joeware - never stop exploring... :)

After the wave of responses on what could possibly be wrong with my VPN (insert stock footage of crickets chirping) I continued on pecking away at the problem.

As you recall, last we met I had VPN’ed into work, got some updates (what I don’t know), then VPN didn’t work anymore, I couldn’t learn anything from the network traces, and finally had concluded it was something with the (enc)decryption/certs/etc because I could use the code produced from another machine.

So I looked at the certs and found a bunch of new certs and also some odd new cert stores that had oriental characters which was quite odd. I smoked all of the new certs (yeah that will come back and bite me at some point I am sure) and went into the registry and deleted the new cert stores, why I can’t do that from the cert management tool I don’t know, you just can’t or at least I didn’t see an immediately apparent way.  I crossed my fingers and tried to connect and still no go.  So I give up because I had to run to the airport to fly to Dulles in Washington D.C.

I get to Dulles which is under quite a bit of construction and it takes about an hour to get my luggage and get to Avis rent a car. On top of that I crap out yet again and don’t get the navigation system I always ask for (I am horrible with directions but luckily if I get lost, I usually have fun anyway) so I fire up the laptop and plug in the USB GPS and start up Map Point.  For some reason it isn’t working which is disturbing because it has worked perfectly for two years…

Oh great ANOTHER problem, only worse, I had no clue how to get where I needed to get to and would have to actually read the Map Point maps instead of just easily following the directions and the little car driving down the road because of the GPS tracking. Out of sheer frustration I start trying every COM port for what Map Point should use and sure enough, the port moved… Ok, one more thing that somehow changed from the last software update. Not sure why, don’t care, I now have GPS, I punch in the address I need to go to and tell it to figure out where I am and where I need to go[1]. I start on my way occasionally peeking over and wait, somethings wrong, the GPS is reporting the wrong time… Off by an hour, how is that? I get to the hotel and plug in and look at the clock settings… Hmm the clock isn’t set to automatically adjust to daylight savings time…

No please, it can’t be this simple… I check the box, close the window, I pull out the smart card and give it a shot… It works perfectly. Ah so, smart code passcode is time based. Note for future. I have no clue how the checkbox got unchecked but it did and rechecking fixed. I am just glad that has come to an end.

I feel quite slow that it took me so long to work that out and had I not gone through this sequence of events I may not have figured it out because the clock in my tray was actually correct but the GPS window showed the wrong time. I am glad that I did figure it out before rebuilding the machine. I hate unsolved crimes. I am going to reload the updates when I am safely at home and watch carefully what is done this time. I met up with one of my manager’s other direct reports (Paul – he works out of Colorado, I work out of Michigan and we seem to see each other in the flesh 1-3 times a year) and when I explained the whole thing he looked at me, shook his head and said… “You run the corporate load?” with “the look”.

So back to the title… I am really slow but sometimes that is a good thing… Whatever does that mean, it wasn’t too good it took me this long to look at my time settings[2]. Well here is what I mean… I got together with Paul as I described above and we jumped in the rent a wreck and drove over to Baltimore to watch the Orioles play the Los Angeles Angels. Again the GPS and Map Point came in quite handy or else we probably would have ended up at the Capitol building. It was a bit ironic that we were going because I was recently talking to both a friend and my sister (the one in the San Fran area) about seeing a game for the experience and I hadn’t been to a game in years.

So we eventually get there (rush hour beltway traffic) and park and start walking around. The stadium is absolutely amazing, I loved it, it is in great shape with an outstanding old fashioned feel to it. I have some great pics of it, if interested, comment or email me and I may post or email some off. About a half a mile from the stadium straight out past the center field fence was a very cool clock tower that I found my eyes constantly drifting to thinking how cool would it be to sit up there and look around. We bought tickets on the spot from the ticket booth (not a scalper) and got some great seats just behind first base and the Orioles Dugout, about 8 rows from the field. We had some very funny folks sitting next to us as well which really helps the overall experience.

(cough cough) So about the slow part joe… Oh yes… Why is it good to be slow sometimes? Well if you have been to a baseball game before, what is one of the reasons you want to sit near the baselines? Foul balls of course… Do you see where this is going? This game had its share of foul balls and Paul and I received a little scare when a 96+ MPH fast ball was shanked off our way and we lost sight of the ball in the sky, it was still bright out and the sky was bright blue. We just sat there hoping it wouldn’t crack our skulls. As luck would have it, it dropped about 30 rows behind us and bounced and hit the leg of the girl sitting behind us as she was coming back from the concession stands. She was ok, figure she will get a good bruise though.

So we progress in the game (great game btw) and bam, another ball shanked our way. Only this time it is dark and I refused to lose track of it. I watch it go up and up and up in the start of a very tight high arc (think something like -4x^2 instead of say -x^2) and then it looks like it is starting to coming down. Well actually it doesn’t look like it is moving at all… That can only mean one of two things, it hit a spot up there where gravity wasn’t affecting it or it was falling straight at ME and my vantage point wasn’t such that I could see the motion. So not willing to look a gift horse in the mouth and COMPLETELY forgetting the speed at which those balls are traveling both from my Little League and Micky Mantle League baseball days (I was a pitcher) and the incident with the young lady behind us I stood up and took a small step to the left to align myself better with where I figured the ball would come down (quickly completing the necessary calculus formulas to generate the ballistic vector) and I could attempt to soften its landing.

I finally start seeing it move again and growing larger meaning it was definitely not stuck in a time space distortion and would end up nearly on me. I put my hands up in anticipation and then whoosh I swear I hear the air parting for the ball and I close my hands where I expect the ball will hit and I am too slow and I only get my last two fingers on each hand closed in on the position and the ball nails them and keeps on going hardly noticing my fingers, hits the concrete step (which I felt in my legs) and then bounced about 20-30 feet back up in the air and probably 50 feet behind us where the mob dived on it.

In the meanwhile I started thanking my old age for my slowless because had my hands closed milliseconds faster they would have taken the full blast of kinetic energy of a very hard ball that was sent hundreds of feet into the air by the combination of a heavy quickly swung bat and an initial pitched velocity of something like 92mph. Basically it would have been close to the force of just catching the ball as it was blasted off the end of the bat. The best time to catch a foul ball, for the curious, is when it is at the top of its arch, not either bottom. That would have meant broken hands and I can’t type well with broken hands, or so I surmise; even with that slight brush with the high speed projectile both pinky fingers started swelling up and hurt quite nicely and started bruising. Two hours later they moved onto numb.

So, indeed, sometimes being slow is a good thing.

     joe

[1] Do not drive around Virginia unless you know the area or have a GPS or a lot of gasoline.

[2] On my side there is the fact I never really look at my time settings and things always work.