Work has been going well, at least as far as the employment part of it goes. The task list is a freaking nightmare.

I reported a week or so ago about the number of people (279) that had 'root' (administrator) access across the domain due to a programming error by my predecessor. But that's not half of it. Another 240 or so had no access whatsoever (and should have). Yet another 40 or so had non-zero duplicate login ID's ('uids' in Unix-ese). This means that any of them could write over or steal files from the other folks with whom they shared ID's. 

This is all due to programming errors by my predecessor. There are just under 2000 accounts, so a little more than one in four were hopelessly screwed up. 

I've also had to break in to about 40 machines because my predecessor didn't leave any password information for them and doesn't respond to (phone,email) queries. He's still at the 'Uni' (University) and somehow managed to get promoted to central IT services. Gawdd, I fear for the damage that he can do with even more access to the central infrastructure systems like payroll, purchasing, enrollment databases, etc. Most of the departmental machines (the ones I'm now caring for) have custom built scripts for performing user and system management. Those dealing with system management are as buggy as the ones managing users. It's some of the most horrid looking buggy code I've ever encountered - and I've been encountering buggy code for over half my life.

At least I'm not in danger of running out of things to fix any time soon. I'm amazed some of this stuff worked at all. In fact, most of it didn't - or just worked marginally enough that nobody ever noticed how flucked up it really was.

Oh well. Slowly but surely I'm getting all of this stuff whipped into shape. 

Workers tunnel to find missing coal miners. (Doesn't look good.)

The shuttle has a 3 inch gash. (Doesn't look good either.)

Afghanistan prepares for a 'Tet' style offensive. (Ditto.)

Another school shooter named. (Psychos, cont.)

Missing girl in Portugal believed dead. (Psychos, cont.)

Big Ben goes silent. (This doesn't happen very often.)

Dads design bulletproof back pack. (Good onya' mate.)

Pakistan government claims to have full control over their nukes (at least for now).

So what's happening around here? Not much. The cows are grazing. Downtown they'll be chopping up the trees that fell over yesterday. Free firewood I reckon.

I used to think that I had a built-in compass - that you could put me anywhere on earth and I'd be able to find north. Usually this is the case, but I have found that my sense of direction gets tripped up when you drop me into a place where the ocean is on the 'wrong side'. I'm used to having the (nearest) ocean towards the west. If that isn't the case, it takes me a bit of orientation to 'find the ocean'.

But the curious thing is that once I've found the ocean, I seem to be able to keep its location oriented in my brain, and I don't lose it again, no matter how I get twisted around - as long as I stay on the ground and as long as the ocean stays in the same direction.

It was interesting that when living in Colorado years ago that I still maintained my direction by the orientation of the Pacific Ocean, a thousand miles away. Western Mexico, no problem. As a teenager I was at ease finding north in York, England, though this defies my logic completely. Although I do recall flying towards the coastline an hour before landing. But having flown to New York and the Yucatan and most recently to Eastern Australia, my sense of direction was completely destroyed for about 48 hours. The common denominator in these cases is that the location of the sea was apparently on the 'wrong side'. 

Very curious.