Ragu Spaghettisauce

Old way of getting our Citrix VPN client onto a new machine:
1) open IE
2) go to fqdn/saclient.exe
3) login
4) it downloads
5) DANCE

New way of getting out Citrix VPN client onto a new machine:
1) open IE
2) go to fqdn/saclient.exe
3) login
4) somewhere between steps 2 and 3, the firewall hardware reboots itself and kicks off everyone who was on the firewall
5) no matter how many times you try for this user in this session, #3 will fail, and if you try #2 again, it will restart the hardware again
6) go to the citrix.com downloads site and notice that not only have they renamed everything and removed 90% of the content that was there, the rest of it now requires you login to see it, let alone download it

ASJDKGHSADGKHASDTKHASTHKSDKTH

So my question, is how in the fuck do you get the Citrix VPN client onto a new machine?

I'm sure one perfectly legitimate answer would be "Assfuck, you should have a copy of that on your network somewhere." and my response to that is both total agreement, and a hearty "go fuck yourself, we don't appear to."

I looked to see where Citrix was handing that file from, and don't see it on any of the webservers that manage its stuff, nor the Citrix server itself, which makes me wonder if it was being hosted from the firewall hardware itself - which I don't see any sign of and question the validity of that line of thinking anyway.

Hate.

I went into the bathroom earlier today and there was a guy standing at the urinal with both hands clasped firmly behind his back, going about his business on the other side - sans hands.

He looked straight out of one of those NASA films back in the Apollo 13 days - buzzcut, short sleeve engineer shirt, polyester pants, thick glasses.

For some reason, something about this overall image greatly amused me. I believe it was his sense of purpose.

I really need to start counting how many times a day this happens, but for my job, people regularly (50+ times a day) email me to ask for a solution to something.

When I give it to them, sometimes there are multiple solutions, and sometimes both are equally good/bad. You could argue that I should never give them both solutions, and instead just give them one and insist it is the best, but instead, I am an idiot and must be honest and give them both and explain why each one is good/bad, and why neither can be ruled as the best and in this case perhaps there is no "best".

But I add that while one is not necessarily better than the other in the current situation - one choice is going to be better down the road if we decide to fuck everything up like we always do and therefore we should probably go with that option.

So what do they do? Always? Every single time?

Whatever I recommend, they do the opposite, and then down the road when we fuck everything up, we are screwed because we went with the wrong option given the future scenario.

So my question is twofold:
1) why in the hell do I keep giving them the two solutions - I should just tell them the one I would suggest is THE ONLY WAY?
2) why, if the point of me having this job is to give suggestions, do they then ignore the suggestions?

My extreme hate for everything is superseded by my extreme apathy. But if my apathy really were so strong, then I wouldn't care about this.

And therein lies the problem.

Holy crap is Grand Theft Auto IV completely awesome.

I'm horrible at games, but this is really a lot of fun.

Given my lack of skill at things like driving in the game, it is unlikely I will actually beat it.

But that said, I can waste many hours doing things that the game wasn't really designed for.
Favorites so far:
When you are introduced to a new character (Michelle is the best example early on), you will frequently still have control over your own character, but the new character will be talking to you (on and on) to establish their backstory and to setup how you move forward with them.
Since this is a game, it is not at all important that you pay any attention to this, as they will remind you in other ways if it is necessary, as that will keep the game fun - all part of good game design, and this game is excellent.
So I will either:
a) run circles around the person
b) jump up and hang from something and stay there the whole time they talk to me (door frames, pipes, the display case behind the counter at the bowling alley, etc)
c) sprint away from them (they run to keep up)

Additionally, when you drive people places, they will talk to you. I like to drive on the sidewalk and mow down as many people as possible in this phase, as nobody will ever bat an eye at it (although later, on a date with Michelle, if you do that, she doesn't care - but if you sideswipe a car, she will freak out - if you really smash into a lot of things, she will literally bail out of the car - and then still go on dates with you later).

