Smoke, smoke, smoke that cigarette.

There is an old song that used to be in regular rotation on the Doctor Demento show with a chorus that went:

Smoke, smoke, smoke that cigarette
Puff, puff, puff and if you smoke yourself to death
Tell St. Peter at the Golden Gate
That you hate to make him wait
But you just gotta have another cigarette

The other day somebody finally noticed the icon I used for an application I wrote a couple of years ago. It is the same picture as the one I am using for this LJ entry.

"I don't usually pay a lot of attention to these things, but when I went to run the application today I finally had a closer look at the icon. Is that seriously a baby smoking a cigarette?!"

This is the same application that, in a previous incarnation, was called the Self-serve Hazmat Information Terminal. It went by that name for a couple of years until somebody was doing up a new user manual for it and wanted to refer to it by its acronym. "When you first run the S.H.I... hey, wait a minute!"

Alas, due to some recent corporate changes I had to replace the tool on a very tight time line. While I was doing that, the manager who discovered my bit of duplicity with the name of the application insisted that I give it a name more in line with what it was actually doing. Thus it is now called the Alert Traffic Report Tool. I didn't bother to pretty it up at all because they are in the process of incorporating its functionality into our general inventory application, but I allowed myself to sneak another bit of silliness into it.



Again, nobody noticed the name of the password requester until somebody happened to notice it in his task bar and went, "What the Hell is Zuul?"

Fail

Me: Did you try rebooting the machine that runs the reports?
Him: No.
Me: Did it ever occur to you to try that before you called me?

OK, so I didn't actually say that second line, but I was thinking it. Oh yes, I was.

I mean, rebooting is generally the first trick for problem solving around here. Usually it's only after two or three reboots in a row that somebody will call me.

"So I rebooted it twice, but there's still smoke coming out the back..."

Year In Pictures: 2010/01/13 (Behind the pleasant facade)

Behind their public face, every office building out there has the dingy corridors that the public never gets to see. These have always held a certain mystique for me.