Category: grindstone

All about breadwinning.

Posted on

a quick one

One of the spammer's specials.
I debated on even writing tonight. I had a tense day… and the prospect of having to meet another “commitment,” writing the blog, seemed like something I’d be better off skipping. Then, I figured maybe I’d write about feeling stretched, and before I knew it I had enough for a decent entry. Here we go.

Ever had a day where you feel like perpetually racing the clock, trying to come in under some non-existent deadline? That was my day yesterday. I sat at my desk, transfixed on my work, nearly sweating with determination. Laboring under some imagined race condition, I finally stopped to take a breath around 3pm and realized I’d been clenching my teeth the entire time. I did get a lot done though, even if it was at the expense of my frazzled mind. It just felt like I had to dedicate so much of my mind to my task, every little interruption threatened to bump the table where I was absorbed building my mental house-of-cards. The whole day just felt frantic… although I wasn’t really up against the wall on anything in particular. I’m glad it’s over, and I’m hoping for a less stressful day today.

After making the final changes to my stattraq referrer-spam blocking, I wanted to e-mail my hack to the author in case he might be able to use it in future releases. Turns out, he’d posted that same day about working on the next release, and had even called for any hacks that people had done. Since he mentioned referrer spam directly, I went ahead and posted a description of my mods as a comment to his announcement, with a link back here. To be honest, I didn’t think my hack through completely; I very well may have missed instances where a “good” referrer may not get logged based on my rules – but my quick spot-testing seemed to show it was doing OK. While I’m not sure using WP’s own discussion moderation keys is the best implementation, it’s working fine for me as a stopgap for the time being.

It’s all I’ve got folks, really. See ya.

Posted on

smooth jazz

Working, and dinner? Awesome!
I didn’t really intend it to be, but this entry ended up pretty much being a play-by-play of my day. That’s cool really, since I haven’t done that in a while or anything. And, today was a good day… got a lot done.

Today my phone at work decided that it would start playing muzak to whomever I put on hold. I have no idea why it started doing this, our phones aren’t programmed to play hold music or anything. In fact, I’d say at my job, we rely on our phones not playing music while on hold. A good portion of my meetings are comprised of attendees from across the USA, and the four corners of the globe for that matter. With so many people of varied location, the majority of the meetings I attend are phone conferences. Since I’m on so many teleconferences, I quite often have to put a meeting on hold to flash over and answer the other line or make a one-off call. If I’m on a meeting with twenty or thirty-off people, a Kenny G rendition of “Moondance” blaring for all to hear when I have to put the meeting on hold is not exactly cool.

As soon as I put the meeting on hold today, a coworker who sits a few cubes down from me and attends the same meeting shouted “Dave! Are you playing music?!” Since this particular coworker is insane to begin with, I shrugged off the seemingly insane comment. But – when I went to flip back over to the meeting I’d placed on hold, they had dropped me. Somehow, the operator ID’d the offending line and disconnected it. I have no idea how my phone got muzak, but a few simple tests with Sharaun and other friends at work verified that it did indeed. Such an odd thing to have happen, but also kinda delightfully hilarious to me. All day I wanted to flash over on meetings for no other reason than to liven up a particularly boring moment with some smooth jazz. Hell yeah y’all, nothing like some utterly vanilla and inoffensive Dave Koz to rile up a meeting. Who knows how to party? Huh? I said who?

After work, I had a “working dinner” scheduled to go over a presentation I’m preparing (and giving) jointly with a coworker. I’ve never really done a “working dinner” before, but when my co-presenter suggested it I jumped on the idea. A good meal, perhaps some tasty ales, and some time to sit around and talk candidly about our material. It also affords me the opportunity to look a bit important, or at least to feel like I may look a bit important. Both of us sitting in the bar, laptops open on the table as the keys click away. Later we both crowd around a single machine to work on “integrating” our material. It’s amazing to me just how much productivity with people can improve once you’ve invested some time in developing a non-work relationship. If you can chat as friends and also know how to get serious and knuckle under on pressing tasks – things go much smoother in a high-pressure work environment. In my “Working With China” class, they told us that the Chinese have a word for this very concept: guanxi. In this respect, I think the Chinese have it nailed. It’s all about the relationships.

