Ten Points Random

So today, at work, we rolled out a new system that affected practically everyone in the company.  As we were planning it, we knew that it would affect pretty much everyone across the board, so I sent out an e-mail, via my manager, to all the important heads of departments who forwarded it on to their worker bees as they saw fit.  In this e-mail, I addressed some of the features that would be new to the system, and some current features that, presumably unused, would not be carried over to the new system, unless additional feedback showed otherwise.

I received some feedback from this and subsequent e-mails and adjusted the new system accordingly.  Because what was changing was so big, this process (asking people to look over the new system and present feedback on what they would miss) was repeated no fewer than four times.

Finally I found out about a final go ahead and we released the system today.  Everything went smoothly for the first few hours until my team lead walked up to me and told me the one of the VPs from another department needed xxyy feature added back in ASAP.

Frustrated, but willing to overlook a mistake by the head of one of the most important teams in the company, I began working on adding said feature back in – adding an optional check box that allowed them to activate the feature at will.

Partway through implementing the changes, a thought occurred to me.  I went to ask my manager for clarification on that point.  In the ensuing conversation, I discovered that what I was adding back in was not to be an optional feature at all – but mandatory for everyone everywhere.  What more, this was not a casual want, but one that was, apparently, vital to the very system I was working on running smoothly.  How did we manage to go through 4+ rounds of checks and double checks while every manager and owner received notifications, the first and foremost of which stated explicitly, as a potential point of concern, that this feature was not going to be added unless it was needed, and not have anyone manage to mention anything toward keeping this feature in the new system?

Anyhow, I’m pissed.  Not immortally, eternally angry.  Just pissed for the moment.

(The following  is based on a dream I had last night.  This is what I get for reading Eragon books before going to bed.)

We crested the top of the short, wide staircase.  The dry desert air did nothing to bother me – everything was going well.

It was here, I knew it.

Closing my eyes I focused and instantly knew the direction.  I walked over to a specific gap in the stone behind a pillar and saw it on the ground.

It was small, just smaller in diameter than a penny and nearly as thick as my finger.  It was all white except for a small, light green dot in the center.  I smiled and picked it up out of its enclosure which had held it for the last 500 years.

I smiled.  I had found another of the cores of the lost dragons.  Supposedly, it contained the mind, power, and soul of a dragon of times long past.  With it, the other four I had collected, and the final one I was now to set and find, I could bring dragons back into the world.

—

My team entered the senior citizens home mall in pursuit of the last dragon core.  After wandering the mall I finally discovered its location on the second floor, inside a planted bed.  As I did a final check, sensing its location, something bothered me.  I saw it – it was right there.  It was the same shape and size as the others, except this one had a black ring embellishing it, something wasn’t right.  This was too easy.  Before picking it up, we went down to the main floor and took a nap.  When we awoke, it was gone – picked up by my rival.

Surprisingly, I wasn’t concerned by this.  I could still sense the core, but it wasn’t my rival’s hand.

Confused, I went down to the main floor again and asked my dad to keep an eye on things while I explored the memories of the last person to know of this dragon.  We were fortunate to have the Memory Communication Slab (which looked oddly a lot like a gray Wii Balance board) that allowed us to do this.

In this man’s memories I discovered that when he had originally sealed his dragon in a small, roomless core, he had placed it in the saltwater ponds on the main floor.  Unfortunately, the salt corroded the small white piece until it was crusted like the docks of the sea.  When he discovered this he was distraught, for he cared about his dragon.  With some new metal, and the current corroded core, he pressed it into a coin, which he had hid elsewhere.  All one had to do to bring back his dragon was find the coin and toss it into the salt water – the instant corrosion would release him from the spell and bring the first dragon back.

Excited, I wet back up to the planter and looked under where the small white marker had been before.  Underneath it I found a bag of rare, old, and, to coin collectors,  extremely expensive coins.

My rival saw this and was jealous.  He asked for the bag and naturally I told him no. I began to parse through the contents.  There were some very old coins worth great amounts, some because of their rarity, some because they were mutilated by by the mint that created them.  These, and their multi-million dollar sum held no interest to me as I looked for a coin that was unlike any other – the one that would produce a dragon.

