Author Archive for Christopher

2008 Pinewood Derby is in the books…

So before I write about what happened tonight, I want you to read my post from last year: Last years Pinewood Derby recap. Go ahead, I’ll wait, just come back when you’re done…

Sometimes, I hate my job

So anyways, for those of you who don’t know how the printing here at the University of Iowa works, they installed this new system with a series of checks to make sure you really want to print whatever it is you want to print. The way it works is this:

Daily Iowan prints one of the dumbest articles EVER!

So this morning I woke up and read the DI online and there was this article about how T9 (the predicative text messaging software) doesn’t include any swear words, so it  makes it much harder for people to swear in a text message. Really? This constitutes news? Why in the world would anyone write this? And who came up with this idea? It is really stupid.

Full Article Here

Little Miss Attitude

So I’m sitting here at work, and this girl comes up to me and says:

So, your little system took my nickel, and didn’t print my paper.

Well EXCUSE ME for ruining your life lady. Anyways, what this probably means is:

  1. It didn’t print, because she did something wrong, or
  2. It did print, and she waited too long and somebody else accidentally grabbed it.

These people are REALLY starting to annoy me sometimes…

Let’s see if this works

So we’re having problems with printer #3 at work. It sucks. It’s a piece of junk. It always jams and throws out weird error codes, and the ITC hasn’t replaced it with the printer that they took out that actually works!

Anyways, since it keeps jamming, we just shut the stupid thing off. So, for those of you who don’t know, when we print here, some people are randomly assigned to printer #1 and some to printer #3. Now, at this point, I don’t expect people to know not to print to #3. However, before a job will print, you have to go to a different computer and sign in with your HawkID to authorize it a final time to print. This special computer is called a “Print Release Station” and authorizing the job is known as “releasing” the print job. The selected printer is displayed when you log in.

Now, since printer #3 isn’t working, we put a hand-written sign that said “Do not release any print jobs to printer 3″. It is at this point where I would expect a reasonably intelligent college student to NOT release a job to printer #3. HOWEVER, this is not the case. A few dozen people so far today, in about three hours, have indeed released the job to printer #3. That is a problem.

Now what they have to do is go back to their computer and reprint the job, selecting printer #1. This has made many people very angry. Most people seem to think it is my fault. I am assuming this based on the fact that they are yelling at me.

STOP! So now I have made this sign. Perhaps it will be hard to read, but you will get the idea of what I have done. As you can see, I not only taped a sign to the desk in front of the keyboard, I also taped one directly to the monitor. The message reads “STOP!!! If you sent your job to Printer 3, DO NOT RELEASE IT! If the printer listed is itcprint\LM-ITC-Main-3 please cancel the job and reprint to Printer 1 from the computer.” I hope this will take care of the problem.

UPDATE: During the time it took me to type this, THREE MORE PEOPLE have come to me because their jobs “didn’t print”. Apparently I was wrong, it didn’t take care of the problem. And I was wrong to assume that just because they have been accepted to college that they are reasonably intelligent.

Not working!ANOTHER UPDATE: So since people were still hanging around #3 waiting for their jobs to come out, I put another sign up. This one reads “THIS PRINTER IS NOT WORKING. If you printed a job to Printer #3, please read the note posted near and on the PRINT RELEASE STATION”. We’ll see how long this works.

Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture

So about a month ago my wife sent me a link to a video about some dude giving a lecture. I finally got a chance to watch it today and decided to post it here:

I don’t really have much to say about it. This version is only about 10 minutes long. Apparently the original full-length lecture is about 76 minutes long, and you can view it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo

Don’t offer money to somebody to do something gross thinking they won’t really do it

So I learned a lesson this weekend: Don’t offer money to somebody to do something gross thinking they won’t really do it…

If you want to know why, click here to find out.

Larry King Pitches Fit at Son’s Little League Game

CNN fixture Larry King’s 9-year-old son Chance Armstrong King plays Beverly Hills Little League. King père is the coach of Chance’s team.On Monday, March 10, during a heated game, the suspendered talk show host apparently got into a confrontation with one of the league’s umpires. “[Mr. King] was making a fool out of himself as a manager on the field, talking in the middle of the field in the middle of plays,” reported a source close to the action. FULL ARTICLE HERE

QUESTION: Why does Larry King, who is 74 years of age, have a child the same age as me my son?

Picnic tables

There are always stories in the news about people… making love (?) to things, so I decided to created a new category called “The things people do” and here is my inaugural post…

Art Price, Jr., a married father of three, chose to do a picnic table. I’m not sure I want to write all the details here, but I am bored and can’t sleep and couldn’t pass this up.  If you are interested you can read the full article here.

I am so annoyed at my job right now…

There are numerous reasons for this, some of which some of you may know about all the changes they have made to the printing system here, and maybe I’ll write about it sometime, but…

OK, so about 5 minutes ago somebody came over and said they were having problems printing, so I went over to see what was the problem. First problem is, they’re on a Mac. OK, just kidding. So I go over and check it out and it appears they have tried printing, but there is an error box that has popped up and says they’ve entered the incorrect password. In fact, it is repeated 5 times in a row that they have the incorrect password (I’m not sure why this is). Anyways, its a guy and a girl, and the guy says he doesn’t know what is wrong, while the girl is repeatedly clicking the OK button and trying again and again for it to print.

So I tried to see what was wrong (at this point I had a pretty good idea) and entered my username and password and what do you know, it works for me. So I used my finely tuned troubleshooting skills and asked them to try again, this time with the correct password. It worked.




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