Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   like walking a dog
Wednesday, April 1 2009

Today was the first in days during which prison computers weren't scheduled to be a major factor in my life. The computer security officer for the state's sprawling Rockefeller-Drug-Law-padded prison system was supposed to be touring the computer labs I work in to make sure the security disaster she'd witnessed on her last tour was no longer in effect (the labs had been ordered closed that day and have remained so). I wasn't going to be there for the tour, but Jed (the guy I've been working with) would.
I stepped outside the see what the weather was like (it was cool and occasionally drizzling) and a series of unpleasant events transpired. It started when I saw that the rear driver's side wheel on our Honda Civic four door (the car we use the most) had gone flat. I thought I'd deal with that right away, so I jacked it up and prepared to slap on one of the four surplus wheels from the totalled hatchback I'd salvaged. But the damn wheel was rusted onto its hub and refused to break free. I tried beating it with a hammer, driving a cold chisel into the gap that should have opened, and even blasting away at it with my small handheld jackhammer. Nothing work. Finally I resorted to prying with a long cold chisel, which was about the size and heft of a small crowbar. I was hauling back on it with great leverage when, in an instant, the rust broke free and the chisel slipped the surly bonds of my fingertips, flew with incredible force for a foot and a half and slammed into the side of my right knee, hitting that prominent bump on the tibia just down from and to the right of my patella. The pain was extremely intense, sending me writhing on my back on the asphalt. The pain was, however, tinged with a bit of joy. That damn wheel had come off. I later investigated the treads using a tray of water and found that the tire had driven over a smallish nail.
At around this time, Jed began calling from Eastern to say that the woman from Albany wasn't entirely satisfied with the computer lab. She wanted extra-tight restrictions on the workstations such that files could never be saved on the local hard drive, even under the regime I implemented ensuring that all such files are automatically deleted every time the computer reboots. The fear is that prisoners will pass notes by saving messages in the file system, hoping (I would surmise) that a co-conspirator would come along and read the message before the computer had a chance to reboot. The only way to implement the system she envisaged was to wade into the arcane jungle of the Microsoft Group Policy Object Editor, talents for which no sane persons wishes to acquire.
Another fresh decree that came as part of this tour was that all the old non-networked computers had to be removed from the lab, both here and in Woodbourne. This decree resulted in a flurry of phone calls that resulted in the delivery of ten Dell workstations to my house. They all had Windows Vista installed on them, and it was my job to replace those installations with Windows XP and, tomorrow, install them.
Just lugging the boxes into the house was a big job, and then came tearing them open and making a stack of computers in the laboratory. The computers were a mini-model of Dell (the Vostro 220s) but still the stack was big because there were so many of them. If I was going to have to individually install Windows and Office and fix the drivers on all these computers, I was going to be up all night. There was a better way, I knew, but I'd never actually gotten it to work: ghosting.
The program most professionals use for ghosting, that is, the making of a snapshot image of a hard disk, is Norton Ghost. Of course, as with all Norton products, the most recent versions are feature-limited graphic-heavy application suites targeted at consumers. If the goal is more than the backing up of My Documents, you're better off using an older (discontinued) version only available on filesharing networks. I've tried to get these old versions of Norton Ghost to work, but you end up having to know arcane technical details about your CD drives and it's impossible to get working (and if it does, it loves to crash). Also, older versions of Ghost seem to depend on an available floppy disk drive, though it would make more sense for Ghost to build bootable partitions on USB thumb drives.
Never having had luck with Norton Ghost, this evening I tried a different product called Acronis True Image Home 2009. Like recent versions of Ghost, it's a little heavy on the cartoonish graphics and standards-violating user interface details. But it can also make bootable rescue disks out of USB thumbdrives or output them as .iso files to be burned onto a CD. Over a USB 2.0 connection, it took about ten minutes to image a complete workstation having five gigabytes of actual information on it. But then it proved impossible to boot the computer from a rescue thumbdrive I'd prepared. So I burned a CD rescue disk, and that booted the computer but then Acronis refused to restore the image to a fresh new Dell; the moment I clicked "restore" the program crashed.
This is the kind of thing that could have easily made me abandon all hope, but the rewards of getting this to work were too great to give up just yet. So I tried imaging to a SATA hard drive instead of a USB thumbdrive, a process that only took three minutes (three times faster than USB 2.0), and this time the Acronis boot disk easily restored the image to a fresh new Dell, again, taking only three minutes. If there had been a few fewer menus to navigate, and if bootability and auto-restore could have somehow been integrated into the drive image itself, setting up ten workstations would have been about as hard as walking a dog. As it was, I was able to do most of the work during the one-hour broadcast of the American Idol results show, the one where Megan, aka "Blondie" (as opposed to Scott, aka "Blindie") went down.
Megan never had any skills as a singer and rose to the final ten on looks alone; had she looked ordinary she wouldn't have made it past the initial audition. Truth be known, by the end there, someone was giving Megan terrible style advice, and she was gunking up her eyes with clotted colors resembling the goop that forms around the right eye of my Sylvia the cat. Furthermore, that blond hair was a major mistake. I'd forgotten how beautiful she was until I saw the file footage of the way she'd looked with brown hair and no drag queen war paint.


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http://asecular.com/blog.php?090401

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