03/22/2000

Some may wonder why I bother to update this late at night. Well, I do it
because I can see two senarios happening:



  1. “Why are you complaining about getting no sleep when you update your
    webpage at night? Just go to sleep you loser!”
  2. “Why are you updating your webpage in the middle of the day? Don’t
    you have work to do? Get back to work you loser!”

Neither of which I find that attractive (should they actually happen (chances
calculated at around 0.000000001%)) so I figure I’ll do them while I’m still
on a caffiene high from work. Hmm… hope that I don’t wake up all perky
tomorrow (today actually) from said high.


I don’t know if I’ve complained about this before, but if I could not pay
bills that had my name wrong I would be soooo much richer. I wonder if “no
your honor, I don’t know who Allen Ballward is, why should I pay his cell
bills?” would hold up in court. I mean, you’d think that these people if they
were unsure about a name would simply ASK when I sign up for these things. I
think that the name isn’t even consistant sometimes. The card will have the
right name on it but the bill will have the wrong name. I can see a mistake
on things like the cell bill, but it’d be my guess that when you
stamp a name on a credit card that name (and spelling) has
some correlation to say, your billing system? Maybe I can
lobby for an improved postal service where they deliver to the people who live
at the address only. Ie: I’d stop getting mail for whoever lived in this
apartment before me because they’d not only be delivering to my apartment #
and address, but also to me. Alan Bailward. Not Allen Ballwood.
Not Allan Balwerd. Not Alen Balawood. Not Kyle (inside joke from when I did
tech support at the real estate board and none of the
realtors could understand the name of the person they spoke to so they’d say
“is Kyle there” when they meant to say “is Al there” and we’d merrily pass it
on to who they asked for, even if we knew it was us… ok, it’s funny if you
were there).


Anyway, I can see my schedule for the next little while. Home at 12:30am.
Sleep ASAP. Wake at 7amish. Repeat till friday. Sleep in till 3pm saturday.
Laze around the house doing misc things like laundry. Sleep in sunday and
finish up things such as seeing friends and family. Get to sleep early sunday
night (yea right). Repeat till May.


While watching TV this morning over cereal I realized how true that joke about
“Three’s Company” on “Friends” (‘it’s the one with the misunderstanding’ ‘oh,
I’ve seen that one’) is. I mean, every show has the same bloody plot: Blah
blah normal life. Something happens. Someone misunderstands something
about it and does something. Continue on this track where one or more of the
characters is on a different plane of reality than the others for a while.
Have them realize thier mistake. Have them try to rectify their mistake to
a canned laugh-track. Have it all come out in the end. Roll Credits.


I’m saddened to think that that’s what alien civilizations will be watching
when they look closer at our little planet. No wonder we’ve had no contact.
The colony living underground on Mars are probably like “oh shit, there comes
another probe! hide unless you want to actually have to talk to those morons!”


Well, it’s a theory anyway.


Worklog:

I still hate oracle. Yesturday I spent all day/night trying to get one copy
working. Today I spent all day downloading another copy. Their FTP sucks.
6.6Kb/s all day. I can do better (almost) on a 56k modem! That and they
seem to have a limit of 1 user or so on their ftp site. I hope it was just me, or just
today, but if that sorry excuse for a server is any indication of the rest of
the company I have no idea how they survived.


And when I did finally finish downloading the 265.7meg file (which
crashed at 265.2 megs (thank god for “reget”)), there is now no character based
install option. So you’re forced to have X and Java on the server you install
it on. I don’t know about you but when I envision a database server I
envision a server with minimul cruft. ie: X and Java. Of course, running the
java installer remotely (with $DISPLAY exported) just crashed with the
informative error message:



kermit:/usr/local/src/oracle-815$ ./runInstaller
Initializing Java Virtual Machine from /usr/local/jre/bin/jre. Please wait…
Error in CreateOUIProcess(): -1
: Bad address


Note the hardcoded path for /usr/local/jre/bin. That’s not a script or
variable you can change, that’s embedded in a binary! Go oracle. No wonder
DBAs are paid big bux. They have to afford the detox.


(if you’re wondering about the hostname of “kermit” I chose that so I could
steal cool ass ascii
art
)