GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!!

this is driving me FUCKING NUTS

i have a piece of advice for you all. one that i feel everyone should heed. it's a lesson i am currently emboiled in and i'm ready to kill as a result of it.

if you are going to have anything done that changes the way your network connection is handled, will be affected, supposedly going to be improved.

FOR THE LOVE OF WHATEVER GOD YOU BELIEVE IN

DON'T DO IT ON A FUCKING FRIDAY AFTERNOON!

DON'T EVEN LET THEM OFFER IT AS AN OPTION!

friday morning, fine.

but any time after lunch, tell them to take a long walk off a short pier.

a VERY long walk.

this is just another chapter in our on-going saga of moving the phones from the standard analog phone (what you plug into the wall at home currently) to the new VoIP system.

now, i realize, our network is fucked up. it's in pretty bad shape and is nothing more than a patchwork of crap. but we are trying hard with the new phone system to fix that problem, and to a degree (greater or lesser, i don't know) we have done so. new switches, snappy network speed (up from a whopping 10mb to 100mb that most people have in their offices these days)

anyways, part of that is moving our various external connections (T1) to other routers in an attempt to consolidate things, but this afternoon, they made a few changes that SHOULD have made things better.

in part, they did. browsing the web is now a little snappier. that was supposed to help (in part) with the whole phone system and the various ports in the backs of routers.

shit, i have to call someone.

ok, well the good news is that it looks as tho the phone side of things is working. i just called someone and while i was on the phone with him, i lost a network connection twice. outlook is freaking out and i'm really glad that i have frozen dinners here. a frozen dinner. and if i didn't, RB had one so i could have swiped that as i am now getting rather hungry.

anyways, back the point at hand. whatever happened has fucked up things interally.

every few minutes, we'll lose our connection to something (altho for the moment, outlook hasn't freaked out in a few mins) internally which fucks with the routing and access to various servers (like citrix, exchange) goes away and then a minute or two later, is restored.

needless to say, it's been more than mildly frustrating for me as i'm stuck here not knowing what's (oh, there it goes, outlook can't see the server) going on. by this time, CD should be home and be connected to the network in an attempt to fix whatever it is he botched in the first place.

so anyways, my point is this: don't let ANYONE fuck with your network on friday afternoon. because they sure as hell aren't thinking about whether it's going to work or not. they are working with the assumption they know what they are doing and it is going to work out of the box.

trust me.

IT WON'T WORK.

not at first at any rate, but by the time anyone realizes what happened, they are half in the bag (which i would very much like to be right now, i don't know if i'll be able to even buy beer tonight).

or lost on their way (now it's up) home, or any other (now it's down) position where they have no ability to do any work.

and tonight i was planning on doing phase one of "The Great Molius Coke Challenge"

the other week, i saw that Coke has this thing called 'Coke Zero' (outlook down)

i'm not sure what it is, but i guess it bills itself as a 0 calorie (outlook up)/0 carb/0 whatever soda.

well, plain diet coke is that too. so WHAT exactly is the difference? there are some difference chemicals in the ingredients list, but for the most part, they are identical. both use sweet and low to sweeten, so why have 2 sodas that appear to be the same?

so i decided (outlook up, connection down) that i would see what the big difference was. i bought a bottle of the following:

Classic Coke (the benchmark)
Diet Coke
Diet Coke with Splenda
Coke Zero

i'll pour a little into a glass and sample. i'll post round 1 results afterwards. round 2 will prolly happen on sunday.

well, it's looking as tho someone is actually going to have to come out here to take a look at things. which sucks even more cuz now my chances of getting beer are even lower.

fuck.

enuff for now.