Even though I felt pretty bad for abandoning Sharaun on what is only her 4th day after surgery, I really needed to sit down and get this work done without much distraction. Turns out she’s doing amazing in terms of recovery: already walking without crutches (only a pronounced limp), off the painkillers, and even driving. So she headed over to Melissa and Anthony’s for her repast, which worked well toward assuaging my guilt. So, after wrapping up what ended up being a really enjoyable meal filled with some 44-odd ounces of Fat Tire, I headed home. Only, when I got home, I remembered that Erik & Kristi still have my housekey (I lent it to them so they could do a stealth flower delivery before Sharaun’s surgery, thanks again).

Locked out, I called Sharaun and explained my predicament, and she agreed to head home. In the meantime, I was stranded in the garage. So, I fired up a little desk lamp for light, turned on the little jambox that lives in the garage to find Chutes to Narrow, and practiced my doubling-in on the dartboard. Four or five songs and a marked improvement in double-hitting consistency later, the garage door sprang to life and gave me a start. Even thought it was cold outside, and I kinda had to take a dump, and I had to pee out my beer in my own backyard – playing darts and listening to the Shins to pass the time while locked out of my own house was fun.

Check it out, I think I stumbled across Pitchfork’s “working” version of their delayed new site layout: http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/redesign/. I, my friends, am some kinda talented hacker. If this is indeed their new layout, I was kinda hoping for something more drastic. The dates on the files look right, but I dunno.

Goodnight.

Posted on

under the knife

Knee.
I must have acid reflux or something. Lately, I mean, within the last couple months, I get hearburn from everything. I get heartburn from drinking water, from a piece of gum. It seems like the simple act of swallowing is enough. A couple times, I was even awaken from sleep by the crap. That’s bad, right? I sit at my desk and drink coffee while some burning acid-gasses from Hell sit right at the bottom of my throat. Those generic chewy stomach pills seem to work OK, but not for long enough… and I don’t mind the tropical fruitchalk flavor too much. But, I think the whole mess is merely a symptom of my being fat. You know, needing to lose weight and all. So, to the fire-demons living in my belly: I hate you.

Sitting in the hospital room with Sharaun. She’s all dressed for the knife, the requisite blue “gown” and the word “yes” in capital letters on her left knee, “no” on the right. Waking around 3:30am to get here at the appointed time has left me a little sleep-dazed, but I’m as awake as one can be under the circumstances. My plan was to bring the camera, to take some good action shots of her in the hospital… but I forgot. In a few hours she’ll be all done, with a fixed up knee and all. During those hours, I’m going to do my best to catch up on some work I have to do. I have a 75% review this afternoon for a presentation I’m working on, and right now I’d say my material is at about 10%. Not really, I guess, since I have all the material I’ll cull from… I just need to cut, paste, tweak, and assemble it. Still, I wish it was done… this place doesn’t “feel” like it’s gonna be that conducive to progress.

Last night she got a little freaked out (I’m back to talking about the surgery thing again, if you couldn’t tell – that work-talk was just a lengthy trip off-topic). She has this fear that she’s going to have a reaction to the anesthetic and die or something. Crazy enough, she got a text message on her cellphone yesterday that said “Hey baby, sleep with the angels.” It was obviously a wrong number or something, but the “sleep with angels” part sounded a little too much like an ominous foretelling of death to her. So, ‘round midnight the tears and the “I don’t wanna do its” came… but it was short-lived. Even as I sit here now watching them put her IV in she seems fine. That text message was weird tho, I’ll give her that… I mighta been a little freaked out too.

