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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   consistently vegan
Wednesday, April 7 2010
I had another shift at Eastern Correctional Facility, and my liasion had set me up for an unusual morning shift, which meant I had to be on the road at 8:00am. I'd used an iPhone as an alarm clock, because (being battery-powered and relatively staight-forward in terms of user interface) that was the only reliable alarm clock in the house. The job today was to get a network printer to behave like, well, a network printer. It's amazing how bad Hewlett Packard equipment is when you try to use it for the jobs for which it is being sold. The printer in this case is a HP Laserjet 4240n hooked up to about 20 workstations, but when more than two prisoner-students try to print at once, the damn thing crashes and needs to be restarted. And since it's in a cage, the prisoners have to use a stick made of tightly-rolled paper to turn it off and then on again. Prisoners are resourceful when it comes to such things, but really Hewlett Packard should have done their homework and made the stick of tightly-rolled paper unnecessary. It's 2010 for Christ's sake! With that view in mind, today I tried updating the printer's firmware. You never know, sometimes that fixes a problem. But it's just is likely to break something that had been working. In this case, it didn't seem to fix anything. As a test, we had a bunch of prisoners attempt to print blank pages at once, and it jammed up just the way it always had.
So then I went to try another potential fix: not having the printer be a network printer at all, but instead to just have it be a local printer to a file server and share it out onto the network. But in this I was thwarted by not having an appropriate IEEE 1284.4 driver. If this was my life, I'd just kill myself. Luckily, it's not my life.
On my way home, I stopped at Bodacious Bagels to get a falafel sandwich. The place would have been closed had I been coming home from an afternoon shift, but I was coming home from a morning shift and it was open for lunch. It was good to have an easy source of vegan fast food on the drive home; the alternative in the pre-vegan days would have been pizza. Despite occasional problems finding road food, I've found it a lot easier to be consistently vegan than to be either consistently sober or consistently uncaffeinated. I'm at the point now where I barely miss cheese at all. The only thing I really miss from the non-vegan world is fried chicken.


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