Today I spent most of my time hammering away at one problem. It was one of those things where the entire network system at work was against me, and I had to hack my way though obstacle after obstacle in order to remote into her computer (she works out of Blue Island) and enter a three word command in administrator mode. Yeah.
It did not help that something happened to all the on-site techs' admin credentials around noon-ish.
Anyway, after about fifty thousand reboots I managed to get her computer to let her log in, though it was with a workaround. It's fine, because while I was waiting for other things to shake loose (like getting my admin account fixed!) I imaged the laptop that'll be her new computer. There was a request in the system for it, anyway, because this one's seven years old.
*sigh*
Anyway, those antibiotics must be jet-propelled, because this morning I woke up feeling a hell of a lot better than I had yesterday, or indeed any day since they offered me the job. Gut still pains me here and there, but it's getting better, too.
Got myself put together and was pleased to see I was getting out of the driveway one minute early.
...and as I was headed to work, saw there was a police car parked in front of the train tracks, lights going, blocking the way. It didn't take much to figure out what that meant--there was something going on and the crossing was closed--so I headed south.
The next street that crosses the tracks was clear but I didn't see that in time; I turned at the next one...and as I was getting close to the tracks, the lights went on and the gates came down.
Saying some bad words, I checked behind me, then backed up until I was clear of the posts separating the lanes (because of the silent crossings) and got back to the main drag. By the time I got to the major east-west road south of there, train bullshit had already cost me too much time; but then I got to the railroad tracks on that road and waited, and waited, and waited for the longest frigging unit train of ethanol tanks I ever saw. So long that there was a freaking helper locomotive on the end of the fucking train. In the flat midwest.
Result: five minutes late. *sigh*
The person with the login problem, I'd started working on that yesterday but had to leave to go to my doctor's appointment. Told her I'd call her at 8; was annoyed that I couldn't. Did call, got voice mail, left a message.
She called back much later and it turned out she had a worse drive in than I had: she'd been rear-ended and had gone to the hospital for X-rays. And at the time she called, that was about the time that my admin rights went down.
Still: got her working well enough, and Tuesday I'll drop off her new PC.
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This is a fantastic way to lose everyone's sympathy for your cause. Bonus points for this one: "It seems that nobody in the Dutch military understands that tractors are off-road vehicles."
Heh.
"How fucking dumb do these peurile little turds have to be...?" Pretty damned stupid, it turns out.
Look: you get in the way of ordinary people who are just trying to get to work, and you're lucky if a beatdown is all you get.
They're not bright enough to realize they're protesting something that's usually held up as one of the palliatives for Climate Change (formerly Global Warming, formerly Global Cooling, formerly "the weather"), and they're too knuckle-draggingly insensate and self-absorbed to give a damn who they inconvenience and/or endanger.Which is a really, really bad idea if you want people to havey sympathy for your cause.
Meanwhile, doing what the econazis want would result in an enormous butcher's bill. It would kill billions of people. For a lot of those lunatics, that's a feature, not a bug, though.
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WHAT IN THE EVERLASTING-- Police force a rape exam on a five-year-old girl because of a little scrape on her genitals.
Matt Agorist writes at thefreethoughtproject that cops forced a 5-year-old girl to undergo a pelvic exam after she got a scrape while falling from a trampoline onto a knotted rope.A simple little accident while playing--and the police traumatized her, for nothing.
Well, I guess all the real crime in Mountain View, California, has been solved. No robberies or drugs or anything at all! A paragon of virtue and clean living, Mountain View! The safest, most upright city in the United States, bar none!
...so of course when a little girl gets a boo-boo on her hoo-hah, the entire Child Protective Services and law enforcement establishment has to go into overdrive because SHE MIGHT HAVE BEEN RAPED!!!!
Commentors at the link suppose that whatever cop was in charge was a pedophile and "now has video" of the girl's impromptu and brutal examination. I don't know; it's entirely possible, but it's more probable that this is a case of a bunch of government goons who are all drunk on power.
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NASA continues to stun the world with impressive firsts in space! and YES THAT IS FUCKING SARCASM.
"The first all-female spacewalk!" It's history in the--HERstory in the making! It's an amazing feat!
*rolleyes*
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This looks very, very bad for Boeing.
"...a Reuters report said instant messages from 2016 suggest that employees misled the Federal Aviation Administration about a key safety system on the 737 Max...."
It looks very, very bad...but I'm afraid it does not surprise me at all. Speaking as someone who once worked in the aviation industry.
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So, watched Rosemary's Baby the other night, and
In the latter movie, one of the vignettes was about this high-finance guy who illegally used customer money to try to make himself a pile, and failed. Anyway the vignette turned out to be a version of "The Monkey's Paw", and at the end of it, the guy was permanently screwed.
So his wife wished for a lot of money. There was a car wreck and he died, and it turned out that if he died in an accident his life insurance policy paid double, so she got her fuckton of money. Then she wished that he was "as he was before the accident", only it turned out he had a heart attack before the accident and was dead before the wreck. So she and the decedent's former partner are standing there, looking at his corpse, and she goes back and wishes that he was alive, forever.
Okay, time for a brief primer on why you should NEVER use "forever" when making a wish:
"Forever". Do you know how long "forever" is? Okay, the universe will enter heat death (the point at which no more thermodynamic processes can occur) in 10 to the 100th years. A googol of years. Okay? A very long time from now. For contrast, the universe has existed for only 1.37 times ten to the tenth power of years. 13,700,000,000 years. There are ninety more orders of magnitude to go.
"Forever" is longer. "Forever" isn't even a googol squared years longer than that time. Forever isn't even touched by a googolplex of years (which is ten to the googolth power). The biggest practical number is Graham's number which is so big it's many, many, many times bigger than a googolplex-plex (which is ten to the power of a googolplex if memory serves).
I mean, there are only 10 to the 82nd power particles in the universe--protons, neutrons, etc. We're talking about numbers so big you could count every last nucleon everywhere a few quintillion times over and still not see the end of the new numbers.
"Forever" takes you well past that.
So let's say you wish to live "forever". Okay, you'll still be counting years after the universe has faded to eternal lukewarm darkness, stuck in an infinitely prolonged life that nothing can end, for a literal eternity. Numbering the years in integer multiples of Graham's number won't even be a good start on how long "forever" is. There is no material thing in this universe that you can wish for which is so great that you'd want it forever.
...and this stupid woman phrases her wish so badly that her husband is alive, all right. Laying in that coffin, his body full of embalming fluid, as alive as it gets--and in extreme agony from the chemicals that have replaced his blood.
So she grabs a sword and hacks him to pieces. Now he's alive and in agony and in chunks! There's literally no way to kill him because she wished he'd be alive forever.
While showering I was thinking about that movie, but I couldn't remember this particular vignette; when I did, though, it hit me: at the end of the movie it's revealed that all the central figures of the vignettes are dead, and the stories explain why they're going to hell--but that guy can't go to hell, because he can't die!
Of course he was the first one to fall in. Heh.
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Spoilers, okay, but FFS the movie came out in 1972. It's so old, it was before Joan Collins had any plastic surgery.