Well, just kissed Sharaun off into surgery… and I’m in the family waiting room. About an hour and a half, the doctor said. Netstumbler says there’s an access point here, although it’s not broadcasting an SSID… but I can’t seem to get on it. The signal/noise ratio is a little high… I must be too far away from the thing. Would’ve been nice to be able to check my e-mail or surf the web while I wait. As it is though, I’ve managed to make huge progress on the work I was complaining about just a paragraph or two above. My presentation is now something I won’t feel stupid presenting as 75% content, not bad for two hours work. I seem to have stalled though, as is evidenced by the fact that I’m writing this…

Well, an hour or so has passed between paragraphs. The surgeon just stopped in to tell me the whole thing went well. Following him into the room was another man outfitted in scrubs, face mask also hanging to his chest. Turns out it was a doctor from Japan who had come to observe Sharaun’s surgeon’s technique. Apparently, he’s virtually patented this particular kind of ACL repair, and spends lots of time (and I’m sure makes lots of money) teaching the procedure to others. Anyway, when he introduced me I remembered my Japanese-style greetings from previous experience with work greeted the doc with the appropriate “san” attached to his surname. He seemed a bit surprised, but it made me feel all cultured and stuff. Anyway, she’ll recoup for an hour or so before I can see her again… so back to work here.

Ahhh… back home. Later.

Posted on

my moby dick

It's a cam! Duh!!
A triumphant return to work… not at all like what I was expecting. While sitting at home on vacation, my vision of the tasks awaiting me upon my return was of a giant mountain. However, actually sitting down at my desk and taking stock, I’m not in completely bad shape. Albeit, I have a lot to do in the next few weeks – but I think I’ve situated myself in a pretty good position to get things done in time. I guess the guilt of not working made the view-from-vacation seem more dire than it actually was, which is good. Right now it just looks like a couple busy weeks before any lull is in sight, nothing I can’t handle.

Sometimes I get tired of the endless circle that is the debate about the war. If you make one move to criticize anything about the war, be ready for the triad of war defenses: “This is war, bad things happen.” “You’re just a pussy liberal hippy who can only put down this country because real men are out there protecting it.” And finally, “What about all the good that’s come of it?” If you’re a staunch Bushie neo-con, be prepared for some patchily-rank longhair to come at you with “This war is for oil, money, and US interests alone.” “Bush is a megalomaniac, cowboy, look-how-big-my-dick-is, wanna-be Satan bent on world domination.” “People are dying for no reason.” And of course, “Where are the WMD?” It goes around and around. You question the war, you’re an ungrateful hippy; you support the war, you’re a baby-killing, right-wing fanatic.

Can’t we have some middle ground? Where is common sense in it all? Sure war sucks. Good stuff is happening in Iraq, bad stuff is happening in Iraq. Shit, good stuff is happening in my bathroom; occasionally, so does bad stuff. Why does it have to be so black and white? I don’t like war, but I wouldn’t spit on our troops. Where are my common-sense people? People who can have an educated opinion that’s not lunatic rhetoric. Not gun-toting, hippies-would-rather-see-America-raped-by-Islam-than-stand-up-for-themselves conservatives; and not vegan, hybrid-driving, don’t-touch-anything-alive environmentalist liberals. Where are the people who think rationally? Is it just me, or does international media seem to present a lot less polarized or skewed viewpoint than most American media? Here we get 110% foaming-at-the-mouth patriotic God-forcefed imperialism or 110% limp-wristed simpering liberal whining. Yeah OK so I overstated my case a little for the sake of writing… whatever… journalistic license, I think they call it.

As much as I don’t want to recycle unoriginal links… I saw this via MF the other day (although I know BB had it too, and I’m sure other morning-zoo fodder sites like Fark/Fazed will pick it up soon) and it appealed to the voyeur in me or something. Someone noticed that certain webcams all have similar strings in their URLs, and made a simple Google search which pulls up hundreds of unsecured, broadcasting webcams from around the world. On most you can pan and zoom around, and some even have sound. Check it out. And, to add a completely unrelated sentence to this paragraph for the sole purpose of creating a uniform paragraph height that is pleasing to the eye: I only just now gave PF’s “best album of 2003” a shot… and Ben was right, it is damn fine.