Also with Michelle, as soon as she gets into my car on dates, I will call her up - for some reason that is hilarious to me. As soon as the date is over, I will call her up again to try and get another date, and keep doing that waking her up. Just like real life.

Note that while the bridges are closed to you, you can swim to the other islands (once there, you can't get back to the regular island without swimming - although there are boats, I've only done this at night and haven't figured out if I can hot wire a boat yet since it was too dark at the time I tried).
This seems like a bug in the system, as the reason you cannot cross the bridge is to establish stages of progression throughout the game.
When on the other island, I stole a dump truck full of sand and tried to drive it back for a date with Michelle (she will comment on new cars you bring to her, so I wanted to see what a dump truck would get) - but I couldn't get over the bridges.

I think of anything in the game though, the most endlessly funny thing for me though is the "jump and hang from stuff while people are talking about important things to you" type action. I did it accidentally at first and it was hilarious - now I try to do it all of the time.

Say you are playing a short stack at a full ring cash game online (low stakes), and you only ever either fold or go all in, and you play the same people, so they know your range (as they have seen your showdowns, so they know you are AA-JJ, AKo, AKs).

How frequently do you think you would get called? And by how many?
Presumably after a few hundred hands for them to catch on to this, when you do get called, it would mean they hold higher quality ranges of hands.

Would they call you more than 40% of the time?

I don't have an answer to this, I'm just curious how others feel about it.

I got Grand Theft Auto IV, will be playing that tonight.

I'm so bad at games like this that the main selling point for this is that I can do side things. Like: fashion, prancing, standing too close to people while they read their scripts, stealing hot dogs, did I mention fashion, car wrecks, etc.

---

I was watching the Red Sox game the other night and saw an ad for Comcast having Tivo. I phoned them the next day to get it installed, and they said they would send out a guy to install a card into my current DVR. I asked if this was something I could do myself to avoid the $13ish charge. They said it was not.

The guy came the next day, was right on time, gave us a new DVR as the old one supposedly would not work, and then there was no card. He spoke to a tech guy on a fancy phone/radio thing they carry, and then said to leave the unit on for at least 3 or 4 hours, but the TV could be turned off (durrr). This was not an issue as I was going back to work.

I came home 5+ hours later and saw that the DVR was exactly the same as what we had before, just more responsive (the other unit was slloooooww). No sign of Tivo - wondered if something was up, or if the Comcast Tivo just doesn't look very Tivo-y.
Later that night, I watched the Red Sox game, but during that, it cut out - this happens, and it will usually switch from the HD signal to the crap signal, even though you are on the HD channel. Technical difficulties.

Then it was off for so long that I actually forgot that the TV was on (I was playing poker, not sitting there watching the blank screen in suspense). Then it came back on and it was Tivo! Woo hoo! Except nope.

It said "Welcome to Tivo" or something like that, and showed the startup symbol, which is supposed to be a yellow screen with a sunrise sort of thing. The LED screen on the device said "db01" which is part of the device boot sequence.
I left it like that and it wasn't changing. Went to bed, it was like that over night. Went to work the next day, got home, still like that. Watched a DVD, then afterwards it was still like that.
I restarted the machine - and this time it was a green startup screen (which a tech later told me "should never happen" - oops).
I decided to press every button on the Tivo remote, from left to right, going down the device.
Somewhere around the ABCD buttons, I got the screen to go to a candy cane striped screen and the next said HAPPY HOLIDAYS!
An Easter Egg of sorts.
Couldn't get it back.
Restarted it again at the tech's suggestion after calling their support line, and he said he had no idea about the Happy Holidays. I suggested that maybe my Tivo observed a religion different than the majority of us (I observe no religion, as I am a dirty heathen).

Eventually it was decided that a tech would come out and replace my unit this weekend and I would just go back to the normal DVR, which at least worked, and there is a firmware patch for the Tivo coming out in June, so I will try out Tivo again in July.
It would be great if I could get this new DVR box, but the old service - it is a better box.

