http://www.krqe.com/global/story.asp?s=8598930 If the Redenator works on Prarie Dogs then it should work on starfish.

So it looks like I have a new victim. She was just hired two weeks ago and joined the payroll department (two other people). Fortunately, she's not the payroll dept. that signs my checks.

It started out with little things. First, she wanted her keyboard tray removed from her desk because she's an amazon and needed the leg space. Annoying, but understandable. You can't help your size (I should know). Nevertheless, I polite and humble request is always preferred over an "I need this done," statement. Especially to the IT guy you just met.

Next, however, she decides to up the ante. We had created a new folder for the department and the only people that had access to it were those three, the manager and myself. I get an email from her the next day asking why everyone had access to it when only the 4 of them were supposed to. Turns out, she had misread the permissions on the folder and thought everyone had access. If she had tried to access it from someone else's account, she would have seen that they couldn't get in. But that's not the type of EU she's going to be apparently.

Next up, he station was scheduled to be replaced. So I told her a couple of minutes beforehand, to shut down the system and I'll be down with her new computer. We use terminal sessions, so she wasn't going to lose any work or anything. I said I'd be back down in a minute with her new system. Something kept me upstairs for about 5 minutes instead. When I came down, I heard her say, "That was alot longer than a minute." To which I joked, "Hmm, it seems like all the computers here aren't working, I might have to take them all in for repairs." Obviously I was wrong in thinking she'd get the idea, because she responds with, "There are three of us, I think we could take you."

She's obviously forgotten that there is one guy you don't screw with at any company: the IT guy. Therefore, I open the floor to LART suggestions. Ladies and Gentlemen (and I use those terms loosely). Do your worst (without getting me caught).

Okay, in a continued effort by Hollywood to shit and piss all over our precious memories, we have... WarGames 2: The Dead Code.

wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarGames_2:_The_Dead_Code

imdb:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0865957/

Direct to video (and pirated to BitTorrent last month) for a reason.

For all of my fellow TSC members here in America, I wish you a Happy Fourth of July! The day when we commemorate our freedom from the country over there, across the pond, (who're now our "bestest friends"!), so many years ago!

And to our "bestest" friends, thanks for not holding a grudge!

And, for all members from all countries, out of the spirit of fairness, please save this post, and each morning, substitute the proper date, i.e. "Fifth of July", "Sixth of July", "Tenth of August", etc., until the date of your preference.

Have a wonderful day, everybody!

Sorry, gotta go now- have to go to work, (odd thing how people want hotels to be open 24/7). Oh ,well... Casa de Chaos, here I come!.

email in:
Hello! I have two domains registered with you, ___.__ and ____.___ and I need to renew them. I can't seem to get in touch with my registrar. His details are below:
Name: Goeata Dik
Address: 1 Mormon Place, Salt Desert, UT, 80000
Phone: 818.555.1212
Email: ugotboned@poligamy.com
Thank you for any help you can give. Thank you -- Anil Buttah

email out:
Please contact your reseller. Your reseller info is as follows:
Name: Goeata Dik
Address: 1 Mormon Place, Salt Desert, UT, 80000
Phone: 818.555.1212
Email: ugotboned@poligamy.com
We appreciate your efforts to resolve this issue. -- JSD

  Throughout the world, it is a generally accepted rule, that when developers and operations get together, no good can result.

  This story of course, is no exception.

  And thus our sad, sad story, begins...

  We begin our tale of woe, with our opening scene. We were going to start it with the ending, but the writers guild said that it simply wouldn’t do to mess with the natural order of things. Anyways, the opening scene…

  Our hero, we assume he is our hero, since he is not our villain, although perhaps he is just a supporting…*gaak*.

  Anyways, on with our story.

  Our hero sits down, opening his email client. Confirming that he wishes to work online, the flow of unread messages soon ensues.

  “Spam.”

  “Spam.”

  “Wow, I can pay off my mortgage in 30 days, AND enlarge...SPAM.”

  “Hold on, what’s this now?”

  Our hero opens an interesting message entitled “Account Still Inactive”.

  Reading this literary delight, filled with exciting nouns, interesting pronouns and helpful verbs, he soon discovers that it is a forward of a message from an outsourced developer. The message continues on, stating in very clear terms that he is still requiring his accounts reactivated, since he will still be employed past the accounts expiration date. Reading further, our hero discovers that the phrases “they did not reactivate my VPN” and “password still does not activate a session” appear in the message.

  Our hero quickly checks AD and AAA accounts for the developer, and finds that they are all in order. Since accounts aren’t shedding light on the situation, log files are soon reviewed.

