Quote Originally Posted by SK
I just feel there is something inherently wrong about that, as if it is dishonest in some way, and I also feel like my friend is fucking me over by acting as if there is nothing wrong with the situation.
It's true. That's a shitty way for a person to be... but maybe you're projecting your opinion of the people in question on him, and he doesn't actually share that evaluation?

I grew up knowing a couple guys who were total dicks to me. I really hated them (I treated one of them to a particularly severe and entirely deserved pounding, after which his family immediately listed their house and moved out of the neighborhood).

They had been antagonizing me incrementally more for years, so I had a lot of antipathy for them, but I was alone in being targeted by them (apparently I was the only person they were a dick to) and in disliking them -- they were popular, wealthy, and generally considered "good kids" by classmates and their families. So, I found myself alone in my antipathy for them as well.

Anyway, my own subjectivity as essentially their victim caused to misjudge how well-liked they were. They had a lot of friends, and speaking badly about them tended to backfire.

Everyone has good and bad sides, and sometimes people will choose you alone to reveal their bad sides to. An objective evaluation would probably show that they're not as bad as you think they are, nor as good as their parents probably think they are.

If your friend really does share your antipathy for them, then he's probably as uncomfortable as you are, and being disingenuous. Consider that his bad side. On the other hand, he could genuinely not feel that bad about those guys, in which case you're on your own, and it's probably best to just forgive and not-forget.

Incidentally, I ended up being ok with most of the people in that group after a couple years went by without their defeated and exiled "leader" .

Quote Originally Posted by Board of Command
Got all four of my wisdom teeth out today. Yeah... I don't think I need to elaborate.
Pain! Mine had to come out way pre-emergence, which meant a general and some real pain. It's never fun healing after they've gotta cut away 3/4 of an inch of tissue to get to the thing they're trying to remove...

And now, for my dose of bitching for the day:

I go into work today, and immediately get a call from one of my directors, telling me that her personal laptop (she has 3 laptops: 2 work ones and a personal one) is having issues. This is a machine that I've never touched, I don't even know the hardware specs on it, and she's asking me how to fix it. Over the phone.

Well, it's probably virused, from the description of what's broken (LSASS.exe crashes on boot). There's nothing I can do about it... I'm not about to talk her through burning a knoppix cd and using it to copy her files off, and the vendor tech support people are apparently telling her "just put in the windows cd, and it'll fix it" ... so now I am stuck supporting a random virused piece of crap that is in dire need of a reformat and a better virus scanner -- things I'd be able to give her, if she had come to me to set the machine up in the first place.

I hate supporting laptops in general, because there's no good way to do it when they're out in the wild. Do I stick them on a domain and run into login-time auth problems when they're at some remote site with a horrible firewall ruleset? Do I drop a virus scanner with autoupdates and a personal firewall on the machine and let them flap in the breeze, hoping they stay on top of their own update cycle but knowing they won't? But this is beyond even that! "Here's a machine you didn't even know I had! Support it!!!"

Fuck that shit. I'm wearing my No, I will not fix your computer shirt to work at least once per laundry cycle now, and pointing to it whenever random shit like that happens. If you don't give me a chance to get you set up sanely out of the box, how the fuck do you expect me to support you when it breaks due to your insane configuration?

Oh, finally ... gotwoot's main server (ie: what you're reading from now) seems to break at odd, unusual times for no apparent reason. I think it's overloaded and needs a memory upgrade, or needs to stop hosting one of the random other websites it's hosting, or possibly just unload a certain module that may be causing problems. But ... none of that is stuff that goes over very well when I suggest it...