Spot died today. He got out because of a bitch in heat just down the road. Apparently there was a pit bull also interested and Spot lost that fight. Michelle found him about 1730 and the constables let her know it happened this morning. Stupid little bastard dug under the fence. I am going to miss him a lot. We all are. I think the kids are holding up better than I am at the moment. No new pets for a while I think. I don’t want to go and try to replace Spot. He was such a member of our family and a loving dog. I honestly don’t know what I am going to do when I come home and he isn’t barking at the door or dancing at the gate so happy to see me. This sucks.
And I can’t do this all on my own.
Quitting smoking is sucking balls.
Earlier this year I got a “Final Written Warning” at work. It hit me like a brick. I didn’t know anything was wrong. My boss never communicated anything to me. It got to be a “Final” warning only because I got written up in my first two weeks, yes a year ago, for not reporting that I had stumbled across a website that had pr0n on it. No I closed my browser and went on about my life. I got written up for it. So my boss hits me a few weeks back with this “Final” warning that has nothing to do with anything else in my file and I am on eggshells at work. The main gist of the write up was sloppiness in my work and she had three examples listed. Example one was me doing exactly and precisely what the vendor told me to do and it ended up being wrong. Yeah that was my fault. Example two was a technology I had never dealt with and I did make some mistakes, I made mistakes correcting her mistakes in the initial setup, yes again totally my fault. Thirdly was a project where I was sloppy. I was. I also caught it and slowed it down and recommended we hold off so I could regroup. Along with that I also found that we weren’t ready to go even if I hadn’t been sloppy. The same project on a different plate went horribly awry the very next weekend. All that said it is review time and I have really been head down but I know that the “Final” warning is going to play into it and I won’t get a bonus. I will likely be told I am lucky to have kept my job. The problem is that there were much larger projects that went without a hitch on my plate including projects that modified every single Linux server in the farm. It won’t matter because all she ever sees is what I do wrong.
It sounds petty but I have kept track of a co-workers mistakes recently. I don’t mean out of malice or to throw him under a bus but just to see if I am being paranoid. Out of fifteen projects since I started watching a total of five have gone off without a hitch. The rest all had problems and most of them were things that should have been seen in advance. He has not been written up once. I am not sure what it means but I am sure that I am not being treated fairly. Even the co-worker that I have been watching thinks the same. The whole team has said as much and yet there is nothing I can do about it.
So I am wasted tired, stressed, and the project on which I am working is a long and drawn out project and I am so bored with it. I have a couple other projects on my plate that are in the planning stages but they are a ways off. I need to get my head above the water again. I don’t want to leave this job and I have no plans to do so. I just want things to go a little easier. I may have a chance at a lateral move so I am waiting to see about that.
The stupid quitting smoking is really not helping all the stress. I do the gum through the worst part of the day and smoke it up whilst feeling guilty about it at home because I don’t have the stomach for the gum.
I have no outlet for stress right now. This sucks.
WHAT. THE. FUCK. OVER?
I can’t even get to sleep on time. I want to be in bed right now but the fact is that makes tomorrow get here even faster. And I honestly don’t want to deal with tomorrow.
So I am making it through the work day on gum. The problem is that it upsets my stomach in a massive way. This means I can barely drink by the time the day is over so I buy a pack on the way home. I am down to under half what I used to smoke but that’s not good enough. I am trying to cut back during the day so I can do the gum longer into the evening but I suspect that is not the best plan.
At work I am stuck playing with a technology I know and love. The problem is that anything gets boring after you have done it too long. I am head down in Nagios all the time. I have learned a lot and am still learning but damn it I am bored. I am about to write some check plugins so I will get to play with perl which is never a bad thing.
I am trying to get approved to go to Brainshare this year and I will likely know today whether that is happening or not. We will wait and see.
That’s all for now but more later for sure.
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So you will have to cut and paste the links since I am posting from the crackberry and can’t be bothered to make them into links and frankly won’t care by the time I get home!
http://amarok.kde.org
Amaroke is by far the coolest music player I have ever used. This is not just the oss nerd in me thinking that there is a cool Linux equivalent to stuff I used to do on Windows. This is a real bad ass music player with features that make organizing my music collection, which is no small task, a fairly simple thing.
I love the cover art download feature because it works and does so well. The context browser is pretty ingenious. The iPod support is well done.
It has its annoyances to be sure. The support for external drives treats them like local drives so if you run it without your external plugged in you have tpo rescan your collection. The smart thing to do, which hasn’t been done anywhere yet, would be to maintain collections based on volume names and that way you would never loose your collection and be forced to rescan. Maybe in the next version.
Anyway this is just random spew because I want a smoke so bad I could scream…and it sucks typing this much on a BB
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Well I havwe failed two days in row to stop smoking. I have gum thanks to my friend Dermot and it works as long as I am not arounf any other smokers. I haven’t failed yet today so we will see how it goes. I want one smoke free day under my belt. This may be the hardest thing I have ever done but I think it will be one of the best things as well. There is not profit without sacrifice in life. I just have to see how much I am willing to sacrifice.
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I know I said I didn’t want to talk about politics but what I meant was that I don’t want to talk about the election. I still have issues I will post about. Illegal immigration is one of them. There is a piece by the New York Times, linked by Drudge that caught my attention today.
PHOENIX — The police in this city at the center of the immigration debate will soon ask all people arrested whether they are in the United States legally and will in certain cases report the information to the federal authorities, Mayor Phil Gordon announced on Friday.
People stopped for civil traffic violations like speeding will not be questioned, nor will crime victims or witnesses.
All those arrested on criminal charges like drunken driving and murder will be asked by officers whether they are in the United States legally.
Sounds good to me. I have the same concerns mentioned later in the article, that it doesn’t go far enough, but I think it’s a damn fine start. Cops asking criminals if they are also here illegally. Nothing wrong with that at all. Phoenix is a city full of Hispanics and a good part of them are here illegally. Why not try to stem the tide a little bit?
The program departs from a policy that is more than 10 years old that bars officers from asking people about their legal status in most cases. It also sets Phoenix apart from most other big cities with large immigrant populations, including New York and Los Angeles. The police in those cities generally avoid such questions over fears that they would lead to racial profiling and discourage immigrants from cooperating with the police.
Racial profiling? Whatchu talkin’ ’bout Willis? A white dude with no accent is not likely to be an illegal immigrant. Racial profiling works you regardless of what the liberal bleeding hearts would have us believe. When a single racial group is also the largest population of illegal immigrants then you need to target that racial group. It’s basic common sense. Hispanics are that group. There are more Hispanics here illegally than any other racial group. You can toss around buzzwords like “racial profiling” to try and mask what common sense dictates but it’s all a bunch of crap. If we want to stem the tide of illegal immigrants then we need to target Hispanics plain and simple. If we can turn the tide at that border then we need to look at the Asian community. We don’t need to stop until we stem the tide of illegal immigrants of all races.
Antonio D. Bustamante, a member of Los Abogados, a Hispanic legal group in Phoenix, said the policy changed “only because of xenophobia” and people “who hate the undocumented without understanding the huge contribution they make to the city and the economy.”
What a moron. I am not xenophobic in the least. I support every immigrant who has entered this country via legal means. I support their rights, their community, their place in America. I do not now and will never support anyone who’s very presence is an ongoing crime. The illegal aliens are not merely undocumented immigrants like the WOPs of old. They are illegally, by choice, knowingly breaking our immigration law. They commit fraud by getting fake SS numbers. They drain public resources. They are illegal and should be treated as criminals. We should ship them all back even if we have to do it one by one. And not just the Hispanics here illegally but every person regardless of race who has flaunted our laws.
By the way that’s just some choice quotes. Follow the link for the whole article. I have said my piece. Probably not very well due to the whole nicotine addiction kicking my ass at the moment. I have made it about an hour and a half at this point on the quitting smoking thing. Here’s hoping I can make the next half hour (taking it an hour at a time).
I need to quit smoking. There are many good reasons that have failed me in the past.
1. The kids
2. Money
3. My health
4. Social Stigma
And so on…
The point is that I no longer enjoy being a smoker. I don’t like feeling like a guest in my own body. I don’t like going outside in the muggy Houston weather at a damn bar just to light up. It is not fun at any point in time. It is not cool. My clothes stink. My breath stinks. The main reason for me right now is the fact I don’t like it. I know that sounds selfish but it’s a fact. I haven’t enjoyed it since I read The Easy Way To Stop Smoking. I almost made it recently but failed. Today I start again. I fired up my last one, without knowing it, about an hour ago. I made my decision whilst smoking what I hope to be my last smoke ever.
I am reading Smoke Free dot gov and have a copy of The Easy Way handy. It is time to take my life back from nicotine. It is time to stop being a guest in my own body. It is time to be smoke free. I know it’s a lofty goal but I tired of the insidious addiction that is nicotine. I know it won’t be easy.
I had a talk with the kids and let them know what might happen. I told them Daddy might be a jerk. I told them what was going on and they all agreed that they would do their best to support me and handle things while I get past the addiction. I can do this.
I am also praying a lot and that might be the largest help I get. So pray for me as well so that I can kick this crap and be done with it.
Well that’s needed cleaning up for some time…
The site is cleaner now. And the formatting is right. I think I need to go to bed.
Well I lost the second game. Got flat out out played. It was good. I hope to learn from it.
I have had so much I wanted to write about that I haven’t been able to pen anything. It’s frustrating to be honest.
I have six, about to be seven, kids and I want to write all about them. I want to write about how modern TV has shown me that our society is in horrible shape. I don’t want to write about politics at all. I want to write about music. I just have too much on my mind to get any of it out. Been twittering some but that’s not enough.
So it’s been a while. Life has been a real stone cold bitch. I won’t complain beyond that. For those that know anything about poker here are a few hands from tonight…
Yes in 23 hands I can back from 80 chips with the blinds 25/50. A lot of it was luck but after 700 it was skill to a large degree. I dominated him. I had him on tilt. It was a done deal and I didn’t even realize it. I even told him good game the hand before when he took all but 80 of my chips. I am waiting for the next one to start. It’s a heads up tourney and this was only the first round. I have to be on my game because luck won’t get the 1382 that is being paid for first place…
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