5 posts tagged “mac”

I've been good and busy this week. I'm working on one really big project that is more of a big deal than a big project, another complicated project, and another that I call "The Incredibly Shrinking Project". The Incredibly Shrinking Project started out very very small, then the scope crept out beyond Pluto, and now it is rapidly shrinking back to very very small. Which makes me happy because things such as scope creep are very bad.

I'm lobbying to turn in all my gear - my flat panel display, the big mac tower, the t60 laptop and all the trimmings - for a single 15" powerbook with the intel processor and the parallels thingy. That way I'd be able to bring my whole show on the road and not lose an iota of capacity. What's more is I'd be able to fold the darned thing up and shove it to the side of my desk and use all of my desk space for sketching and evil schemes.  Of course my timing for this scheme could not be better as we're currently not purchasing any new hardware.

And mysteriously my Pearl seems to be shutting itself off all the time. I think there may be a problem with my baby, although I'm not quite sure and I'll have to keep an eye on it.

Well yes, so yesterday I moved to the newly remodeled part of the office. I'm the first person in the ecommerce group to do so. As such, since I'm completely alone with a ten mile buffer between myself and anyone else, cried havoc and let loose the dogs of war as it were and blasted the first official fart in the new area. I've declared this a free fire zone at least for a little while. No one cheek sneaks for me, no sir, at least not for the time being.


They've turned this into prime time prairie dogging territory. For those of you who haven't worked in a massive office, the act of prairie dogging is when one stands straight up in their cube to look around. Typically this happens when there's a loud noise, a shriek or a scream. There's better, more bleak views that I'll try to capture later.

There it is. My whole professional life here crammed into this tiny corner cube in the middle of an enormous maze. I'm already spilling out. That file cabinet there is one of the cheap ones that is only as deep as it is wide and doesn't extend to the back of the desk. I've already gone through a huge junk consolidation effort and I could barely cram my junk into there. I also stole whiteboards from other desks for myself and my team. They had whiteboards at desks for new hires, even had one at a printer station. They've been reappropriated with extreme prejudice.

Turns out the red flag there peeking above my desk is very helpful for actually finding my desk. Without it I'd be wandering aimlessly like some of the other lost souls here...

Yeah I'm kind of grumpy today. I've had this cold thing brewing for the last few days and each day it gets a little worse. I usually get these sore throats that completely go away by mid morning so it's no big deal. This time the sore throat isn't going away. This morning it was pretty nasty, felt like I had a pill stuck at the back of my throat. I hit it with some Listerine which gave me like a minute of relief, better than nothing.

Not sure if I've got a fever but I do feel hot. I've got a lot of crap that needs to get done before the end of the week so I really can't duck out of the office. My plan is lots of piping hot green tea and minimal contact with other humans lest my grumpiness spoil someone's day.

My VPN woes continue with Phixed. I've tried logging in to his VPN via both pc and mac using many different VPN tools, both on my home network and here at work. I've played with all the settings on my home router going so far as to completely disable all security on the darned thing but nothing seems to work. At first we believed that it was a password issue which may or may not have been the case. I've pretty much given up at this point and have asked for an SSH connection but they're telling me that their sever doesn't support SSH. Anything is possible but I've never heard of such a server. So that whole thing is up in the air, adding to my grumpiness.

That's right folks, Phixed admitted to getting "overzealous" with the Snag-It arrows. I understand completely. I think we've all been there before, discovering the arrow feature on Snag-It and getting a little crazy with the Cheese-Wiz as it were. It sure caught my eye and I knew exactly what he was talking about so I guess his little technique worked.

In case you're wondering what that's called and how to make one, they're called "favicons". Since I use a MAC (and I suggest you use one too) here's a great tutorial for making them with photoshop cs2 on a MAC. Personally I think they're not all that great but if you think a 16x16 image will float your boat, by all means knock yourself out.

I've banished my client "Phixed" to the naughty stool. He's got this wacky setup where I have to login to a VPN to access FTP to upload changes to his website. I spent 4 days trying to set this lousy VPN connection on both my Mac and my PC, fiddled with my network, my firewall, and all my security settings trying to get it to fly, only to find out that he sent me the wrong password. Phixed, you will now spend 30 minutes on the naughty stool. Off you go.