I added a wonderful comic on the right sidebar. It’s Day by Day by Chris Muir. You should read it. It rocks. If it messes up the site’s layout please let me know. I think it will be fine at 800×600 but no way to tell from where I am because even my display size is locked down. Heck I cannot even see Spider J. up at the top left this version of IE Is so damn old! I think I will be adding some more stuff here in the next couple of days. And I am looking for a new domain name so expect some changes in the near future.
UPDATE: So it’s not working like I wanted it to work. I am going to drop an email to the genius over at Jack Lewis and see if he will share his little collapsible code thingy with me…
The Hollow Men
T. S. Eliot (1925)
I
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us — if at all — not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
II
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.
Let me be no nearer
In death’s dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer –
Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom
III
This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.
Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.
IV
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river
Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.
V
Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
Motorhead’s The Game was my soundtrack for my winning streak last night playing poker. I needed to be aggressive and it was just the right amount of metal and angry lyrics. I made some good money last night. No quite three times my buy in but nice and close. I was even in bed before midnight.
Then this morning came. Hamish, poor little guy, had a high fever so I called into work. Now Michelle feels sick and Anna, Aoghdan, and I all have low grade fevers. Hamish is a trooper. He is still laughing and playing even with his fever albeit a little slower than normal. I am not a trooper. I want to crawl into bed and sleep this off. I want to whine and be pamperred. No dice on that one though. I even have a headache that is bordering on migraine to top it all off. And I am missing work. That is the suck about being hourly. Not that one day really hurts us at all financially with the money I am making but damn it I want the money!
I am going back to feeling sick. I just wanted to whine here for a minute.
Well if you have missed me online it’s because I have a job. I am spending time with my family in the evenings so I am not on the cumputer much. I am trying to get things normal around here. I mean normal like I come home, play with the kids, fix dinner, spend time with Michelle, and then maybe a little time for poker somewhere in there. I am laying off the booze for a while and planning to try and lay off the smokes if laying off the booze works. Anyway…peace out until next time.
So the new job. It’s boring right now. I don’t have the access to do the things I need to be doing so it’s roughly a job where sitting and staring at the wall is the complete and total norm. I run some service calls with other engineers (a misnomer) but mostly it is sitting around and trying not to fall asleep. The same can be said for those with access to tickets right now. We are overstaffed but that doesn’t mean my job is in danger. We are overstaffed for a reason. A reason that none of us actually know but will likely find out tomorrow during a meeting.
We have lots of meetings. Monday morning and Thursday afternoon are pre-scheduled and then there are other random meetings in between. It’s pretty corporate. Of course at a company this large everything is corporate in nature. We service a specific set of clients on a specifc set of operating system with a very specific scope of support. Some days we are just ticket jockeys making sure the right departments get the problems that were assigned to us. Other days we are lifesavers to the clients. There won’t be anything challenging here for me as the scope is so limited but I think that will be alright for a couple of years.
I don’t want to stagnate so I have to find new projects. Since karaoke is a hobby of mine I plan to learn C++ by writing a karaoke suite for Linux. By suite I mean player, cataloging, ripper, and so on. Once it is done I plan on making it a bootable CD distro. A complete karaoke system by just putting a CD in your box and rebooting. It’s actually a very huge project to be honest but I have been wanting to learn C++ for a long time. I could do it in perl most likely but I want to have a nice compiled system that is graphical and can be used by a novice with a simple reboot. I have to decide on KDE or Gnome but that is academic to be honest. It will work on either when I am done so all that matters is what libs I want to use.
So the drudgery of daily work in a large corporation carries on. Evidenced by the fact I had time to write this post to begin with. This is not a fast paced environment at all. Everything moves through levels of bureaucracy with such quickness it reminds me of an iceberg. That is not to say that the job isn’t important but rather to say that my job has absolutely nothing at all to do with affecting any change. All I have to do is make sure the clients OS and hardware are working right and then hand off to the right group. I have to do this rather quickly according to those that work here but our SLA is pretty laughably far out. It might seem fast to those used to a corporate environment but to those of used to demanding clients this is a cakewalk.
Maybe I’ll take some pics of the new office digs and post them later. Of course I will have to edit out all of the indentifying marks since I am not saying where I work but that takes mere seconds. I am off to stare some more at the wall and maybe read more Sluggy.
You can tell it’s Lucero from the opening strains of What Else Would You Have Me Be and the piano kicks in. True to form Lucero has produced yet another album and maintained a signature sound while not sounding like any of the rest of their work. From the album art to the track layout this album is a winner from start to finish. I have had the MP3 version from the pre-purchase for almost a week now and have been having trouble getting the review written because my favorite parts about it keep changing. I must be a goddamn fanboy because there is nothing I don’t like about this album. Produced by David Lowery of Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven fame the album was not done in tracks but rather with the whole band in the studio all plugging away on each song. The maturity of the band shows very well througout the tracks including nods to 70’s garage bands and 80’s rock and roll. It is an easy listen for fans of just about any genre except hip hop and who really gives a shit about them anyway.
Ben’s vocals, Brian’s guitar, Jon’s bass, Roy’s drumming, and it’s all Lucero from start to finish. The lyrics are heartfelt and belted out in whiskey style with a rhythm that demands to have cold beer swilled while singing along. The references to sailors and the sea draw you in and you have to wonder if Ben has secret dreams of being a pirate. I would say sailor there but Ben would make a shitty merchant marine but a damn fine pirate!
The wait for this album was intense. Knowing the boys change a little bit with every album. Not knowing if I would like it. It was more than worth it. I might do a song by song later but right now I am just going to give it another listen and get to the job. I hate half finished reviews but there is so much swimming around my head on this one that I think it might take three or four posts!
I interviewed with Shell this week and it went well. Hell it went better than expected! I got a response from the staffing agency the next day saying the team that had interviewed me reccomended that I be hired. The hold up is the manager being in Europe so I won’t get official word until early-mid next week. However the reccomendation means it’s all but a done a deal. I won’t talk about compensation here but let’s just say it’s finally nice to see the rewards of almost sixteen years in the IT industry. I might even post a pic of my in a suit some day soon. Not that I have to wear them to work but I sure as hell wear them to interviews and I look damn good in one!
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