Useless Conversation

[Merusk]

2) on the on demand sections there is no way to go back to the previous menu level, you have to exit out and go back in.

I am also mildly annoyed that if I want the hd broadcasts that I could get locally I have to pay Comcast 8 bucks month more plus a $20 activation fee. Shit that is broadcast over the air should be forwarded to the customer the same way at not extra cost IMO .

Try the "last" button if you have one.  Took me forever to figure that out on mine.

I agree, but thankfully HD tvs all have multiple inputs.  Plug an antenna into one of the other inputs for local HD if you don't care about having any of the other channels in HD.

[Morat20]

So, just randomly -- my dog got something called 'vestibular disease' last week. She's an older dog (11 or 12), and the vet says sometimes older dogs just..get it. Generally just once, thank god. Most of the time there's a reason -- generally ear infections.

Anyways, the reason I bring it up -- it was the scariest, saddest damn thing I have ever seen. It started with her trembling, falling -- thought she'd hurt her hip. I checked the area, didn't find anything tender, figured she'd just jumped badly or something.

Next morning, she couldn't walk without falling. I thought she'd had a stroke. She fell into a bush and got stuck. She was listing to one side, falling over, walking in weird patterns.

She walked like she was drunk -- like staggering, barely conscious drunk. You can see why I thought 'stroke'. She also had this ultra-fast left-right eye twitch thing.

Vestibular disease is a swelling of the main nerve between the dog's inner ear and her brain. She was, in fact, dizzy. The signals from her inner ear were claiming the world was not only swaying and shaking, but at least two inches to the left of where her eyes were reporting. Just getting food and water into her was a pain.

All the vet can do is treat for nausea. Thankfully it got better each day, and she's finally back to almost normal. And I got told this was only a moderate case -- the bad ones are so bad the dog can't even lay down, she just starts rolling around because she thinks the world is.

Saddest damn thing I ever saw. I felt so bad for the dog -- she was so miserable.

[Bzalthek]

I'm looking forward to St. Bloodworth's day.  I really want to annoy all those people on my facebook with it.  Is there a consensus on the actual day?

[Mrbloodworth]

Mr. B's birthday? 

Its the 8th of December.

[Der Helm]

Dinggratz! 

[Mrbloodworth]

Thanks, but I think some base stats dropped.

[Chimpy]

Try the "last" button if you have one.  Took me forever to figure that out on mine.

I agree, but thankfully HD tvs all have multiple inputs.  Plug an antenna into one of the other inputs for local HD if you don't care about having any of the other channels in HD.

Ahh. Thanks, will try that. My mom's box with insight has a visible option to go back. Unfortunately on the HD thing, I only get two channels intermittently with the antenna, CBS and ABC so if I decide I want to watch football in hd I will have to pay the fee.

[Samwise]

I'm looking forward to St. Bloodworth's day.  I really want to annoy all those people on my facebook with it.  Is there a consensus on the actual day?

Unless Lant exercises her right to veto, I'm going to say Groundhog Day.  It adds an extra layer of joke that people might actually "get" outside of our little group here.

Happy belated birthday, MrB!

[Lantyssa]

Vestibular disease is a swelling of the main nerve between the dog's inner ear and her brain. She was, in fact, dizzy. The signals from her inner ear were claiming the world was not only swaying and shaking, but at least two inches to the left of where her eyes were reporting. Just getting food and water into her was a pain.

Very similar, if not identical, to BPPV it sounds like.  That's what I had over summer.  It was most definitely not fun.

[Xanthippe]

So, just randomly -- my dog got something called 'vestibular disease' last week. She's an older dog (11 or 12), and the vet says sometimes older dogs just..get it. Generally just once, thank god. Most of the time there's a reason -- generally ear infections.
<snip>
Saddest damn thing I ever saw. I felt so bad for the dog -- she was so miserable.

I'm glad she's better. Poor dog, must have been scary.

I had an equilibrium problem a year or so ago. I rolled over in bed, at night, while sleeping, and immediately woke up and thought I was falling out of my bed. The unbalanced feeling was there anytime I moved fast. Lasted for a few weeks, then disappeared.  I suspect it was an inner ear infection or something but I felt fine other than that.

[Reg]

You suspect? Didn't you go to a doctor?

[Strazos]

So I think I hallucinated in my sleep the other night - though there was a large cockroach in my bed. There was, in fact, nothing there.

I'm hoping it's just an isolated incident and not the start of a trend of reactions to my anti-malaria mefloquin. :/

[Reg]

Probably just an isolated stress reaction from being in a new and foreign place. Or bedbugs. 

[lamaros]

So I think I hallucinated in my sleep the other night - though there was a large cockroach in my bed. There was, in fact, nothing there.