I am expecting I will have some issues in that they are charging me for the techs to come out, and they are charging me for Tivo - that's fine, were it to work - but the fact that this didn't at all work, means I don't want to have to pay for it - as we also cannot watch *any* TV at all for several days (that doesn't phase me, but it bothers The Wife) - not paying for their service if I cannot use their service.

Good times.

Thanks to the anon person who warned me in the comments that this would happen - you were right. Although Comcast tech support is infinitely nicer to deal with than any of my Verizon experiences, so this wasn't really so bad.

I'm sure it has been discussed elsewhere in far more detail than the cursory thought I have put into it, but during my (short) run yesterday, I worked out that if you are going to be doing the "all-in or nothing" ring game strategy, I believe 20BB is the minimum buyin you would need to maintain in order to start having any profitability in the long term.
(to be fair, I worked it out in my head, and then tweaked it on scrap paper later when I had more bloodflow in my brain)

By my math, it would look like at that buyin, you should be able to sustain something around +2-2.5BB/100. With 10BB buyin, you would lose 1-1.5BB/100. (technically I suppose the actual buyin could/should be slightly less - but I was only testing in jumps of 10 - 15 is probably closer, having just tested 15, it would seem something between 15 and 20, lol - not enough time to do this properly right now)

I haven't worked out any of the variance swings that should be expected.

This is after a discussion with someone over writing a poker bot that exists solely to play a lot of hands an minimize losses, in the hopes of clearing bonuses and generally collecting points (as opposed to expert play in order to gain money, without any regard to points).

Since I'm sure there is a large potential for error in my work (for instance, I didn't look at rake collected), and as I said this has surely been well covered by people smarter than me, I won't go into the details of it.

---

When I was at the OTC in high school, they told us one way to look out for overtaining was that if you felt fatigued before going for a run, you might be headed towards overtraining and your body was trying to tell you this.

They suggested that you lie down on a carpeted floor or a couch (specifically not a bed) and if you don't fall asleep after 10 minutes, get up and go for your run.
But if you do fall asleep, then you likely needed it, and therefore just sleep until you wake up.

Except that every single time I have ever done this in my life, I just go right to sleep and sleep for at least 8 hours. Always.

Seeing evwhore's post about the NASA study where you have to lie in bed for 90 days makes me think I should do that, as I would just sleep the whole time. No problem at all.

On a side note, a better way to track if you are overtraining or not is track your resting heart rate when you wake up every morning (unfortunately this only works if you do not use an alarm, as that startles you - and I am physically incapable of waking up without an alarm). Track that over time, and if it starts to increase, then you are overtraining.

Similarly, if you monitor your waking temperature, you can track your metabolism which (at least at that time in the morning) is largely controlled by your thyroid via T3 levels, so if you wanted to hack your system to try and burn more fat (technically muscle too) by taking outside sources of that, you would watch your temperature in the mornings, and it if it no longer elevated over the baseline, your T3 should be increased.
The key thing to note being that at the end of your usage of the T3, you need to pyramid back down to get your body back to making its own again, as otherwise you will have suppressed levels and then get a rebound effect and get your weight back in fat - yay fat!

(note that if you monitor waking temperature and it is not for some arbitrary fat loss and drugs thing, and you see it going up in the mornings over your baseline - then you are sick, as in you have a cold)

Fun with body stats! Err, "fun".

Occasionally in IT, you get one of those events that makes you think "well, guess I'm getting fired". It will be something that isn't your fault, but it is so big and bad that someone needs to get fired over it, and you are the nearest one to blame.

But in the case of today, it caused us to find a comically better solution to the problem.

