Won't You Turn Your Head Once More and Make Your Peace With Everyone?

Does anyone have any idea why in the name of Jehovah Doc Marten boots squeek as they do on polished floors? You can tell I'm walking down the hall from the other side of the building. But wait! There's more! A friend here bought a new pair of Doc Martens and his squeek just the same. What exactly do they make their oil, fat, acid, petrol, alkali resistant soles out of?

Last night went amusingly at the Chateau Towers Reunion. Kias and The Pollack were to arrive at 7:15 and both were fashionably late. Kias, at least, was courteous enough to have brought beer - New Glarus' Imperial IPA, in fact - the brand spankin' new flava in the "Unplugged" series from Dan. The Pollack, in a move completely unsurprising, forget my goddamn Russian cognac...for the second time! Jackass. And I fed him Basil Hayden! I think it was the first time those two had seen one another in several years although my liver and I were acquainted with them both last week. They shot the fecal matter while I attended to The Pollack's ailing laptop. This is to say that Internet Exploder and Outlook Express needed to be reinstalled. I had grabbed the installation files and threw them onto the laptop. Then I tucked away The Pollack's mail, faves, and files. I opened the setup executable and got an error that a newer version of IE was already installed - installation shall not continue. D'oh! I had forgotten to hack the registry first. So I do that - thrice checking my edits. Done. Same fucking error when trying to reinstall IE. So I go through the registry with a fine-toothed comb only to find that I'd done everything properly. So, when in doubt, re-apply the service pack. A beer or two later it was done. Fired up OE and he received his mail fine. Then we tried to send and it was crash crash.

I troubleshot. Setup my laptop with his e-mail account and got the same socket error. Tried all the various configurations of settings for the outgoing server. All to no avail. I telneted into mailbox via port 25 and got error. The whole time I was having bad flashbacks to the sentence I spent at Sitel doing this crap for a living. After having wasted the better part of an evening with Charter the day before, I reluctantly called his ISP. I explained what was happening and verified settings. blah blah blah So I had the tech woman try telneting into the SMTP server and she couldn't either. Problem solved. Well, figured out, at any rate. I powered down The Pollack's laptop and washed my hands of the mess - until he calls me again pleading for help tomorrow.

I have to go to this u-rah-rah hoolie after work this evening in Pewaukee. This looks to entail and hour and a half of speeches by upper management and the owner of the company. I am un-looking forward to this. In about 40 minutes I get to head home and await the arrival of the cable guy to tweak our lines.