Monday, my left foot was killing me. Something to do with my ankle perhaps, but I was nearly in tears by the time I made it over the river to Drupalcon itself – late, very late. Tuesday through Thursday, I was sick as all hell, and spent all my time either sleeping, working, praying for the sweet release of death, or assisting the launch of a space balloon.

Friday, I was ready to go home, without doubt. Honestly, it was a purely useless Drupalcon for me. Kind of can’t be helped when you’re emitting rivers of liquified snot. Well, be that as it may, early Friday evening, we made our way to the airport, where we got in line.

And after standing there, were told to walk seven leagues to a different line.

After standing in that line for an eternity, we were questioned – they wanted to make sure we were in the right line, you see. So upon getting to the front of the line…

…We’re told to go stand in yet another line.

The net result is that by the time we managed to actually talk to anyone to try and check in, United’s asinine policies prevented printing of our boarding passes.

Lovely.

In fairness, United did put us up at the Hilton across from ORD. Not exactly world class accommodations, but damn, the beds are comfortable at least. And we did end up on a direct flight back to SMF this evening.

Still, this is the second time I’ve had an unexpected extended stay in Chicago while flying United. I warned them. They didn’t listen. Or at least the horrible travel agency used for Drupalcon didn’t listen. Never in the field of human conflict have so many reservations been so completely botched by so few.

Regardless, here’s yet another wasted day. Not happy. May be slightly happier if the flight out didn’t prove a fluke – I think, oddly enough, United may have decreased their seats per plane – I wasn’t nearly as cramped as I used to be after a United flight. Then again, it could’ve been a Continental 757, I suppose.

Problem is, I can’t migrate their docroots. Well, I can grab most of the docroots – but curiously, there’s a number of files which are owned by apache:apache and -rx to anything but, wull, Apache.

The virtual server in question has no root access, no sudo, and no way to configure either through their control panel. Last time I had the misfortune of dealing with GoDaddy’s support… Let’s just say, I don’t have three days for another non-resolution.

What to do? Wull, it is a Drupal site…

<?php
system('/bin/chmod -R go+rx /path/to/files', $retval);
?>

This happily worked, because everything I needed to mess with was owned by the Apache user, so Apache itself had no problems smacking permissions around.

This pointedly wouldn’t have worked if a different user (root, for example) had ownership of those files. But never underestimate the power of a single call to system() and the weird headaches it might solve.

I’ve been awake far too long (haven’t slept since… I don’t know when), and was waiting for a return business call. Decided on a whim that I’m growing ever more tired of IT work. I’d like to get rich quick and GTFO of the industry, to be honest. Then again, wouldn’t we all like to get rich quick and retire before we’re 30? Well, I keep hearing (usually from late night infomercials) that people are making bajillions of dollars on these here Internets. So a quick Google(tm) search later, and I was off on what seemed to be a potential scheme. Mechanical Turk. Promising crazy micropayment jobs such as data verification and transcribing images to text, it sounded like an awesome idea to fund my future pirate ship. I have two eyes, and I type fast, after all.

Okay, so I didn’t sign up actually expecting to get rich, or expecting to generate any money whatsoever. Seriously – get rich quick on the Internet? Only if you buy a domain name that’s suitable for hosting images of cats in compromising positions.

Anyway, Turk’s filled with hilariously bad jobs for the most part – anything worth doing, in terms of sanity, is completely absurd from an income standpoint. Anything that pays well? It’s all ‘sign up for our spam’ crap. Suddenly dawns on me, I could just create a spam-specific e-mail account, route it to /dev/null, and, well – I throw out my junk mail anyway. I’d feel bad for the slaughter of the ten thousand trees that would surely fill my mailbox though; pretty much all the “high” paying jobs want mailing addresses for some reason.

Let me quote something from Amazon, here.

As a Mechanical Turk Worker you:

…If your home is a third world country; if you’re happy to work 23 hours a day, and if you have the skills to understand incomprehensible requests, certainly – I’m sure you can make a living off the Turk.

If you live in a first world country, don’t quit your day job.

(Wonder if I’m going to have to claim that $0.03 on taxes next year.)

The better solution for this problem: Join the National Rifle Association.

My latest stuck disc issue was easily resolved by jamming my NRA membership card (which is of a lesser thickness than a credit card) into the drive, wedging it on top of the disc. Press and hold the eject button while applying some pressure downward on the edge of the disc. Slides right the hell out and doesn’t get retracted.

I mention I freaking love technology, man?

Anyhow, I went to snap a quick picture of the cheezburgrz involved. I figure I need as much pictorial evidence as I can gather as to why I shouldn’t remain in Pennsylvania. I power on my Powershot SX100 IS and… Lens error, please restart camera. Beep beep beep. No power.

Restarting the camera several times, of course, did nothing. Upon returning to my present home away from home, I finished my fries while checking out the camera – noticed the shutters weren’t closing. Springs/whatever were fine; the shutters could be manipulated closed, but simply weren’t closed.

Gah.

The solution is simple though: Immediately after hitting the power button, smack the camera decently hard on its left side. With little luck involved, you’ll soon hear your lens making it’s normal lens-like zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt sound.

I freaking love technology.

Looking through some of my old (previously organized) pictures – trying to figure out if I have a picture of my living room wall before the paint inexplicably started running (protip: never use flat paint in a house with bad windows and a condensation problem)… Noticed, half the images weren’t tagged. Odd. I’ve been making it a point to tag the images. Indeed, tagging is one of the more awesome features of Vista.

Okay, maybe I just missed a few – I usually do organization at 3 AM when I’m bored to tears and awake solely due to deployments.

I go to retag an image and – nada. Error 0x88982F50: No error description available.

I do some Googling; nothing but some BS about Roxio, which ain’t my problem. I give up on Google, searching for the words ‘tag’ and ‘tagging’ is pointless thanks to everyone and their mother having a blog these days. Well, I open up a tagless file in notepad and – there are my tags. Just sitting there. Odd.

Well, at least they aren’t gone.

On a hunch, I open up a file whose tags are working and the tags are there, albeit in a weird, different format.

The plot thickens.

On another hunch, I open the tagged-but-tagless image in Photoshop and re-save it. And now the tags appear in Windows Explorer again.

Lovely – so basically, I need to run every tagged-but-tagless image on my box through Photoshop. For no explainable reason.

Man, I wish Linux didn’t suck so badly for desktop work. :p

Update: Or maybe I don’t have to run everything through PS. After choosing a small directory, sorting tags by Unspecified, selecting all images, opening with Photoshop, and re-saving… Windows Explorer crashed.

Upon restarting Explorer, all tags are now visible. Even ones that weren’t previously displaying. Gods below, I hate computers.