The rustic shack that houses our department contains, for all its decrepitude and squalor, one shining example of technological efficiency: the air conditioning. It is brutally powerful. I don’t remember encountering such a system since the last time I was in a restaurant’s walk-in refrigerator.

And I sit right underneath the fucking thing. While the rest of the office relaxes in perfect comfort, I get to freeze my ass off in the artic downdraft. Even if the office is really muggy to begin with, the comfort level at my desk is only reasonable for a couple of minutes; after that, it goes from “uncomfortable” to “cold” to “icy” to “my frozen testicles are in danger of shattering if I move” in a startlingly short time. Even as I type this, my fingers are actually so cold, I cannot operate my keyboard without difficulty.

Attempts to block the offending vent have thus far failed. I can’t turn the AC off for long, because then the rest of the office whines about the heat. The “closed” position of the vent merely delays the onset of discomfort- and by a surprisingly small amount, at that. The last gambit, sealing the entire thing with gaffer tape, ultimately failed as the cold air dessicated the adhesive, and it fell off with a sudden plop onto my desk three weeks ago. I’m hatching a new plan that involves removing the register and tampering with it from the inside. I hope it works. Gluing testicle shards back together is more difficult than you’d think.

Over the weekend I was patrolling the dorms on campus, providing onsite network support during the freshman move-in period. Wireless access points are forbidden in student housing, mostly because ResNet is a festering cesspit of malware, viruses, illegal filesharing, and general idiocy, and the less accessible anybody’s machine is there, the better.

At any rate, I was trying to snag the faint signal from the central campus wireless network when I noticed an SSID with a very amusing name.

Apparently the simple expedient of a Facebook comment was either insufficient or uncomfortably identifiable.

The other day it was brought to my attention that a user had reported an abrupt loss of Internet connectivity, so I called the unlucky fellow at his cell number. After some initial confusion I was able to figure out he was at home, trying unsucessfully to dial in to the campus modem pool.

Usually when such connection attempts fail, the user’s OS will display some kind of prominent error dialog, but he insisted nothing like that occurred. “Although”, he mentioned, “I do hear a high-pitched tone, maybe that’s an error message?” No, I assured him, that was likely just the carrier signal from the modem pool. Stumped, I was pondering my next move, when he abruptly asked “does my computer have to be on when I do this?”

If I hadn’t heard it with my own ears I wouldn’t have believed it. He was dialing the modem pool on his land line himself, not through his computer. Considering that acoustic couplers haven’t been made for about twenty years (I haven’t even seen one in person for fifteen years), what was he expecting? To talk to the Internet on his voice line? Helloooo? Is that you, Google?

Hellooooooo?

This morning I went over the admin logs for this site and noticed that a new user account had been registered. That doesn’t happen very often, so I investigated further. It wasn’t anybody I knew, based on the username “adol77dai51″ and a similarly obscure GMail address.

I might have shrugged and left it at that, figuring perhaps I’d picked up an admirer/sycophant/enraged stalker through one of my many posts on the Something Awful Forums, but, on a whim, decided to perform a Google Searchon the username. It returned over 700 hits, most of them from a bewildering array of forums, including sites in Turkish, Polish, Hungarian, Spanish, and Italian.

This was suspicious, especially since the majority of those user accounts had been registered this month. This still got me nowhere closer to who or what “adol77dai51″ was, but then I found one of the search results led to several posts from “adol77dai51″ on this commercial blog for a loanshark payday loan company. Stock in said company is (as of today) trading at the staggering price of USD $0.0002, at one point reaching the lofty 52-week high of USD $0.008.

*Sniff sniff sniff* is that the scent of spam being cooked up somewhere?

Bye-bye.

Last night I went out to purchase a pair of dress shoes, so that I could pretend to be put-together for a family function this weekend. (A fool’s errand, I know, but that’s not germane to the story). Eventually I stumbled into Macy’s and found their shoe department.

The clerk informed me they didn’t have my first choice in the correct size, so I went back to the displays to find another style. I found this.

Note that this image is in no way distorted. No fish-eye filter was used on the cell phone camera, no photoshoppery applied to the image file.

What kind of foppish idiot would wear such a thing?

I’m really getting riled up to play Team Fortress 2 when it comes out. The latest player class showcase video from Valve is not only entertaining and awesome in its own right, I love it because playing as an Engineer is one of my very favorite things to do online. I’m all about the D, baby.

I can hardly wait for the thing to finally ship. It’s been at the top of my wish list for ages. It’s going to rock.