Corporate Hippy

I drove to South Bend, IN on Monday for work.  I was there with my co-worker through the day on Thursday.  It was a rough week.  I ate badly.  I brought my bike and trainer but only actually rode for 45 min on Monday.   After that, it was just a decoration to administer guilt.  Work went relatively, but was still frustrating and very tiring.  The weather was ridiculously cold, and on Tuesday morning, I lost the last fan setting in my Jeep, so I only had heat if I was going 40+ mph.  I left on Thursday almost in a state of depression, despite the daily dose of crazy pills I take.

My boss let us stay home on Friday in thanks for our hard work and volunteering to go in the first place.  I spent the day just trying to chill and recoup from the crazy week I’d had.  I was tense and tired and it was nice to sit still.  We talked about spinning, but never made it off the couch.  Jarek came over and we watched 3 episodes of Alias and 2 episodes of Battlestar Galactica.  It was awesome

But, by Saturday, I needed to do something.  Jarek was off to a birthday party so we had the day free.  Nick was “mr. idea” this weekend and took me to the Tree Farm for a Single Speed ride in the snow.  Our ride time was ~1hr 40min with an average speed of 5.9 mph .. S L O W .. My front brake on my SS had lost its usefullness and so I had very little control over my bike.  Also, the snow was a little wet so it kept icing up my cleats, so I had a terrible time clipping in.  I couldn’t wear my tinted glasses because I wasn’t going fast enough to keep them from fogging up.  But, let me just say this:

The ride .. was fucking .. Awesome… I had a blast.  I had so many endorphins running though me when we were done that I just needed BEER.  So, Nick too me to Dragonmead in Warren and I had an English Brown Ale and an English Amber Ale.  Yummmmmy.

Saturday was a great day

Now, today was way colder than yesterday.  Like almost 10 degrees colder.  When we got to Stony Creek High School at noon to meet Mike, Nick and I both realized that we needed to switch from our normal fleece-lined tights to our heavy-duty AmFib tights.  Once we finally got rolling, we warmed up pretty damned quick.  I rode my K2 Flyin Monkey for the first time since I bought the lighter wheelset.  That bike is ridiculously fun to ride.  Oh My Gawd .. I had SO much fun today.  Since the weather was colder, the snow was much firmer and easier to ride.  My cleats didn’t freeze up once, and both of my brakes worked flawlessly

Then, we got a call from our foreign exchange student (the jessica girl who just moved to germany) and we chatted with her for ~45 minutes.  She’d gotten the care package we sent and wanted to say thanks!

I’ve been in a rut lately.  We’ve been in a rut lately.  But, it seems we’re working our way out of it.  I feel oddly refreshed after this weekend.  I’m most thankful to my great dude, Nick because he was my tour guide this weekend.  He made the plans and I just went with it.  Good stuff.  Thanks baby

life hippy

Nothing burns my biscuits quite like appliances that call themselves simple and prove themselves to be anything but …

Ok .. in the GRAND scheme of things, this thing is a pretty sweet piece of technology and, if you get past all of the ‘gotchas’ , it is pretty simple.

But, to lable something ‘simple’ and ship it with a default configuration that will not work in a standard windows xp workgroup and have NO documentation as to why …. well, that’s just plain rude.

So, here’s my deali-o. We got a smokin deal on this 250 Gig File/Print appliance called SimpleShare. We waited patiently for this thing to come. Finally, it arrives! And there is much rejoicing! Until we find ourselves hours later, about to put our fists through monitors because we cannot browse our own windows workgroup, muchless see our shiney new driveshares.

The husband first followed the setup wizard and quickstart guide and immediately got a strange error when trying to map a drive to his local machine. He thought we probably had generic windows xp sharing issues that seem to bite us in the ass constantly, so we spent a few hours fiddling with settings only to wind up with the same strange error. Now, we can browse via HTTP to the Admin GUI and we can ping the device by name and by IP, but when we try to browse for it, windows gives an “Network Path Not found” error. This makes no sense to me.

If I can ping you, and I can reach you via http, then your network path is found.

Today, I finally had some time to sit down and play with this thing again. I found the 100+ page help file to be utterly useless for any kind of troubleshooting. The help file assumes ‘best case scenario’ and nothing more. I also looked through the FAQs on the company’s support page and found some information regarding error codes for problems mapping drives, but nothing about network path not found. I needed to consult the Internet.

Google handed me a forum thread where someone was having the same problem as me. Several people responded with answers regarding those same error codes that I read about on the FAQs, but none of them helped the original poster, nor did it help me. Finally, someone responded with what seemed to be a very obscure answer, but I figure it was worth a try.

He suggested I look under Printers –>Printer Pool Name and change it to No Printer Pool . So I went to my web gui, and clicked on the ‘Printers’ icon, and sure enough, there was a printer pool name assigned. The printer pool name was SimplePool … This is significant because the File Share pool name was also set to SimplePool and was causing conflict. I changed the setting to No Printer Pool and suddenly everything worked.

This little configuration glitch caused me not to be able to browse my own windows workgroup, and would not let me map drives to my simpleshare server. As soon as I made the change, I had access to my windows workgroup and my simpleshare also showed as a member of that workgoup.

Its always those little things that bite ya in the ass …. I hate that shit

geek hippy