  Among the plethora of undecipherable gobbly-gook, our hero soon finds a shed of light, when a legion of “bad password’ errors suddenly, and without warning, leap out of the log files, and proceeded to…*gaak*.

  Anyways, on with our story.

  After our hero recovers, he replies to the message, indicating quite clearly what the issue appears to be. Since it is still quite early in the day, and he has yet to become embittered with the world, he also humorously jests that normally he would require a trouble ticket, but would wave the issue this time.

  As the next few chapters are quite boring, and have absolutely no contributing value to the saga at hand, we shall skip them altogether.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  Our hero arrives back at work the next morning. Opening his email client, he confirms that he wishes to work online, and the flow of unread messages soon ensues.

  “Spam.”

  “Spam.”

  “Wow, I can pay off my mortgage in 30 days, AND enlarge...SPAM.”

  “Hold on, what’s this now?”

  Our hero cautiously opens an interesting message entitled “CRITICAL ISSUE -- unable to logon via vpn”.

  Realizing that the message was generated by the ticketing system, he opens the app, and reviews the issue.

  He is quickly shocked to find that the phrases “Despite your record logs showing ‘wrong password’ or something” and “fix this before close of business today” in the ticket.

  Once again, our hero quickly checks AD and AAA accounts for the developer, and finds that they are all in order.

  Once again, our hero consults the log files.

  Once again our hero is viciously attacked by an army of “bad password’ errors, which he was only able to repel by…*gaak*.

  Back to the story at hand.

  Our hero, sure that he explained the situation as clearly as he could, proceeds to hunt down the consultant, and asks him to relocate his PC, as well as himself, to his office.

  Once there, our hero connects up the laptop to an external connection, and tries to start a VPN connection himself.

  At this point, our developer friend is grinning quite proudly.

  “See, I told you it wasn’t a password issue”.

  Our hero tries again, with the same result.

  At this point, our hero is about to try somewhat more ‘drastic’ measures, when he realizes something…

  …the laptops’ “NumLock” lamp is lit.

Windows XP creates an entirely new profile for me.

I told my boss what happened, that there is now a "mushroom" and a "mushroom.NEW" listed in Docs & Settings, and the mail STILL doesn't work. Apparently this fix and outcome was a surprise to him too. I stayed at work for many hours trying to figure a way to get my stuff out of the old, inaccessable profile because, duh, I need it. Fail. Bonus amusement when I log in after the IT clowns reset my password, I change it to what I want it to be when prompted, and next time I log in IT has returned it to what they had given me...

So this morning I came in over an hour early, pulled out my Spotmau CD (know how hard it is to find the full version on the juarez sites? almost all are just the Windows app with the full version's description, not the boot disk!), and transferred the contents of profile "mushroom" onto a memory stick. Yes, I am aware that someone with admins could have done the copy directly, or even just put shit back where they found it, but they can't be arsed to clean up their own mess. Happily the old profile I copied included the Outlook PST, my desktop, my IE faves and Firefox profile, and my personal apps (IT has the Program Files folder secure), so I was able to log into my new profile and copy everything over... reboot, and things look the way they are supposed to (after putting my cat's picture back as my wallpaper and changing the color scheme to sumptin more purple). I'm back to functional...

...except the email. Remember the email?

Launch Outlook, and it asks if I want to use a temporary profile (which works but saves nothing) or the old one (which crashes the program). Short version: Wound up creating a POP3 account so I could delete the Exchange account, then deleted the POP3 account, did two kinds of repairs (useless as those are), uninstalled and reinstalled the program (we're talking Microsoft so it was uninstalled in name only), and the only issue I was having was that I couldn't do anything with the program -- see, it'd put up a dialog asking for first initial and last name, like the program was freshly installed, but then put the Outlook desktop over it so the Okay couldn't be clicked, and it can't do anything until that dialog has been satisifed. After screwing around with that and websearches, I went into Excel and it prompted me for the name, I was able to Okay on this one, and that solved the issue in Outlook. Mail restored, happy happy.

Now, there's still one database I need into that won't let me in, but since it never sends notices to say when issues put into it have been fixed it's not like I'm going to go there without a reason (and I have 4 presently, and some whinging customers wanting updates daily). Now, I don't claim to know everything about Windows network management, but if you can confuse "reset my password" with "create a new profile and don't fix the issues caused by needing a password reset" you probably work in IT here. A coworker told me yesterday that setting up Windows profiles is a pain but managing them is easy; someone here must feel the opposite.