I was trying to find the right analogy regarding this new solution, and the best I could come up with is that they told us we needed to go to a building every night, blindfolded, and find a rope on the side, climb up to the roof, and then using a pick axe, tunnel into the building via the roof, and then wander the rooms inside looking for a big box, and then take said box and climb back out the roof, and back down to the ground. The box would need to be opened and all of its contents would look exactly the same, but would need to be sorted by unknown means.
But then one day you show up during the day without your blindfold on, and you see that there is a door to the building, and you open it and go inside, and there is a clear box that weighs much less, and right on the side of it is a label telling you exactly what is inside of it, and each item looks different and so you just sort the items based on similar traits.

I don't know, made sense to me.

---

Today when I was outside, I walked by a bus stop and there was a woman sitting there on a stone pillar, looking very tired. And I can't blame her, because she was alternating between:
1) leaning forward and screaming as loud as she could "ARRRARGGGH"
2) same thing, but yelling "POLTERGEISTS"
3) drinking vodka from a clear bottle (with label, out on a busy street, with a cop standing right behind her), and smoking cigarette - looking as if she could not be more bored with life

More importantly, she looked EXACTLY like Chris Farley. With long stringy dirty (as in actually dirt caked) blond hair, and huge sweaty breasts that sagged past the waist of her stained sweat pants.

I fully expected her to get up one of the times and fall on top of an oddly placed coffee table, completely destroying it.

ARARGGGHHHHH

I could just picture her doing this all day, and then at 5pm looking at her watch and getting up, catching the bus, and heading home. She walks through the door of her home and her husband is there, wearing a colander on his head, holding a pair of stained underwear up in front of him like a newspaper, feet up in front of him, nothing on but flippers - and he says to his wife "oh hello dear, how was your day" and she just lets out a sigh as her shoulders slump and says "oh man, the worst - can't wait 'til Friday". Then heads over to the corner to poop herself, grab a handful of cat litter for a snack, and then make dinner.

---

Note that this woman was sitting in the seat of another woman who usually sits there blasting a boom box, but singing along so loudly and so out of tune that I can only assume she is deaf and purely going by feel more than any other sense.

Not sure where she was today.

---

I saw my first prostitute a few days ago on this same street. Not as in I was a client or anything, and I'm sure I've seen many more and didn't realize it - but this woman was subtle about it and in her fishnet stockings over purple granny underwear with one high heel and one high top sneaker, a bra and a shredded football jersey, with hair that clearly had been hairsprayed and slept on in successive moves one too many times in the recent past, limping along the side of the street screaming at people passing by WHO WANTS TO FUCK?! YOU WANT TO FUCK? WHO WANTS TO FUCK?

She saw me openly staring at her and headed towards me with her one-heeled limp, waving around what looked like may have been a single leather sleeve from some coat that had long since been lost - and I couldn't help but wonder how old she was. She looked 50ish, and I wondered how long she's been doing this, and what sort of success this strategy resulted in.
But before she could get too close, a policeman came running over - presumably to get her out of the street - or perhaps he was going to take her up on her offer.

Ahhh, Central Square - good times.

Spare change? Smaaaaaalll change. Spare change? Smaaaaaaaalll change. I like to think that guy isn't really asking for money, but instead just making social commentary to pass the day.

We are getting Tivo installed on our Comcast cable today - not a Tivo box, but they put a card into our existing DVR and it transforms into a Tivo. Or Optimus Prime. Something like that.

I'm hoping they show up on the early side of the time window they gave me.

---

This is the greatest picture ever.

---

I hate listening to other people chew. Or bite their nails. Or burp 90 times a day.

Thankfully the guy right next to me at work does all of that.

Poker Stars won't let me change my avatar to this.



I don't believe due to any policy beyond that they feel I already changed it once before. I assume they are correct in that they are in a better position to know, as I don't recall doing that, but it was over two years ago, and I have the memory of a... what were we talking about?

Say what you will about Kathy Liebert, I don't know her at all, but that is a great picture.

I think that is how the saying goes.

