Fear and Loathing in the machine room

I hate the fact that it's Friday. I hate the fact that I can't make any changes. I hate the fact that office is really noisy. I hate the fact that the office is really cold. I hate the fact that the office is really untidy. I hate the fact that I can't spend all my time sitting in the cafe drinking coffee. I hate the fact that I had to get up early this morning. I hate the fact that I couldn't spend my day reading in bed. I hate the fact that the latest xscreensaver needs GTK 2.0. I hate the fact that the OS on my workstation is years out of date. I hate the fact that I'm bored. I hate the fact that I'm directionless. I hate the fact that I'm drifting. I hate the fact that I'm unambitious. I hate the fact that I'm wasting yet another day of my precious, valuable, life on things that don't matter.

Maybe now's the perfect moment to go and fill in my employee attitudes survey...

Working around NFS hangs

Thanks to the catharsis obtained through the release of all my bilious choler into my last update and thanks in no small measure to a double espresso, I managed to squeeze in enough work before hometime to prevent the day from being a total waste.

The gist of my cleverness is that after years of complaining about the impossibility of preventing df from hanging at the first sign of an NFS glitch, I bothered to the think about the problem for all of thirty seconds and lo, an answer presented itself. I came to the happy conclusion that I could open the dot directory on the target file system and then use the resulting descriptor with fstatfs to obtain usage figures and effectly dodge the path–to–device lookup badness that hobbles statfs.

Now all I have to do is sit back and wait for an NFS server crash so that I can test it. Going on past experience, I shouldn't have all that long to wait.

Bluetooth and Empire

The other night, I spent a unsuccessful quarter of an hour attempting to describe the bizarre phenomenon whereby the middle aged — and it does, almost exclusively, seem to be the middle aged — attempt to use bluetooth headsets to turn themselves into some sort cheap version of Lobot from Empire.

It was somewhat futile because I'd forgotten that Christian was a devotee of the wireless headset, I'd completely underestimated his lack of knowledge of Star Wars and I'd also managed to forgot Lobot's name. I think my side of the conversation went something like this:

Do you remember that guy in Star Wars? The bald guy. The one with the thing around the thing. Around the back of his head. Yeah, that silver thing around the back of his head. I can't remember his name but he was like Lando Calrissian's right hand man. He was Lando's go–to guy for stuff. How can you not remember him. He was cool. What? Oh, the film? Empire. That's right. He worked on the gas mining station on Bespin. That was Empire, right? I think so. Well, it's like all the people with wireless headsets are trying to turn themselves into that guy. All you have to do is think of a person with a bluetooth set and you've pretty much got that guy. Specially if their bald. More so if they're male.

I'm still not quite sure how I failed to get my point across...