A new face of Plonq

The only scanner that we have at home just now is an old parallel port model, which doesn't do us a lot of good since none of our four computer possess that particular interface. We've talked about getting a new one, but the lack of anywhere practical to set it up, and a shortage of available outlets in the computer room have put such a purchase rather low on our priority list.

Fortunately I have access to a decent colour scanner at my office. Unfortunately it's a public, network-based scanner. Even more unfortunately it is located outside of my office, around the corner and down the hall a piece. What this means is that when I want to scan something personal (like this new LJ icon), I have to slap it down on the scanner, run back to my office and start the scan process over the web, then scurry back out and grab it before somebody else comes along with their own notions of using the scanner.

I always half-expect to find somebody standing over the scanner, clutching their (soon to be scanned) copy of the American Association of Railroads Interswitching and Roadhaul Leased Equipment Per Diem Tariff Agreement tome in one hand, and my con badge in the other hand, in the middle of saying, "... who is this sick fuck named Plonq, and why is he scanning furry art on our company equipment?"

As you might have guessed, I'm leading up to the fact that I finally got around to scanning my new con badge¹ (created by the much talented beerhorse at MFF this year.) I ♥ this picture much.

^{1 - Lonnie, I hope you don't mind that I cropped it a bit for the icon, but when I shrunk the whole badge down to icon size it lost a lot of the facial details.}

Onyxia

wipe.
wipe.
we got her! we got her! we... oops. wipe.
yay! die bitch!

... and that's the 30,000 ft overview of our evening. Our guild has downed Onyxia before, but there have been some significant personnel changes since then. The raid leader raised a good point when he said (paraphrased here), "This was a significant kill for us. I know we've downed her before, but it's been months. Obviously most of us have beaten her with other guilds and other toons, but often we were just tagging along with people who had her on farm status. It was important for us to learn our own strategy."

I'm starting to feel good about this raid group that's coming together (and I sincerely hope that we can hold together after Burning Crusade). It's taken a bit of work with all the re-training of tanks and other turnover, but we're starting to gel and work well together. We finally cracked Sulfuron again too after adopting a slightly different strategy suggested by one of our newer members.

On a side note (rant), what ever happened to good manners? At what point does it seem reasonable and polite to simply stand up and unannouncedly wander away from your keyboard moments before we're about to pull the main boss? I know that emergencies, and unexpected events sometimes crop up, but one would think that a person could show at least a modicum of consideration and say something in text of voice chat. Leaving 39 other people standing around with their thumbs up their asses because they don't know if or when you are coming back (and they can't leave you there because you'll end up drawing the trash mobs onto us when they re-spawn) is ignorant and rude. As you can probably tell from my rant, it's one of my pet peeves in the game.

We ended up booting him from the raid after giving him 3-4 minutes to respond to our repeated voice and text prompts. He didn't grouse about it later, so I suspect he knew why he got punted.

Workplace idiosyncrasies

When will I learn to stop going above and beyond the call of duty?

A year or so back I extracted a bunch of records from one of our mainframe flat files and dumped them into a small, local database for quicker access. Since most of the people in our office have no idea how to use MS Access, I built a Visual Basic front-end that allowed them to query the data with a couple of user-defined filters. It worked great until I repopulated the database with fresh records last week. Somewhere in the process it changed my ""s into nulls, and the program quit working.

The solution was fairly simple, but time-consuming. I either had to fix the database, or change the program to handle nulls. Since I will be using the same program to refresh the database the next time it gets out of date, the nulls probably won't be going away, so I opted to fix the program rather than the database. It turned out to be a somewhat fiddly process, and each fix I put in place caused another failure downstream. The fix started taking much longer than I would have liked, and herein lies the problem.

This program is not an official, supported program. This is just a little utility that I cobbled together during my spare time to help some of the people in support positions do their jobs. The program simply cross-references data that they used to have to do manually, using 3" thick physical printouts of the tables. Because it is just a side-project of mine (my boss doesn't know that it exists), I could only work on it when I was caught up on everything else, so it was over a week before I finally got it fixed. Needless to say I had to deal with a small flood of email scuds from unhappy end users.

As useful and time-saving as this program is, I am left wondering if I should have created it in the first place. There are now a group of people who have become dependent on an application that doesn't officially exist.