less time formatting articles than TinyPortal did. That, I damn well enjoy. I also spend less time futzing about with the CSS in WordPress because this free theme (Clean Home) is clean and simple: my favourite web design elements. Another significant benefit of WordPress is SEO. I’m not an SEO expert, but the number of views from search engines is definitely up.
The downside to this one way expression is that I barely receive feedback. What I do here isn’t of importance or enough interest to anyone whom actually finds the place, so they probably aren’t going to leave comments. I’m no Tom Limoncelli, Matt Simmons, sysadmin1138 or storagebod and thusly, I don’t share their common trait of regular readers. All that adds up to what feels like me lecturing, yelling, asking questions and ranting into a giant empty space. Sure, it feels good but it’s also strangely egotistical and self serving. Hey, maybe that’s how it’s supposed to feel to be a geek with a blog. Heh.
During the year, I produced about 41 original posts. That’s less than 3.5 per month. And some of the posts are just random things, not even substantial. Output definitely too low, but hell, that’s the story of every web presence I’ve ever had.
Happy WordPress anniversary, techslaves.org! It’s been a fun year.
Posted: February 16th, 2011 | Author: rthomson | Filed under: Fun | No Comments »
“Today’s ‘best effort’ is tomorrow’s broken critical service.” – sysadmin1138
Posted: October 31st, 2010 | Author: rthomson | Filed under: Fun | Tags: hits, milestone, page, techslaves, views | No Comments »
techslaves.org hit a tiny milestone today: Over 3000 page views in one month (October)!
That’s pretty darn insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but it’s a milestone for techslaves.org none-the-less. Of course, the vast majority of traffic is related to the iSight Disabler AppleScript but I’m still happy to see that traffic to techslaves.org is increasing in a fairly consistent fashion since the site’s format change and move to WordPress.
Also not surprising is that techslaves.org seems to get more views the more I post. There were 8 posts in october (the most since moving to WordPress in March) and also the most views. Seems like I should keep posting regularly to increase the number of eyeballs on techslaves.org.
Although 3000 page views in one month is nothing, it still makes me happy. Thanks for making me happy readers and iSight Disabler downloaders!
