Ah, been a pain in the ass couple of days around here. First, I’m getting really tired of this friggin’ Mac laptop losing the wireless connection constantly. It just drops for no reason, and then I have to turn the radio off and back on again (and there’s no hardware switch on the damn thing, either – I guess they figure that’d just be asking for a rush on the “geniuses” when throngs of average macsters couldn’t figure out why for they’re wireless don’t work no more, or maybe at the rate their hardware fails, they figure it’d just be one more thing to break). It drops a few times a session when I’m not even moving around with, which is pretty annoying, but when I try roaming from one access point to another (say, from downstairs to upstairs or outside), and the stupid thing will drop constantly. Needless to say, none of my other wireless (Windows, Linux, Android, etc) stuff has a problem. I tried some updates (there’s another thing that bugs me; I thought Windows was a pain in the ass with the updates, but the Mac ones seem more frequent, and, damn they’re HUGE). That frickin’ update icon jumping up and down bugs me, too. Look, I don’t want anything to do with iTunes, OK? So, don’t keep telling me there’s an update for it!
Then yesterday, as many of you may have heard, McAfee (which I’ve never really liked) released a DAT file (an update) for their virus scanner which identified a harmless (and somewhat necessary) Windows file as a virus, quarantining and (in some cases) deleting the file. In networked enterprise environments, this had the effect of causing Windows XP SP3 machines to reboot constantly and/or disable certain capabilities (like copy and paste, the toolbar, some properties pages, etc.). This is quite a hassle when you work in a networked enterprise environment that uses McAfee. It didn’t really affect me all that much, as I was able to kill my computer in time, and didn’t allow McAfee to delete the file. A quick power down/up, and I was good to go. For about 2,500 of our 6,000 computers, though, things weren’t quite as good, and IT people had to go and touch a lot of them. Bummer for them.
And of course, this morning, no DB connection for this website. A couple weeks ago, the web host decided to enforce new password rules which required me to change my server passwords. Not the database ones, though. Not until some time last night or this morning, that is when, without warning, everything went to hell. Took me a while to figure out what the deal was, but now we’re back up and running.
So, OK world. Whattya got for me next?