At last I found a small stack of coins pressed together and held with crud.  I began to pull them off the stack one at a time, watching the years of each successive coin go back farther and farther in date.  At last I reached the last coin and I was overjoyed.  I picked the coin up.  It was a little worse for shape and never would have passed for uncircumcised, but the inch and a half proof was one of a kind.  I was surprised at how shiny it was, especially considering it had been pressed from corroded metal and magical stone.  It was soft – so soft it flexed under only a slight pressure.  Careful not to break it, I read the inscriptions that told little of what it was – only of a man’s love for something.  I was, however, certain this was what I was looking for – I could feel it.

Leaving the rest of the coins on the raised marble edge of a planter, I walked over to one of the two pools and held the coin high.  I paused only a second for effect before plunging the coin into the cold, smelly water.

The reaction is almost instant, but didn’t come from in front of me as I had expected.  Suddenly and without warning, the entire building is whisked away and we were left in the valley it was built it.  A large, calm river snaked around us. Suddenly, an explosion blew out a large section downstream of me and everyone else.

The river started to flow in a mighty rage as it was freed from restrictions and begins to fall to unknown depths.  My nearest companion and I quickly get onto a makeshift raft – it was held together with coarse rope and the logs were mossy.  I pulled a stick out and started to paddle; my partner did the same.  As we failed to quickly draw away from the impending waterfall, I paddled harder, so much so that I unbalanced our efforts to move away.  For several moments I struggled to keep paddling as hard as I could while simultaneously trying avoid spinning the raft around.  I was annoyed that my companion failed to push as hard as needed.

Suddenly we rand aground uphill and were safe.  To my surprise, everyone was partying because there was now a fun new waterfall they could jump and slide down.  Many children were making good use of it already.

I didn’t care about jumping down a waterfall and breaking my neck.  I stepped to the summit of the fall, however and looked heavily rinsed land over.  The river had settled again and was now flowing lazily.  At one point the river split in two to go around a shallow, rocky island, and to my joy – standing prodly on top of it, was a black dragon – the first of many that I would awake.

RFC 2606: Reserved Top Level DNS Names

So the other day I enabled my catch-all mail account.  (A catch-all account is an e-mail account that get’s all the e-mail going to non-real e-mail addresses like [email protected])

As you would expect, I got the regular share of SPAM from the regular random spamming, but I noticed something else that was a little more interesting: mail from newsletters and sites that didn’t appear to be the regular, per se SPAM random addresses: many of them were rather specific along the lines of asdfs, sdfasdfasd, asdf, asdfahf, etc.

Which raises the question: when the spammers were setting up and testing their scripts, is it these addresses they used to test it?  I can easily see someone going through and filing out a form and entering [email protected] as their e-mail address, just to fill the bo.  Of course, this is in total contravention to RFC 2606, which says that if you’re gonna test something on a  live server/document something, you should use the dummy domain example.com.

But hey, like like any thing else ever stopped them.

• Dragons
• Dragons
• Dragons

Bewarned: I don’t speak for all the art of all these people, some of it derserves to be skipped.

No, I didn’t hit any.

I’m note sure what it it.  As I was driving to church today there was a guy walking his son and 3-4 small, white, fuzzy dogs.  (I’m assuming they were Bichon Frisés.)  Anyhow, none of them were on leashes, so they wandered wherever they wanted – including onto the road.  I stopped for one, who thought its walk would be better spent on the other side of the road.  I stared to go again.  Just as I was starting to get up to speed, another dog that had walked on ahead decided it wanted to cross the road too.  Right in front of me!

Since I was keeping a wary eye on it already, I was able to stop just fine, but what is it that possesses people to think it’s okay to take a whole bunch of dogs out, without training or leash, and just let them run around as you “walk” them?  Anyone who was driving with less care/who was driving distracted would have turned that fuzzy creature into a splat on the road.  Admittedly, it’s the driver’s responsibility to watch the road, but even the best driver can’t go from 65 to 0 when something darts out ten feet in front of him.

Anyhow, be sure to keep your dogs on a leash, or don’t scome crying to me when I run it over.