I work in a cubicle of shoulder-high grey fabric walls. If the “entrance” (1/4-wall side) of the cube is due-south, my chair faces the north-west corner. On the west wall there is a cabinet where I keep random stuff, including some pictures I’ve taped to the grey metal exterior. A couple of my wife an I in various mountainous locales. Two of my dad in front of the Space Shuttle, those always elicit questions… hey dad, if you’ve got pix of you actually in the shuttle, send ’em my way OK? Three Andy Griffith fridge-magnets, which someone actually once mistook for family pictures. Adam Bomb from the Giant 1st Series, and a Post-It note with an arrow pointing to Adam Bomb from the Giant 1st Series and the words “This is dumb.” On the east wall is my whiteboard, which I try to keep filled with a jumble of math equations and engineering-themed drawings, and three show posters from gigs at the Fillmore (Death Cab, Modest Mouse, and someone I can’t remember right now). Due north (to the right of my monitor) is a shelf filled with books and a Sgt. Pepper standup cutout Kyle gave me back in middle school. Somewhere else there’s a coathook, a couple neon lights, a tangle of wires, spindles of loose burned CDs, and all sorts of crap. I dunno, just thought it might be interesting to paint a picture of where I spend my days. My coal mine, if you will.

In the self-serving statistics portion of today’s entry, I finally found a simple WordPress plugin that outputs the total wordcount for all entries. So far, not counting this entry, I’ve typed 224,278 words since starting this site. Compare that to the 211,763 words of Moby Dick… impressive. While I haven’t yet written my own Bible (1,029,084 words) I have managed to rival the bulk of a literary classic… which must mean my tome instantly qualifies as a literary classic, right? That’s what I thought! You can just mail my Newberry to work, I’ll hang it on my unadorned south 1/4-wall for the world to see. Thanks.

Sometimes I look over how much I write on this thing each day… and I can’t understand it. Where do I get the time? Hahahaha… and… goodnight.

Posted on

mud and weeds

I'll cleave you in two.
Sharaun and I rented Garden State tonight, what an excellent movie. Made me think a lot about some of the times I go back home to Rockledge. Seeing old friends, seeing old places. It was a really, really good movie (at least, to me). I think that Scrubs-guy is my hero… writing and directing such an awesome movie. And great Lord in heaven… Natalie Portman is the single most attractive woman on the planet (both physically and a little bit because I think I could make her be in love with me). Seeing her in that movie only helped to cement her into that position atop my list of “best” women (non-attainable women, mind you). Maybe I liked it so much because it centers on people who are my age, going through what people who are my age go through when they “go home.” The scene with Simon & Garfunkel’s The Only Living Boy In New York nearly made me cry. So good.

A while ago, Sharaun got these neato print-your-own iron-on sheets to make t-shirts with. Today, since I’m taking full advantage of being on vacation and indulging in laziness, I decided to make a couple of shirts. I made one shirt full of alchemy imagery, and one full of Voynich Manuscript imagery. Sharaun said they’re “stupid” and “devil-worshipy.” Yeah, so maybe it’s kinda “dumb” to have t-shirts with stuff from old manuscripts and stuff… dumb indeed. Owell, it’s not the first time I’ve been dumb.

It has been raining on our little house for nearly two days straight, without so much as an hour break. Our half-done backyard is all mud and weeds… the little trees all bare for the winter. Because of the rain, I’ve been hold up inside a lot these past couple days… I actually like it. Back in high school, I’d sometimes get the urge to hide away in my room for an entire day and make “songs.” Fancying myself a brooding artist or something, I dunno, I’d purposely not shower… just wallow in grease and pluck a guitar with the tape running. My “songs” sucked. Most of them are sung in my I’m-afraid-of-singing, cartoony Adam Sandler voice. I made two tapes though… edited down into songs and everything… Sharaun still has one, and I have it on the headphones as I write this. So. Effing. Terrible.

