Tuesday, July 15, 2008

If it ain't broke, it's probably not mine...

This year has brought a rash of broken items, most of which have been manifest in the last 30 days. Here is a review:

1. Flaky router - this has been ongoing. It "mostly" works. I have plans to replace it, maybe later this year.
2. #3 cylinder on the Windstar. It shuttered awful bad. Replacing the plugs and cables fixed it.
3. Distributor wire on Protege... this just fell out last Friday on my way to meet a Friend. $65 for the tow, $10 for the diagnostic. And "thanks" to the African Muslim guys who stopped to help!
4. Front driver side tire. Again, on the Protege. It had a visible hematoma for a few weeks but it finally popped on Saturday. Much thanks to Percussivity for his bail out. And Grrrrr...
5. Combination Switch. Again, on the Protege. It's got 190K+ miles so what do you expect? Still gets 29mpg so I can't complain too much. $35 used one is on it's way. When that comes then I'll also fix..
6. Horn contact plate on... go ahead, take a guess! This one has been a nuisance for a while.
7. Brakes on... yep... they were shot, totally, and grinding the disks. I fixed them about 30 days ago but now the emergency brake doesn't work. Getting that looked at tomorrow... oy...
8. 48" 1080i widescreen TV... **sniff**... I can't even talk about this one yet.
9. Weed eater. It just up and quit on me a couple of weeks ago. Grrrrrr!
10. Daughters bike. It's awesome that she learned to ride. The whole family is in on that now. But she learned a valuable lesson in parking: do not park behind the van!!! Front wheel got bent, I had it fixed but then forgot to secure it when loading into the trailer and somehow it popped off. Geeees... mea culpa!
11. Nerf gun. It's not a big deal, but it cost $1.20 for a new spring and took up my precious time. My precious!!!

And that doesn't even cover work! It seems I've spent a lot of time this year just fixing things that used to work but mysteriously don't any more, such as:
12. Our work managment system. It's been suffering from horrendous latency. Noone can figure out why, but it's just hammering the disks. A call with Oracle did nada; a new server has done a little but we can see it coming again.
13. FTP download process. Worked fine before I moved my office and onto a new switch. The IT dept affirms that all switches are configured the same. I move my connection to a different switch on my own (not bad for coder!) and bingo! It works like magic...
14. XML to PDF job. This little app just broke the other day because the local user account password got changed. That was a bear to figure out!
15. ArcGIS install. This went ill the first time because the license file was not adequate. After I got the right now, I decided to get fancy with the install and use non-default options. Even though it lets you do this, it apparently doesn't like it. After a support call with Apoo, I had uninstalled it, removed all directories, users and groups and then reinstalled it. Worked like a charm. Gees I hate other people's bugs.
16. BCL "Easy"PDF SDK. Easy.... riiiiight. Their words, not mine. Sure it's easy to write code to, but try to deploy this thing when it's wrapped in a web service. OMG I never knew there were so many places to set permissions!!!! This one is still open with the vendor. What really stinks is, it was working great just... 30 days... ago... hhhhhhhhhh

It's been a fun 30 days. Lets hope this phase is over!

5 comments:

Percussivity said...

I just inherited an electric weed eater from my dad... borrow it whenever you feel the need to wack weeds.

The Unabashed Blogger said...

Last time I made a list of things that needed fixed I almost cried: 2 pages typed.

HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHhhhhhhhhh....

Did you mention your chainsaw?

SQLFunkateer said...

Ever tinkered with pdftk?

http://www.pdfhacks.com/pdftk/

The price is right. Probably not as sleek and awesome and cool as a commercial pdf sdk but it was perfect when I needed a cheap and quick solution for concatenating two pdf files automatically.

Percussivity said...

Ah yes... the concatenation sensation that's sweeping the nation!

The Angry Coder said...

No! I had not seen that. Would to God that I had... but at least I get support with the people I'm working with now. The trouble is deployment and user context. This program will be called hundreds of times a day by internal users and external customers through a web service. Any time you wrap a local application that requires network permissions to support a web app, you're asking for headaches!