The ravings of a keyboard cowboy
All Sys Admins start their day by reciting this prayer:
Our Server,
who art in the data center,
hallowed by thy CPU.
Thy computations done.
Thy process ended.
With results written to disk
and to tape.
Give this day our daily reports,
and give us not confusing errors,
but produce graphs and charts
for the PHBs I must endure.
Leads us not to core dumps,
but deliver us from lusers.
For thine is the Power Supply,
the RAM and Hard Disk, forever.
Amen.
It had to happen sooner or later. Jason Robert Stoner was busted in Florida for growing pot. Please hold the “is this one of your relatives” jokes. I’m not related to this moron, as far as I know.
This is just one more piece of wood for the fire. Do you know how many times cashiers/bartenders (and the like) ask me about my last name? Yes, it’s really my last name. No growing up in high school wasn’t weird or funny because there is actually a high percentage of people named Stoner in Southwestern Pennsylvania. In my high school class alone were two other people named Stoner. None of us were related in any way.
At least the article gives us a funny picture to look at. Damn does he look pathetic! I also chuckled when I read he’d be going to “Land O’Lakes jail.” Is that a veiled reference to anal lube? HA! 
It’s become apparent to me that I have to buy a UPS. When we lived in Dale City, the co-op power company buried the power lines. This had several wonderful benefits:
Now that we live out in the stix, our power is more…varied. Lights flicker a lot. We’ve had 2 outages that lasted 4 or more hours. We’ve have power “blips” (complete power loss of a few seconds.) It’s this last aspect of Allegheney Power that has me peeved. Just today, I was on a conference call and my power went out. No power = no cable modem. No cable modem = no Vonage. No Vonage = no conference call. Yesterday, we had a blip between 7:30 am and 8:00 am. When I got up, the clocks were blinking “12:00″.
Every time these blips come down the line, my computers shut off. Computers don’t like having the rug pulled out from under them. So, to remedy, I’m going to have to purchase a UPS. I have a 21″ monitor, two desktops computers, a cable modem and router that all need plugged in to it. That’s a lot of juice so I need to shop for a UPS that can handle it.
APC is “the” name in UPSs. I’ve had varied experiences with APC. I’ve had more than a couple completely fry themselves when the power was lost. Any they really don’t like surges. At all. One fine day, back when I worked at the University of Pittsburgh, a co-worker, Tom, had a slight “accident.” He had a UPS on a table and had just removed its metal cover. He turned to put down the screws and screwdriver he had in hand and set the metal cover on top of the UPS. Well, the battery terminals were exposed metal plugs and when the metal cover touched the plugs, he created a short. Oh, and the UPS was plugged in at the time. There followed a loud POP, followed by some sparks. The resulting surge went around and blew 5 other UPSs. Not tripped so that the equipment was running on battery but completely fried them. A minute or so later, a nice cloud of ozone formed that filled 3 offices. It was quite the event and Tom was the talk of the town for the next 2 weeks.
“To err is human” or to put it another way, no one is perfect. I’m certainly far from perfect, I freely admit that. I screw up all the time, but at least I’m not this dumb.
After watching that video, I pondered what my reaction would be if I were there to watch it as it happened. I think…no, I definitely would fall over laughing for a good 5 minutes or more. I would be rendered useless, unable to lend assistance or seek help for my fallen homo sapien as my laughter would echo the hallways after witnessing such pure, utter stupidity.
What’s the most funny “people being stupid” act you’ve seen?
Every decade is identical in some respects:
The first important decade in my life was the 80’s. Ah yes, big hair, Rubik’s Cube, heavy metal, the Power Ballad…it was excellent. I was taken on the trip back to the 80’s when I stumbled upon the “home page” of Jeff Spicoli. If you were at least in your teens when the 80’s started, you know exactly who that is and why he’s so important. The movie was pretty much spot-on for the high school scene of the 80’s.
Another movie set in the 80’s is The Last American Virgin. While the two themes are universal (teenage boys trying to get laid and teenage love), this movie always comes to the forefront of my mind when I think of the 80’s. Why? I think it has to do with the movie’s ending message: fairy tale endings are only found in fairy tales.
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