Yesterday I was sitting at home playing poker, in a chair by our windows. Said windows are on the front of the building and go up to the 10th floor. That means if someone on any of the floors between makes a loud noise, the windows pick it up similar to a guitar, and we can hear it in our place (if you are close to the windows).

While sitting there, I heard what sounded like people chanting "fight, fight, fight" and then sirens. The guys above us are college students and seem to play video games or watch sports pretty much non-stop when they are not loudly having sex with their girlfriends, occasionally drunkenly accusing them of cheating and slapping them around.
Great times.
I've largely come to tune them out, and in this case assumed they had the new GTA4 and there was some sort of fight scene in it and the sirens would explain that.

But it really sounded like it was outside, so I looked out and sure enough, right in front of our place were two cop cars, about 5 police, a paddy wagon, and an ambulance.
They had a guy on the ground in cuffs, and he was going into great detail about how he was innocent and/or framed. Roughly 15 feet to his side was a knife on the ground, and then a few other things that I couldn't tell what they were (I believe they were measuring tape carried by the police to denote distance of things at a crime scene - in this case the knife from various locations).

I later found out that the guy they arrested was "some crazy guy" who had tried to break into the building the previous night. The security guard had escorted him away, and then he came back this morning. When the security guard tried to escort him away, said crazy guy pulled a knife on him and cut him (not too badly thankfully, and not stabbed, as I saw the guy was still working his shirt later that same day).

The cops knew the guy and took him away, but obviously he would be back on the streets again soon enough.

On a good note, they raised my rent.

I've always felt that each time someone gets into a knife fight in front of where I live, it increases the value of the place.

I can't say that my speech is without failing. In fact, far from it, many people have a hard time understanding me - due to me talking too fast and/or too quietly, and perhaps a deep voice, mumbling my way through whatever convoluted thought process I'm trying to convey to the other person in the conversation is not the ideal speaking style. Especially if said other person does not speak English as their native tongue.

That said, I've been watching instructional videos online done by "pro" poker players, and holy crap do these guys sound... hilarious.

I wonder if there is any sort of correlation between playing poker (successfully) online and sounding like the hugest dork in the world?
90% of them sound like Professor Frink from the Simpsons, many of them thalksking wifth a listhp, to the point where even though I am a glasses wearing dork myself, I just want to hunt them down and beat them up, just having had to listen to them.

The exceptions to this rule are the Brits. They all are awesome - and I have to wonder that were I actually British, if I would not feel the same way when listening to them and it is merely some cultural divide that helps.

It has been done many times already (I first heard about it in some psych class years ago in college), where you combine many photos of people and then the composite outcome is considered "above average" - so movie stars and the like tend to have faces that are just "extremely average" and we see that as attractive.
(and I think I recall that "supermodels" in terms of runway and the exotic look, are actually freakishly different, as opposed to aggressively average - but for success in the lowest common denominator magazine cover and movie world, the average look is best)

This page:
http://www.webstersismybitch.com/2008/04/some-celebrities-shouldnt-stan.php
Shows close-ups of celebrities, and they are all pretty close in setup, so it would be interesting to merge/morph/average all of those together and see what you get (I would imagine Iggy Pop's facial hair, Marilyn Manson's face paint, and Tom Hank's refusual to look directly into the camera would throw off the results, as would the small sample size)

Our country is doomed.

http://www.komando.com/videos/4-30.asp

I have an IBM ThinkPad T60p that I have a love hate relationship with. When I first got it, I loved it. Then within a few months, it bricked itself in the middle of me doing something important (July 4th 2006, in that I recall looking at the fireworks, and then back at the screen and it was gone).
I had it sent out and the motherboard was replaced and it worked again.
But then it started acting up again, in a different way - when you press the power button, all of the lights go out. Basically the total opposite of what it should be doing. I could at least go through a convoluted ritual of plugging things in a certain order, unplugging, taking out the DVD drive, taking out the battery, plugging the power back in, booting it, and then putting parts back in and it would "work".