I guess there are a limited number of way to approach a “blog.” You can write about what you did that day, like a running ticker at the bottom of CNN or something. You can write super-introspective, raw, personal-type stuff… riddled with bad poetry and a depressed, lonely air. You can be a political pundit or social activist. I guess, actually… there are probably an infinite number of ways to approach a blog. My way, I think, is haphazard… but the semi-permanent theme is always “make ’em laugh.” I guess that’s what I’m trying to do, overall. Tell stories, pontificate, make fun of myself, whatever.

When I was a kid and we used to take long trips in cars, I’d sometimes pretend I could shoot a laser beam from the tip of my index finger. The laser beam was molten-hot, or razor-sharp, or both, and whatever it fell upon was cut right in two. I’d sit in the seat and “aim” the beam out the window, slicing everything in the car’s moving path to the same horizontal plane. Trees, people, buildings, other cars, whatever… I could slice them right in two along the plane of the moving laser. An odd daydream.

If there’s one thing good about being up at 11:30pm on a Thursday, it’s that, on this particular Thursday, I don’t have to go to work on Friday. If there’s two things good about it, it’s that I don’t have to go to work, and that the garbage truck will come take away our garbage tomorrow morning while I sleep in.

Goodnight.

Posted on

down again

The PC is dead. Long live the PC.
One more day of work and then the road gets Wednesday. I’m looking more and more forward to getting out of town for a while, and to seeing my folks’ new place. Work is at this “apex” right now, an important phase in our project (they always seem to line up with big holidays), and things are crazy. I’m supposed to have the week after Christmas off, but I think I’ll be in a “checking in” mode with work since things are so hectic. Y’know, not quite a 40hr week, but not quite a vacation either. That’s fine, I don’t care. Then I’ll be “working from home,” or “WFH” as we abbreviate it on the whiteboards outside our cubes, the week Sharaun has her knee surgery… so for a while here work will be somewhat non-standard.

Nerd-talk coming up…

Well guys, something hosed my XP install, and my home system was trashed last night (tonight, as I write). It started out innocent enough, I noticed IE was displaying some fonts kinda funkily. Then my desktop icons started changing into icons for stuff that they weren’t… and I couldn’t run “regedit.” Then things slowed down, a buttload of files were missing from the c:\windows and c:\windows\inf directories… I couldn’t repair anything… something was wrooong. I assumed it was a product of installing Linux as a dual-boot, but it turns out that restoring my hard drive (pre-SuSE) resulted in the same problems. So, I reinstalled SP2… but that only seemed to make things worse. Tried to run Recovery Console, but that wouldn’t even launch. So, I reverted back to my last good backup… from sometime in early October. Yes, it was a catastrophic failure, but I’m back up and running and typing this on my dead-an-hour-ago PC, hooray for backups.

So… no Linux. Owell, I couldn’t get the sound working, and SuSE wouldn’t recognize my RAID array. On the plus side, I got to give my backup solution of choice a true test-run; and I’m happy to say it flawlessly restored my hard drive to it’s pre-Linux state. So that’s it. I think this is my last try, honestly. I’m gonna break down and buy Windows XP Pro and go with all freeware apps. Speaking of, I’m way excited for the impending new version of OpenOffice, and the newly released GIMP2.2 (dang I’m a nerd). As for my Windows problems, I don’t know what caused them. It wasn’t Linux… because my pre-Linux backup captured the problems. The only other thing I did was install, and subsequently uninstall, Firefox. It’s the only thing I can figure. Owell.

/end nerd-talk

Today Anthony and Ben and I decided to take our laptops down to the cafeteria and work. When they suggested the idea to me, I agreed immediately, writing “working from cafe, where I can see the sky” on that whiteboard outside my cube, the one we already talked about, remember? Actually, I got a lot done down there… away from the phone and and self-made interruptions.

I saw on a couple pages yesterday that Wal Mart will be offering a low-end cheap laptop that comes pre-installed with the Linspire OS. For $500, this thing reeks of a buy-it-and-install-pirated-XP strategy – which is I’m sure what many will do with the machine.

Sorry the entry was so techy today. Goodnight.

