Virtual Sacrifice Log

Every year, there seems to be some hot topic. The topic that there's at least a few papers about, and the sessions are packed with people sitting outside trying to hear. The "Birds Of a Feather" (BOF) sessions are all about it, and those discussion sessions again fill rooms.

Last year, it was Vista. A couple of years ago, it was student employee management. Before that, it was imaging. The year before that, it was spyware.

No idea what this year's hot SIGUCCS topic is, as of yet. We'll see.

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EDIT: Figured it out. It's student employees. Those BOFs are packed, there's multiple BOFs about "managing a helpdesk", "managing student employees", "training student employees", etc. Guess that's the topic du jour.

windexcowboy notes that one prior year, before I started going yearly, it was all about choosing or setting up a trouble ticket tracking system.

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EDIT DEUX: At this conference, I'm not the only long haired fella. By a long shot. There's tons of my people here. And Canadians. Including a Canadian who cured his own bacon from pigs a friend raises. But yeah, lots of long haired university IT people.

Currently we're discussing how bad the food was last year. The horrible tofu dish is what people kept on talking about last year after it was served Monday for lunch, and it's still a hot topic this year. Wow that was some bad tofu. "Food is very important for IT people."

Want to follow my fanboy gushings and snarky comments? I'll be twittering them at http://twitter.com/Kingfox

Right now still on the store line, watching the opening ceremony, kinda like last year.

I'd tell you to check out my Flickr feed for pictures, but my hotel wireless keeps on bombing out mid-upload.

Ran into gamers in EWR, LAX, and everywhere I've been so far. Been enjoying guildie homebrew and cooking, and look forward to all that I'll experience here this year.

And posing for a picture on the Frozen Throne. Unf.

For a while now, I've done LJ polls soliciting anonymous comments before taking a flight. The idea was originally stolen from creepingivy a few years ago, and I've kept on doing it regularly.

Fourteen months ago, while leaving for last year's Blizzcon, I did the usual. Someone let me know they were single. Immediately, a piece of wisdom from a good friend came to mind - no one lets you know a change in their relationship status unless they intend you to do something about it. Turns out, she had no such thing in mind, and was still working through things on her end. But after returning from Blizzcon, I got talked into giving it a shot and asking her out by maidoftheshore. We discussed this after last year's MP3 Experiment, as I walked around Manhattan chatting with people on the phone. I finally asked her out, and even invited her to last year's handout party, but ultimately our first date was a day after that - a month after the LJ poll was posted.

Thirteen months later, and jedimentat and I are still together. I love her dearly, and am really glad I posted that LJ poll. And asked her out.

As the year wraps around, I'm often reminded of last year's events. This year, she did go to the handout party, and even helped out at handout. Instead of calling everyone about her after the MP3 Experiment this year, I called her. And now, packing for Blizzcon, I've got a loving email in my inbox from her instead of a poll answer that makes me pause for thought.

But, so as not to break tradition, here's the usual poll. What's something you would regret not telling me?
[Poll #1274774]

And hey, if there's something you want to tell someone else? Don't wait.

( LOST spoilers for season five (Locke tricking people with Dharma technology) )

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And in other news, this past Saturday night jedimentat and I revisited our second date, and I got her a ring. ( See the ring! )

Video from handout that caniswolfie took:

Watch on YouTube

Seven years ago today, yet a year ago I forgot while drunk. And was ashamed.


Holy shit has today been nutty. When the error "The User Profile Service service has failed the logon." comes up and you've done nothing except try to uninstall some printer software that was seemingly breaking Word, breaking the printer list, deleted ntuser.dat, and has created a ton of empty directories at the root of the drive? And activate the Administrator account when logins are broken? And it just gets better from there? Fun.

This morning, after a morning of dealing with shit not working like it should, a co-worker wished for an afternoon where computers did what you intended them to. I joked that he was planning on spending his afternoon on Fantasy Island, and sure enough, nothing worked for him or I all afternoon. Stuff I fixed then didn't break when I tried to break it, stuff didn't work when it should have worked, and stuff was just nutty all around.

I could really go for a stiff drink and some NRG Chips.

What do you do when your name matches someone in the news? Set up a fake blog about the person, of course!

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As someone who regularly has a couple dozen tabs open at any given moment, I'm curious to see how Chrome performs insofar as the back end changes. Looks great in Aero, windexcowboy reports that it's not so pretty in XP. Will it handle the kingfox load? We'll find out tonight.

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At the post-handout pre-handout party annual BBQ dinner, we had a seating arrangement problem that jasonio ended up solving. He, his wife, windexcowboy, shmivejournal, jedimentat, caniswolfie, his wife, and I were seated at a table. While keeping couples together, people had to be re-seated so that four of us were close enough to have the fatty platter, in as few moves as possible. jasonio did it in only three, which should make his algorithms professor happy. shmivejournal joked about it being bubble sort, which left me cracking up the rest of the dinner.

Watch us give computers out over here.



Wheefun.

The guy who runs that business? The one two blocks from where I live, right under the kickboxing place I go to (he complained when they jumped rope over his head)?

That's Malone. From Cheersoft. Yes that Cheersoft.

I've been punching and kicking a bag right over my former employer. This world is waaaay too small.

Also, if you're a BBSer from the central Jersey area that isn't in this group yet, you need to join. We're having a grand old reunion.

White Castle finally makes it to India.

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Only thanks to a guildie will I make it to Blizzcon. Who else managed to beat Failoc and the SCV to snag tickets?

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Two nights ago, csmole updated graye and I on some CS drama. It's no warcraftdrama, but what is? We were just delighted to hear that things are just as inbred and hilarious as ever. I stopped really coding/creating/pushing buttons on cybersphere shortly after 9/11, but still keep tabs on things. There's some systems that still report to me, and plenty of people who still IM me when things go wrong. Many of my online friends are former or current players, mostly in the former camp these days. I'm just really glad to see that people are still moving across the country, making important life choices, and otherwise living life with CS as a deciding factor.

One time, quite a few years ago, incognito______ and I were the only two people actively coding who knew how MOO code (and specifically, how to work with the ancient fragments of code from those such as ogun and Quinn (beauty crafted from their genius and insanity)). We had a long discussion about how we would have to, well, find some new blood and get them rolling. We joked about what the MOO would be like if we just left it. "I'm sure I'd just log in one day, years later, and still find people playing it. long tailed rat would be the administrator logged on fixing code, as the MOO would just become self-aware.

While it's not an AI running what was once "my baby", a baby I had merely inherited from a long line of those who came long before me, it is kinda cool to see it still pooping its pants, crying, and wrecking people's lives. Long live CS, which has been "slowly dying" and "not the same CS" since at least 1994.