yaleman.org

The most common way to connect a drive to a network path in Windows is this command:

net use X: \\SERVER\Share

Where:

• X: is the drive letter you wish to map the share to,
• \\SERVER\Share is the UNC path to the share.

Assuming you have permissions to map drives and to access that share, it will map the drive and tell you that it mapped successfully.

If you want quick access and do not want to map a network drive, you can access a UNC Path directly from the Command Prompt using pushd.

For example:

pushd \\SERVER\Share

This will connect to the path automatically for you and make it your current working directory.

When you are finished on the network share enter the popd command. This will return you to the directory you were in before and delete the temporary network drive.

The popd and pushd commands can be used with local directories. If change to a directory with pushd it stores the previous location you were in so that when you issue the popd command you are returned to it. This is similar to bash-stacking in linux where if you open a shell within an existing shell, quitting that will take you back to where you were when you opened it.

“Saratoga Springs school district prohibits kids from biking to school, but a mom and her son defied the law. A state trooper was there to greet them.”

I’m completely and utterly gobsmacked at the nanny-state behaviour that’s happening more and more in today’s society. If a kid wants to ride or walk to school along a designated bike path with their parent supervising them no less, when does is it become the school’s choice to ban them from doing so?

I have to ask how the “State Troopers and an unhappy group of administrators” became involved, other than the fact that they had been pre warned or something else had happened to spark it.

One section of the school policy states: “The Board of Education forbids the riding of bicycles by students to and from Maple Avenue Middle School.” Another section also prohibits riding to elementary schools.

Why would they do this? What is the justification? There is mention that it has something to do with the bicycles being on the property – possibly sparked by parents making it the fault of the school for bikes being stolen in the past.

There’s a reader comment (that seems to have been written by someone with the spelling ability of a bucket of sand) which complains that if a child got injured, the town and school district would be sued.
The concept that a parent would sue the school or the town for a child’s injury caused by a motorist is nothing less than disgusting.

They go on to say that the mother is setting a bad example by teaching their child to break the rules. While I agree that while it’s bad for them to break the rules, being taught to question political decisions and perform peaceful protests isn’t such a bad idea. This is especially true in the face of a generation of children that will likely be buried by their parents because of their terrible nutrition and weight problems, poisoned by the culture that they want so badly.

I hope I’m not one of them – I am trying to cut back on the garbage and get a bit healthier these days. If at all possible my kids will walk or ride to school with me, reinforcing the message that it’s good fun to be outside and getting some road sense.

What do (or will) your children do?

Saratogian via Mother Nature Network

Well, I should have known better than to have trusted all those in the chain that my contract paperwork had to go through in order to go from a temporary employee to the comfort of a permanent role. Of course once I had made the assumption that all would go well, it did not. Instead of attaching my paperwork along with some others, it lay forgotten in the digital wasteland that is an Executive Assistant’s computer and did not reach the appropriate people to get me paid.

Of course, the people that it was destined to reach are a government-run outsourced nightmare of bureaucracy and stupidity so I thought it would be them at first. Alas, they had not received the paperwork so it was most likely to be a fault on our end.

The complete lack of information on who to call and talk to in this place is just mind boggling. I had to ask two different people before I could find the wrong person that just happened to know who the paperwork had gone.

They had to call me back because there was much walking and discussing to happen. I’m sure there’s Tolkien-esque paragraphs I could write about the rage that boiled inside me.  I won’t, I hate Tolkien.

I will say that I was physically twitching and feeling decidedly unwell with rage. And lo, it was solved! I got a call from RR, the wonderfully sweet young lady that is the Executive Assistant to someone incredibly important far up the chain. As the fires of anger raged within my gut, my heart and mind were instantly calmed. I can’t explain it, I couldn’t yell at such a Nice Young Lady. Her sweet voice was the music to the beast within.

As it stands, I got paid enough to pay rent and have splash cash, and I should have the rest by the end of the week. Sigh.

I attended a wonderful wedding recently in the Bunya Mountains between two friends of mine, and it was lovely. The ride to and from there was less than fun, however.

I can handle:

• A four hour bike ride, that’s easy.
• Five or six kilometres of fist-sized gravel on a sports bike.
• The seals on my front master cylinder deciding to refuse to  live up to their name.

What I can’t handle is the terrible state of back-country Queensland roads and ending up with incredibly sore wrists by the time I was half way home.

In other news, Kawasaki wins again on the parts front – went down to TeamMoto’s big warehouse store at Springwood and ordered a rebuild kit for the master cylinder ($93) and a replacement seal for the top ($25ish).

The three-brake-line system that the bike runs as standard needed replacing because the lines were bulging even under light braking situations.  I found a local manufacturer called HEL Performance and I have ordered some from for the reasonable sum of $160 delivered.

I’d highly recommend them because they allow you to choose from a variety of colours for both  the lines and the fittings and have a massive back-catalogue of supported bikes with their associated configurations of lines. I have chosen to go with a more race-like dual-line setup which runs a line for each caliper directly to the master cylinder. This configuration allows for more direct feedback and improved performance along with reduced parts count and ease of bleeding.

I’ve just finished listening to an audiobook version of Orson Scott Card’s novel “Empire”. It’s quite an impressive novel, bringing together action, science fiction, politics and some modern philosophy.

It explores the idea of a red-state vs. blue-state American civil war brought about by manipulating the media and the people through some interesting psychological ploys.

As stated by the author himself, it wasn’t entirely his idea – having been approached by the Chair Entertainment Group, an American video game producer – and offered the chance to develop the game’s storyline as well as a novel to set the series into action. This is not to say that it’s not an incredibly well thought-out story, with rich character development and the just the right amount of workout for your imagination.

There’s so many twists and turns through this story that at times I was left with an intense feeling of being right in the story, lost as to what’s going on and wondering what will happen next. The plot rarely pauses and by the time you get to the end it showed no sign of slowing down until the very last word.

Well worth a read in my opinion, get your copy here at amazon.com