Posted on

to the rescue

Too soon homies, too soon.
Now, I know we just saw the Arcade Fire… but they are coming back in mid-January for a rock-star binge 3-night stand at the Great American Music Hall. I knew about the shows when we saw them at the first show, but just assumed we’d seen them once – so why again so soon? But man, reading all the hype about their LA shows selling out in less than 20min… and hearing that two out of the three nights in January have already sold out, it makes me wanna go see them again. I told Ben that since Suzy didn’t get to go last time, we might be able to use her missing them as an excuse… y’know, we’re doing it for Suzy. Yeah, that’s it. Problem is, that’s a mere week after Sharaun will have had her knee surgery… do I leave her alone to fend for her gimpy-self? Such a dilemma.

Hey, I’m starting this paragraph now! It’s “evaluation” time again at work, I’m sure most big works have something like this each year. Y’know, it’s where you’re compared to your co-workers and ranked for possible raises and promotions and whatnot. Some people hate it, but I have a theory that those people are just sucky workers. I don’t hate it, although I do get kinda tired of writing “reviews” of myself and others. It doesn’t scare me though, like it does some, I guess because I’m confident that I’m a decent worker, and that there are a lot crappier employees than me. The sucky workers who always complain about the process must have something to fear, I figure. The guilt of knowing you suck, or something. I don’t get too worried, I just tire of the long formal process of giving feedback about others, “assessing” myself, and then waiting for what seems an eternity before hearing how the money and promos finally pan out. It’s a necessary evil though, so I always do my best to write good reviews of my co-workers (the ones that don’t suck, at least). So, bring on the review… do your worst corporate-America… I’ve been not-sucking all year in preparation. Rank me, rate me, compare and contrast me, for I am a cubicle dweller known to his company as a number… and I am to be feared.

Speaking of work, got word the other day that it’s likely they’ll be willing to bring Sharaun to Taiwan – providing I stay for a monthish amount of time. So, that set us planning and scheming ways she might wrap a weekend in vacation days or something, so that she could be there for near a week with the minimal amount of time away from the classroom. If the whole affair gets approved, she essentially gets a free ride to Taiwan, and I get a little break from the hotel-room masturbation doldrums. I really hope it works out, I think she’d get a big kick out of the city, and I’ve been there enough now to show her around pretty well. We could hit the night markets, Taipei 101, dig on some real Taiwanese food, and both party in the palatial hotel. I won’t miss home nearly as much if I can take her with me… so I’ve got my fingers crossed.

Tonight, when I asked Sharaun to pause the OC so I could do the dishes, she decided she would take that time to run up to the store and pick up a gift for her “secret santa” at work. She left, I went about my business: putting away clean dishes, putting new ones in the dishwasher, taking the house trash out to the bin and the bin to the curb, and feeding the cat. Somewhere just after taking out the trash, my cellphone rang. It was Sharaun. “Hey babe, do you see my wallet on the kitchen table?” “No… no I don’t,” I replied. She sighed heavily. See folks, this is not the first time she’s gone shopping only to get to the register and realize she forgot her wallet… in fact, it’s not even the first time this week she’s done it. I looked around the house with her on the phone, and finally located the wallet in the guest bathroom. I told her it was here, she sounded sad, and we said goodbyes.

After that, something happened… I can’t explain it… I guess it was like my “good husband” instinct kicked in. I called her back right away and asked where she was. I grabbed her wallet, threw on some flip-flops, and headed out for a wallet-delivery. Running out in my standard after-work ensemble of shorts and a t-shirt, still slightly damp from dish-washing, I got some strange looks from the people bundled up for the cold. At Target we did a little shopping, and overheard a highly-comical conversation between two white teenage Target stockboys, who were restoring order to the rifled rack of Christmas cards, about who’s lyrics were more poetic: 2 Pac or Biggie Smalls’. It was highly entertaining, their recitation of accolades for the two gunned-down gangstas drilled into their heads by MTV’s “Diary” and VH1’s “Behind the Music sounded so serious.

I’m outta here guys, goodnight.