Mandiejolander came into town on Saturday. She wanted me to text her my phone number for her to call when she was ready to head out for a couple beers with the group. I sent her a text but it doesn't always work on my phone. I ended up calling her just to make sure.
Later as I was talking to her about it, she looked on her phone to see if she got it and noticed a blank text message from "unknown" at 8:22, which is her birthday. I looked at my phone and the time I sent my text message at 8:28. She asked me what time my phone said compared to hers to see if they were 6 minutes off. I looked at the time on my phone which was 10:29, my birthday.
OK, now this one is kinda cool... It starts out a little dryly, but please give it a chance - it's worth it.
I'm at work yesterday morning, continuing my efforts to create an SMS package for deploying Symantec Anti-Virus to all of our computers, replacing our previous A/V product, Sophos Anti-Virus. (I don't like it, I'm just following orders.) Anyway, I'm using SMS Installer to create a wrapper application that then spawns the Symantec install. If an error is encountered, it logs it. I'm testing the process using my non-administrative account, so, permissions lacking, errors are definitely encountered. In this case, the error was 1603, which, according to Windows XP's "NET HELPMSG 1603", corresponds with a "Fatal error during installation."
Fast forward a bit in the day to after ku came in and asked me to help him move some network switches around in the wiring closets. Thirty-eight minutes later, as I'm back at my desk logging the time spent helping him out, I ask him (jokingly), "so what budget code do I use to charge <his state agency> for my time?" "I dunno," he says, shrugging. "1603?" he says sarcastically, blurting out the first random thing that came into his head. I instantly stopped what I was doing and turned to look at him. "Why did you say that?" I asked. He could tell that he'd said something extraordinary. "Why? Is this a blog moment?" he asked.
Well, of course, it was. You see, he had no idea of the work I'd been doing, or the errors I had been receiving. "1603" wouldn't have even been a valid code. Something like "ETDS-US" or even "100-ETNK-8314-ETDV" or something equally ridiculous would have been more like it. I showed him one of the log files that my testing had created:
