So I have been twittering for a while (romeosidvicious) and also hitting identi.ca and wondering if I should pick one. I know I will be posting here more since I found an easy way to do it from my phone so I will start my postings from the reading room again.
I may have mentioned I have a WM6 phone now, the Mogul from Sprint, and I have to say that if I reboot it twice a day it’s a stable device. I could probably only reboot once a day but I like to be safe. I would go iPhone but Jobs and co. are worse than MS at locking crap down. I am waiting patiently for the Andriod phones in Q4 and will snatch up an HTC dream and suffer the pains of early adoption for that but at least I’ll get geek cred for it.
I updated the romeosidvicious muxtape and think this one might be a final product, meaning that I will make another muxtape account for future mixes. It’s pretty damn slick right now and I can’t imagine I will get a better flow out of the songs I want!
I have to update the backend here and at Last Chance Diner this weekend and work a new theme for the diner as well. So the weekend is sort of packed as I also need to test Joomla for the family website as the specialized software has the wife in a tizzy.
We had the baby (figure everyone already knows but just in case) and the pics are up at Michelle’s gallery. So go gaze at the new little addition to the clan. A few more and I’ll be prepped for world domination.
So my wife wrote a little commentary on a piece written by a professional photographer (with a whole three years under her belt). A couple of people and I commented, and then this got left by someone too cowardly to even leave contact info (Michelle removed it):
You people are stupid! Just because you bought a digital camera at Walmart doesnt mean that you know how to make a picture or process it correctly in you PC of shit computer. Photographers are not SNOBS, they are working professionals who are trained to capture moments in time.
And one cannot help but wonder why this troll even bothered. Photographers are not “trained to capture moments in time” but rather trained how to take pictures and work a camera. Someone with natural talent can go far taking pictures without any “professional” training. The thought process that people can be trained, in any shape, form, or fashion, to “capture moments in time” could only be the deluded fantasy of one who watched too many Kodak commercials while young. Aside from the rest of the faulty logic it is obvious that the person who left the comment has precious little education based on the lack of punctuation and the horrendous grammar contained in the brief venomous spew they felt compelled to bang out on their keyboard.
Nevermind that none of us who commented referred to all professional photographers as snobs but rather a specific set of them. This set of “professionals” (note the use of quotes) believes things such as they should be served the same food as the guests at a wedding and the bride and groom should forgo tradition to make the photographer’s life easier. It is to these people that we give the internet version of the middle finger. Had anyone with any spark of intelligence read the comments they would have realized that the comments were based on the type of attitude presented in the article and not at professional photographers as a whole. There are always people who give their industry a bad name and the author of the article in question is, in my not so humble opinion, one of them.
I couldn’t help but point out the idiocy. My wife is much more civilized than I and simply removed the comment because it’s her blog and she’ll do what she wants with it. Me, well I prefer to bring this sort of thing to light and make snide remarks about it. Does that make me better than the person who wrote the comment? Probably not. Nonetheless it amuses me…
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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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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So I have given up caffeine for Lent. For the first week of Lent. After that, week by week, it will be processed sugar, alcohol, nicotine, and eventually I will fast for the last few days. I do not say this to brag at all. In fact I am hesitant to post the list which I intend to give up for God but it relates to the topic of the post. You see I have been drinking juice and water a lot already since I have had the symptoms of a kidney infection. I haven’t had a drink all week (not that I drink much to being with) and I have been eating better in order to prepare myself for the fast at the end of Lent.
I say all that to say this. I feel completely miserable right now. I should feel better than I have in a while. I don’t mean my kidneys hurt from the apparent infection. I mean I feel worn out, worn down, and all over beat up. I feel a sore throat coming on, along with joint aches, back aches not due to the kidneys, hot and cold flashes not due to fever, random coughing fits, and an all over feeling of just being tired. Now if I were a heavy drinker I would think I was having DTs but since I drink once a week at the most and it hasn’t even been a week since my last drink we can eliminate that possibility. I am getting enough sleep so it’s not exhaustion. The current flu is a stomach flu and doesn’t have the symptoms I possess so that can be ruled out as well. The lack of fever eliminates a lot of options. My only other guess is environmental so I will be wiping down my desk with bleach wipes every day for a while and using the hand lotion that kills germs.
