If you don’t read Penny Arcade then you should. It’s the most awesomest web comic around especially if you play video games. In any case they have a new book out. I ordered mine from Think Geek and with any luck it will arrive this week. I can barely contain myself.

I’ve been reading PA for a long time now. Long enough to have purchased their first book when it came out. I rely on them to get me going in the morning and I partition my work week based on comic updates. I bring this up because I’ve been noticing a trend recently as far as updates are concerned. I’ve noticed that many days the comics aren’t up before I have to leave for work. The news post I can do without until the evening but the comic is the thing I count on to put me in a bright enough mood to not run down pedestrians in the street or set fire to my workplace. I’ve had to leave home several time over the last couple of months without a new comic in my head and I don’t like. Get on the ball Gabe and Tycho or I may come looking for you two next (not really because then I wouldn’t have any comics at all).

Violet came up with the following theory while driving home from work today.

The big fat accidents that you see on the road are caused by the big fat assholes who run up and jam up the lane that is vacated by people merging to avoid the accident.

She goes on.

We need to equip vehicles with real-time traffic displays on the rear bumper in conjunction with defragmentation software for the freeways. Also I suggest a “flight plan” type registration for the freeways that is color coded for speed and efficiency. Furthermore people who violate the color coding will be automatically cited for being fucktards. And it need to say “for being a fucktard” on the official citation.

She keeps talking.

After too many fucktard citations you will be marked by a barber pole type indicator that says “I’m a fucktard” and lets others around you know who much of a fucking idiot you are.

Excellent ideas all.

I’ve been working six days a week here recently and have been doing fine with it till now but I’m starting to see the lost time show up in my personal life. Violet has also been working really hard at her new job which is in Encino, CA (about an hour and a half from out Palmdale HQ) and comes home pretty beat after eight hours on duty and three plus hours of commuting. I’ve been handling most of the house work since she started the job but I still see her as the one working harder. In any case, thanks for working for us baby.

Son of a bitch! I’m doing like all of these things.

Some poor soul decided to jump his Animal Crossing: Wild World game to the year 2010 and this is what happened.

The really crappy thing is that when you jump forward in time within AC:WW and then jump back, all of the weeds that accumulated stay in your town. This of course doesn’t even take in to account the super weeds that appear that can’t be picked or dug up or anything. You just have to clear all of the other weeds out and the super weeds will go away. My daughter did this same thing last week although by a much smaller degree (6 months). It took her and Violet working together almost an hour to pull all the weeds.

My professional opinion is that this mouse is toast.

So I got my cardbus parallel port yesterday and it installed without a hitch. Today I finally got around to seeing the client with the machine (a Konica 7145 in case you cared) and things went smoothly on the first firmware write that I did then it went to hell. As soon as I started the write I knew something was wrong. The progress bar in my writing application started counting weird and the data light on the machine was blinking oddly. Sure enough the write failed for no particular reason. A hardware removal and a reboot later I got the other two firmware modules in and the machine worked fine save for some mechanical issues. It seems some asshole tried to use the box despite the large “Out Of Order” sign I had left and thrashed a bunch of the drive gears in the top paper tray. I isolated the tray and checked the rest of the machine and left bitter and broken that my sign had not been heeded. I really hate my users some times.

Then I had the network install from hell. A bitchy user and a seriously fucked up network made the entire process painful and sad. I was there for 3.5 hours with the bulk of my time spent in a small office with three other people at around 80 degrees. It didn’t help that I had no idea what I was doing with this machine (Konica Minolta Bizhub 200, again if you care). Beyond the two hours required to set the fucking thing up I’ve spent all of fifteen minutes playing with the unit and up until today had never set up print, scan, or fax functions. I’d say I was flying by the seat of my pants but I think my experience today was more akin to holding on to the wing of the plane with my teeth as it performed various aerobatic maneuvers. That is to say it was scary as hell and my jaw hurts from all the clenching. In the end I got everything working the way it’s supposed to and everybody was happy, except me.

Nnnnnghh! I hate looking for anything that I would consider legacy hardware. The item in question is a cardbus parallel port for my laptop. My new rig doesn’t have an LPT port and I need it for updating firmware on older machines. The USB to parallel adaptors won’t work because the application we use for writing the code won’t see it. We went to two Fry’s locations and one Best Buy today, no dice at any of them. Finally had to order it online. Sucks to be me.

More proof that Pat Robertson is completely fucking insane.

So Violet was telling me about her day and something occurred to me. Would it be possible to execute a hostile takeover of a company’s IT department? The stories that I’m hearing about the company in question are horrific. Important data being stored locally on the desktop. Old machines still in use. Unlicensed software. The level of incompetence is mind boggling. But I think what stings the most is that these people are all making a lot more money than I am. I feel ill. It’s no wonder data keeps getting lost or stolen.