Random thoughts borne of too much coffee

Bleh, night shift is not something to be looked forward to.  Although it's quiet, there are no manglement around, you can get away with surfing the net and watching DVDs, and you get 15% penalties so it could be worse.



What's weird though is waking up at 2:30pm to a quiet house, occasionally with a cat asleep on top of you if the cat thought you looked warm.



What's also weird is LOLing to this and realising you haven't spoken yet today.  The sound of your own voice is weird sometimes.



By the time you're starting to doubt the wisdom of having another coffee, it's generally waaay too late there, sport.  Have one anyway.  I am still resisting the temptation to buy a full-auto coffee machines, my excuse being that I don't want to spend $1200 on a machine that only I will use.  In reality I think I'd probably OD.



I'm currently torturing someone at work, which is always good.  He's tasked with implementing a new system for which he has no idea of the content, so a couple of experts (/me waves) have been stuck with the job of providing the content.  That's cool, except for the fact that this guy is a needy pain, and constantly wants to adjust stuff on me.



This is where night shift becomes very useful, because when he sends out a plaintive e-mail (like he did about an hour ago), I will rely to it at 3am, and be gone home before he sees it.  This turns the whole process into a tennis match where each volley is 24 hours long, and he's going to hit his project deadline well before the match plays out naturally.  Result: content gets implemented the way *I* want it.



My idiot mate is having his usual run with computers.  I am more or less jack of patching up antiquated crap, wrestling with cheap eBayed hardware, never having driver disks, and general cluelessness, to the point where I have instituted the following rules as an idiot tax.

• I refuse to work on either of his current desktop machines again.  If they die, they're gone and good riddance as far as I am concerned.  Old Athlons and S478 P4s are getting unsupportable, motherboards are third hand and RAM is either scarce or very expensive, and I'm sick of the whining when I can't find parts for giveaway prices.  Go and buy a new box, you can get an i3 tower with all the bits for about $350.
• I will not touch rubbish hardware like $5 USB "Skype compatible" handsets bought off dodgy eBay sellers in Hong Kong.  They don't have driver disks, there's no FCCID or anything you can use to identify them, there's no website you can get documentation off, and when all you get after an hour is the same "Error 10: Generic error" message on the USB controller when you connect the thing, I am not playing any more.
• If you haven't got the drivers disks for it, I will tell you to throw it away and buy a new one, and keep the freaking box and driver disk next time.  This includes wifi network cards (which may or may not be a TP-Link or Flying Panda brand), yum-cha video capture cards, cheap sound cards etc.  No manufactuer and modem number on the card?  You haven't got the box it came in, and the driver disk?  Bin.
• The Dell laptop you bought that you've just killed with XP Antivirus?  That needs a rebuild.  Guess what?  That licence key on the bottom the nice man told you could be used to reinstall Windows only works with the genuine Dell reimage disk.  Didn't get one of those, did you?  Good luck finding one.  Have your credit card ready for when you do.
• No, for the last time I will not show you how to download movies.  You arent't smart enough to understand it.  This is the person who still can't quite cope with the idea of having 2 separate hard drives in one PC.  I am not going to waste my time explaining the concept of torrenting to you, how to drive the client, how to obtain and load torrents, how to ensure you're downloading something in a usable format, how to reassemble the resulting multipart file, how to mount an image file, how to put it through transcoding and burning.  Face it, you still haven't mastered the concept of C: and D:, this is beyond you.
• No, I don't particularly care if you are paying through the nose for printer ink.  You are the person who for at least the 5th time in a row has been stupid enough to buy a printer that takes the multicolour cartridges, when you've been told that nobody makes aftermarket ones of those.  Having multple ink tanks in a printer will NOT kill you, and if it hurts a bit then I'm sure it will be therapeutic.  You only need black anyway, despite what you think.  No, you don't need colour.  No, you don't.  Why?  because you have no need to print webpages in colour, and no need to print e-mails with Incredimail-generated multicoloured vomit on them - and I'm not even going near the subject of the stupidity of printing an e-mail in the first place.  Nor do you need to print photos.  There is no point doing so when you're using a cheap POS printer on typing paper, the result is not worth having.  Go to Harvey Norman or somewhere and have them make prints for you.

I feel a little better now.