It is maddening, to be honest, to start eating better, drinking better, cutting down on smokes, and everything I am doing only to become miserable. I don’t know how to handle it mentally to be honest. I am quite surly right now and not getting much done at work. Of course “not much” for me still impresses the boss. I am on the verge of depression over this. It doesn’t follow. I am still feeding my one addiction so it’s not withdrawal from nicotine. I weened the caffeine monster slow and haven’t had even one headache so I know it’s not that either. I think I will go curl up under the covers and wait for the wife to come to bed and rub my back.
Quitting smoking sucks. I mean it sucks really bad. For me it’s not the nicotine though. I can go without nicotine without too much of a problem. The ritual however is just about killing me. I am not bothering this weekend because I failed every day Wed to Fri this week. I got the gum and that completely takes care of the nicotine and then some. It’s when things get boring that I break. I don’t know what to do with my hands at all. I can’t even drive without a smoke. So I am sitting here puffin away instead of chewing gum and all because my hands don’t know what to do with themselves. I know it sounds weird, hell, it feels weird. It’s like being a guest in your own body. Quitting caffeine was painful when I did it for Lent but this is something different. I can’t just fight through a headache for a day or two and be done. It’s killing me. It is hard to breathe with pretty much any physical activity. I am down to one pack a day but it’s not enough I have to quit. I want to play ball with my son and right now I am grateful his attention span is shorter than my stamina but that won’t last. The price just went up here as well and that sucks. Dumbass lawmakers taxing us so they can do more bullshit. They claim it’s for schools but we all know the students won’t see any improvement. I don’t want to get sidetracked though. I could go on and on about the futility of dumping money into education without revamping the system from the top down but I need to quit smoking worse than I need to rant right now.
I have to finish getting the urchins ready for church right now so I have to whining about everything. If you are so inclined then say a prayer for my efforts to quit smoking.
Well it is that time of year and for the first time in half a decade I am unemployed. Technically I have a job but it doesn’t start until Jan 8 which will be too late to pay rent. Yeah I was overestimating our finances for rent time. We didn’t spend a dime of our own on Christmas for the kids even. Just bills, food, and such. It sucks. To be honest I fight depression every year around this time and it’s really hard to keep my head up right now. Last time I was unemployed an angel sent me money and it helped. I have to go to various organizations and ask for help and while I shouldn’t feel this way I so don’t want to. It’s a blow to my pride. The last job loss wasn’t anything I did and as such I feel I should still be employed. The bastards as Veritas DGC fired me while my wife was in labor for God’s sake! I can only think it was the three days I asked to have off for the new baby. Yeah that’s right I asked for three days. Of course they get around all the federal labor laws since I am a contractor.
I am not having a good time of it right now. I cannot stomach this for much longer. I am headed back into webhosting because I know that industry. It’s not near as much money and we will have to change a few things but I have to get my confidence back. I am done in. I wish I could just give up to be completely honest. No music this time folks…
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.
So I went last night. It was going to be the last night out for a long time. You see since I screwed up with the bank I have had to realize that I just suck with money. I had the wife do a budget and it wasn’t pretty. We could go out this week but then it would be three weeks before we could even afford to eat out again much less go to karaoke or anything like that. If I had done this, turning the budget over to the wife, we wouldn’t be where we are but I am proud fool. So we will be debt free inside of three years. I know that doesn’t sound good but it’s better than most people. I don’t me caught up. I mean debt free so I guess it’s not all bad.
So we are at the karaoke show. And I am having a good time belting out Johnny Cash, Dwight Yoakum, The Violent Femmes, and so on. I call up my old boss and find out he needs someone to run a show tonight and in July to take over a show 3 miles from my house as well as someone to run the route. If I can get 5 shows a week and do the route then I will make more money than I am working for the company I work for right now. Of course if I just do two shows a week I add a ton of money to the budget. So going out paid off. I have a gig tonight! I gotta make some phone calls and get some people to come out. My first show back in Houston! I am pretty stoked.
It’s a hell day at work. I screwed up and managed to overdraw the bank. I am depressed about Tom’s leaving. Overall a day I wish I had just stayed in bed. I am not having a good one to be real honest. I am trying but it just doesn’t seem to be getting any better. Oh well it’s over in seven and half hours and I will go to bed shortly after that and tomorrow will be better. I just need to get over all of this and do my job.
The upshot is the kids are actually being good for the most part and that’s not making things worse. I don’t know why I am complaining here either except that I need to whine and get it out. Bah…MEH! And for that matter foo…
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