freemode.net

6 shopping days left!    [ Rants ]

Six days of shopping left before Christmas, and my total number of presents purchased is dangerously close to zero.   Blearg, I've never been this bad about getting my shopping done - normally there's a few things left to get, but this year, I'm looking at either lots o' shipping fees or lots o' trudging through the local malls.   Happy Holidays!

How the Computer Services Industry Works    [ Humor ]

I started this while ago after finding an archive of one of my favorite posts to Slashdot, but I was inspired to finish it this afternoon. Hope you enjoy.

Snow snow snow    [ Rants ]

Got about 4 inches of snow in Manassas from the big storm on Thursday, schools were closed, and since I had put in about 9 extra hours of work in on Tuesday and Wednesday nights (wheee, pager duty) I definitely enjoyed having the day off.   Jessica got Friday off as well, but the Prince William County site wasn't terribly accurate in its "All employees must report to work" statement - turns out it was only 12-month employees who had to show up on Friday, not teachers.

The snow made for pleasant scenery, we don't normally get storms this early in the season.

How to edit a Linux bootable CDROM under FreeBSD    [ Software ]

One of my cow-orkers has been out of town for the past week or so, and he was thoughtful enough to leave a BIOS boot password on his Dell workstation.   Not like we needed access to this workstation while he was gone, no, no one would ever leave a machine locked down like that if it was needed.   That would inspire others to acts of BOFHery.

So that lasted until I ripped the "reset password" jumper out from the motherboard (love those easy-access cases), reset the password, and re-arranged the letters on his keyboard to spell W-A-N-K-E-R in the upper-left-hand corner instead of the usual Q-W-E-R-T-Y.   And then, for giggles, I thought I'd leave a bootable Linux CDROM in his drive to create the impression that his beloved Win2K install had been replaced.   But how to edit a Linux bootable CDROM, when all I had were Solaris and FreeBSD boxes?

The Weekend After in PA    [ Rants ]

Drove up to Pennsylvania this weekend after Thanksgiving to visit Jessica's family up there - her mom and her dad are from the same small town in the middle of Pennsylvania.   It's a bit quieter than Northern Virginia, but there's other differences too.