But now it won't even do that.

I was thinking I would play some poker on it at the higher resolution that it has, but apparently this thing is too far gone at this point, and basically needs to be taken in again - probably for either a new power supply, motherboard, or all of the above.

Bah.

Over on Bruce Schneier's blog, he links to a study that boring jobs dull the mind (to the task at hand).

That particular study was in reference to airport security scanners, and I was under the impression that specifically for that reason, the software would occasionally show false positives on the screen that were not in the bags, and the screener still had to flag them or they were pulled off (although I would imagine the false positive examples were not exhaustive and you could probably grow to recognize them as they came up, so you are less recognizing threats as you are learning to beat the test).

It reminds of me some software that my company was trying to sell to law firms to help with the e-discovery process, so that the many people reading over documents wouldn't glaze over and miss a document, and also speed the process up.
It was not well received, as law firms make money hourly, so speeding things up is not a terribly large incentive for them, and the trust levels on software are still quite low.

At a hedge fund conference, I heard someone from the legal team of the SEC note that they have many documents to review, and not much of a budget nor staff to work on things (compared to funds they are going after who have many more resources - if you are a top notch lawyer, would you rather work for a hedge fund, or against them - if the money to be made were massively larger on the fund side, many will choose that of course).
So I figured perhaps we didn't market this properly and should have tried for government contracts - except that I would rather torture than have to go through all of the government hoops for securing contracts - lucrative or not, they are not a sure thing to get and can cost a lot to secure - but once you have them... good stuff.

Train of thought posting, it is what I do.

I had forgotten about this until just now, but when I was flying back from Grand Cayman and we landed in ATL, the plane took some time to wind its way along the various runways and such. As we neared the terminals where we would park (or whatever it is referred to with a plane - dock?), yet still far enough out it was terribly amusing, was a single green bag with beige stripes sitting on the runway.

I could see if we were closer to a terminal, as it would have probably fallen off one of the many carts moving about - but this was still on one of the connection roads between landing and the terminals.

The bag looked sad, sort of dejected and slouched, just out of the way of the plane's wheels. I only happened to notice it as the guy next to me was leaning over me looking at the window, making me feel uncomfortable, so instead of staring at his head, I looked out the window as well.

I had to wonder how the bag got there, how long it had been there, what was in it, and what did the owner know of its location? Were their plans ruined, or had this happened so recently they didn't even know yet? Were they wandering the bowels of ATL trying to work out who to talk to to find this thing, and were the airport to use an RFID system, would that even find this thing?

So many questions, and yet, no answers.

I've decided to start running again.

Although technically I don't have shoes to run in, but they should be here early this week.

I need to pick a race of some sorts that is sufficiently distant that I can actually get in shape by then, yet sufficiently close that I won't flake out prior to the race and I can use it (and others, hopefully) to keep me focused.

It will be interesting to see how out of shape I am. The last time I was running regularly was in Bermuda around roughly 2005 I think.

---

Up until today, I always thought that the lyric in the Lennon song "Working Class Hero" was "a working class hero is something to fear", as opposed to it actually being "something to be".

That dramatically changes the meaning/feeling of the song (depressing in the latter, as intended - inspiring in the former, in an "overthrow" sort of way).

Although it would explain the stupid (in my previous understanding of the lyrics) juxtaposition of the line "When you can't really function you're so full of fear" just prior to the main lyric (two lines in a row ending in "fear", silly).

Anyway, CARE.

I have experience with Citrix and MS Terminal Services.
I do not have experience with 2x, but I hear it is basically like Citrix.

But I have no experience at all with AppStream, and I am curious if anyone reading this has used them at all and if you have any feelings one way or the other (especially negative, since positive ones are basically what sales people will give me).

One massive negative they have going for them is that they were recently acquired by Symantec, which is probably the worst software company I have had to use over the years. They buy things and ruin them. Hopefully this is an exception.