One of the worst parts of being part of the “Always Available Society” is cell phones in public bathrooms. For some reason it is taboo now-a-days to not be instantly available to every person all the time. As part of that it is unheard of to not answer your phone when it rings, even if you are taking a dump.

What the hell is that about? Is that the evolution of our society, because if so, let me out. I walked into the bathroom at work and not 1 but 2 people were on cell phones, one guy standing at a urinal with his neck at an extreme angle trying to pinch his cell phone to his ear while he zipped up, and another sitting in a stall. Both chatting away.

Here is what I plan to do about it.

1. I am going to not answer the phone in the bathroom, or most other times really, I hate the telephone.

2. If I call you and you are busy, feel free to call me back when you have time to talk.

3. If I am talking to you and I feel the urge to evacuate my bowels or my bladder, I’ll get off the phone first.

4. When in the bathroom with people on the phone I am going to make as much obscene noise as possible. And throw out such standard bathroom chatter as “How’s it hanging?”

Here is an observation and a question:

Mister shoulder holder slunk out of the bathroom without washing up, so clearly when on the phone it is important to not disrupt your conversation to wash your hands. What decision did mister stall talker make about wiping? I don’t know, because I got the hell outta there.

Just wanted to get more noise out there that the new E521 distributed by Dell isn’t working right under Linux. Specifically I have tried Ubuntu 6.06 But there are others reporting problems with other distros and lots of different people trying different kernels.

Anyway, I have started a thread on the ubuntuforms and one on Dell’s forums that are getting a fair amount of traffic. I have also contacted Dell support with no luck, but I suggest everyone who bought this system with the intent to run Linux contact support too, making noise that they can see may help push some results. I also put a feeler out to Canonical about maybe purchasing support to address this issue.

I am holding off submitting a bug to the Ubuntu guys because they have their hands full with tomorrows release, plus I want to try out Edgy and see how it runs. If I can reproduce the problem there I will submit the bug and renew some detailed troubleshooting.

But if you are looking for a new machine and you want to run linux on it and don’t want any problems, forget Dell and go for system76. I can’t speak for their quality or support because I haven’t tried it, but I can say if I had this to do over I would have just ordered a similar machine for slightly higher cost from them.

Turns out to be super easy, there are long how to docs out there that deal with all the trivialities and different scenarios, but basically if you have ssh access to a server that is the SMB server you simply need to do this:

ssh -f -N -g -L 9000:localhost:139

and then you can simply mount it to a directory by doing:

sudo mount -t smbfs -o username=USERNAME,password=PASSWORD,ip=localhost,port=9000 //SERVERNAME/SHARE /mnt/remoteshare

You saw me where I never was,

And where I could not be;

And yet within that very place.

My face you often see.

(more…)

A euphemism for imprisonment I have heard is, “Making little piles out of big piles.” This is referring to times when prisoners were used to do menial jobs, and when those jobs weren’t available, or maybe there was some use in this, they would spend all day breaking big rocks onto small rocks.

A thought just flew into my head as I was organizing the numerous tasks I have to try and fit into my day, that management and specifically information work can be summed up by making little piles out of big piles.

There has to be a better way.