I'm hoping it's just an isolated incident and not the start of a trend of reactions to my anti-malaria mefloquin. :/

Could be the DTs.

[Yegolev]

Is Citrix shitty, or our implementation shitty?

[Lantyssa]

Dunno.  We just switched to Terminal Services using thinstation for all the dummy terminals.  Once we got it to stop hitting the pagefile it was pretty awesome.

Thinstation should be able to connect to Citrix though, so you could make a test boot disk and see if it's any better.

[Yegolev]

Unfortunately I'm a victim client and am not allowed access to anything Windowsy.

Edit to say that it is probably weird to think of a place where you only work on the one thing you are supposed to work on, when you work in a small shop and don't have techs for each discipline.  It was bad enough for me when I was told to stop doing SAP BASIS, sqlplus, and user admin work.

[Ironwood]

Automapping mailboxes in Exchange sucks fucking arse.

It's the fucking insult answer to a question no-one asked.

[IainC]

Porsche Arena Stuttgart.

Last night.

Three rows from the front.

All awesome all the time.

[Lantyssa]

Edit to say that it is probably weird to think of a place where you only work on the one thing you are supposed to work on, when you work in a small shop and don't have techs for each discipline.  It was bad enough for me when I was told to stop doing SAP BASIS, sqlplus, and user admin work.

This is true.  It's always been, "You're the computer gal, you know everything, right?"

[Minvaren]

"This electric stapler plugs into the wall, so it must be an IT thing!"   

[Xanthippe]

You suspect? Didn't you go to a doctor?

No. I don't like going to the doctor. If it didn't go away within a reasonable time period, I would have gone.

[Minvaren]

For the last 90 minutes, I've been watching a race between 5 gallons of mead filtering and 4 gallons of wort (rye++) lautering.

And it finally finished - the wort 90 seconds ahead of the mead.   

Now to boil some beer and spice the mead. 

[Lantyssa]

The wort had a 1 gallon head start!

[Minvaren]

Beer is dear, but liquor is quicker.   

[Ingmar]

"This electric stapler plugs into the wall, so it must be an IT thing!"   

Copiers. 

[Der Helm]

All awesome all the time.

God, I LOVE me some Rammstein. 

[Quinton]

I declare the 2011 holiday hardware hacking season to be officially open.

To celebrate, I picked up an inexpensive binocular boom microscope and digital storage oscilloscope:


And I've been doing PCB layout, ARM Cortex M3 hacking, and mucking around with ISM band radios in the 433, 868 and 915 MHz bands:

[Der Helm]

I have no idea what any of that means.

[Quinton]

Cortex M3 is ARM's low-end CPU these days (starting to displace the wildly popular ARM7TDMI parts), available in a number of very inexpensive microcontroller designs from Atmel, NXP, STMicro, etc.  I've been having fun building tools to debug M3 processors and using those tools to hack on unlicensed (meaning you don't need to buy spectrum) radio transcievers that TI and MicroChip make.  The end goal of this is to experiment a bit with mesh networks and to build some homebrew multi-zone temperature/activity measurement modules towards replacing my thermostat with something much less stupid than the one I have now, and probably to mess around with some small robotics tinkering as well.

[Bunk]

Morat - glad to hear the dog is improving, that would be heartbreaking to watch.
I do enjoy Rammstein, especially when I feel like driving like a maniac.
I laughed audibly at Cheezburger pic.
That was Ralphie's little brother in the snowsuit, not Ralphie.
Quinton - looks cool, what of it I understood. Was the kind of thing I thought I'd get into when I was a kid, just never really happened.

I think that covers the weekend worth of you all posting.

[Sky]

We need Quinton on our minecraft server. I'll supply some redstone!

Spent the weekend finishing up the winterizing chores that Skyrim blew completely out of my mind. Watched the original SW trilogy in preparation for this week's awesomeness.

[Engels]

Cortex M3 is ARM's low-end CPU these days (starting to displace the wildly popular ARM7TDMI parts), available in a number of very inexpensive microcontroller designs from Atmel, NXP, STMicro, etc.  I've been having fun building tools to debug M3 processors and using those tools to hack on unlicensed (meaning you don't need to buy spectrum) radio transcievers that TI and MicroChip make.  The end goal of this is to experiment a bit with mesh networks and to build some homebrew multi-zone temperature/activity measurement modules towards replacing my thermostat with something much less stupid than the one I have now, and probably to mess around with some small robotics tinkering as well.

And this is why Quinton works for Google and most of us don't 

[Nebu]

I'm grabbing Quinton for my next bank heist!

[Zetor]

I (sadly?) understood every word in that post... of course part of my work involves security evaluation of set-top boxes, so there you go.

(I should probably look into getting an ion cannon one of these days though )