I've been 35 for almost a month now. I'm working at a place with linux-only guys, who think that the best solution is always free software. I feel like the old unix dude with the suspenders who still reads a.s.r. I feel ancient, as I've worked with big iron, or at least medium iron since my first job, and the guys who work in the IT department here are used to virtualization on intel platforms (so, machines considered big for their time, but not SPARCs or RISC machines).

Benny pestered me incessantly about what I wanted for my birthday. I couldn't figure it out; I was (and still kind of am) on the dark side right now, about a 4 on my personal 1-10 depression scale. It doesn't affect my ability to work, but it numbs and dulls my senses. Like I should've been elated to get the job I have now (which is almost perfect), but I wasn't. I couldn't express that level of joy. I'm still not quite there, but I'm digging out of it slowly but surely. Anyway, the day before my birthday, I figured out what it was I wanted. I wanted a guitar and lessons.

We headed to Guitar Center and I found a decent guitar, and we walked out with a guitar, case, book, picks, and an extra set of strings. I called up the music store in Castle Rock (which is where I work, 17 minutes from where we live, just north of Sedalia), and started lessons last week. I suck, but I'm sucking less at it every day. I practice until my fingers are tender, as many days as I can actually get the time, and I figure that has to be good enough.

I don't want to be the next Joni Mitchell, or even Lisa Loeb. I just want to make music, in the way I still take photos because I want people to see what I see in the world.

If anyone is looking for a 6-month gig in the Castle Rock, CO area, let me know. I'm looking for a mini-me, who can help me get the alarms in line. Someone who groks windows servers and javascript, who has a decent grasp of monitoring and alarming (snmp and nms experience would be nice, but not necessary.) I'm currently putting people through the "Chris test" by having my boss interview them first, and looking for specific skills later.

Amazing. Kinect taught a white guy how to dance. Very impressive. :)

http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/presskits/xbox/liveEvent.aspx go to 11:48

I gave my notice for the contracting company. I'm going back into NMS with a passion that can't be denied.

Just 2 more weeks of waking up when other people are coming home from work.

Just 2 more weeks until I can take the dog to the dog park after work, or go to the normal park with her on her leash (we're right near Chatfield, and they have a great dog park, I've been told.

Just. 2. more. weeks.

So Ben (el Husband) is building/has built a CNC router using Ubuntu and a couple of pieces of software, a CAD program (for which he paid), a CNC controller program (which I can't remember if it was free as in beer or not), a tiny motherboard, and a couple of other pieces of actual hardware for which he paid a decent amount of money (but not enough to justify actually buying a mill the size he needs). Motors, threaded rod, etc. If you want to see, he's got a video on youtube linked from the woodshop blog showing it in action.

We've had problems with ubuntu deciding to boot from the usb stick, partially because Ubuntu decided it didn't want to shut down properly, and corrupted libraries, and someone decided that certain useful utilities (say, fsck) didn't need to be statically linked, which made it rather unhappy to work with. Ubuntu has been reinstalled, and he's got a .dmg on his ibook (my old ibook which still runs, and well) that he keeps at the shop, as backup. Because he has to. He was trying to install some packages to make his life a little easier (his BACulator, new version of gcc, some other stuff) yesterday, and the automounter kept complaining about ... something. The error message was Linuxy, by which I mean wordy and not very useful. I got this email tonight:

As a programmer and a unix admin, he gets a little upset.

I have never met a single person who is normal. I have never met a single person who was raised in a normal family. Yet I have met many people who insist, often to such a degree that it causes them a great deal of anxiety and stress, that everyone else, with them being the sole exception, is a normal person who was raised in a normal household.

I am not worried, dismayed, or upset by people who are crazy. We are all crazy. What I can't stand is people who insist on always holding themselves up to some idealized abstraction that they call normal.

Where I am from, being of mixed race is normal. Never going to church is normal. Recycling is normal. In the house I grew up in, worrying if there would be enough money to pay the bills next month was normal. A happy joyous Christmas was normal. My father getting up at 6:30am to fry me a steak for breakfast was normal.

Not knowing if my father was going to live tomorrow.

Normal.

Not knowing who my birth mother is.

Normal.

Cursing her every day for forcing me to live with the consequences and end effects of her behavior?

Normal.

Knowing I have a loving family to go home to, no matter how psychologically messed up or near death they may be on any given day?

Normal.

The things we take for granted, the things we, personally, in our hearts, believe to be universal truths that are beyond any doubt, make up what we consider to be normal.

To live a happier life, do not take for granted any of the positives blessings that you have received in life, no matter how few they may be. Be thankful, truly grateful to the world, for all the good that has come your way. Look at everything good in your life that you take for granted, all the positives that you assume are normal, and love them with all your heart. That which you assume is normal are things many others cannot take for granted. Food on the table. A safe bed to sleep in at night. A shoulder to cry on. A place to run away to when your home has become too crazy. Whatever it is in your life, love it and hold it dear.

Come to the understanding that everything wrong, everything negative in life that you take for granted, does not have to be that way. If you are unloved, do not assume that is normal. Do not take it for granted that no one will ever love you. If you saw your parents addicted to drugs, do not assume that you too must become a drug addict. If you saw your father beat your mother, do not assume that you must beat your wife or be beaten by your husband.

The beautiful thing about normal, is that it can, it does, everyday, change meaning. We define it. You and I define it for ourselves, and for the world as a whole.

Do not strive for normal. Strive for joy. Strive for happiness. Strive for a better future, for yourself, and for all of us. Make that the new normal.

Especially after seeing the commercial they're running now. "Did you know that there are germs everywhere, including on the bottle of liquid soap?" Why yes, Lysol, I did. I knew there are germs on top of the soap dispenser. But you see, after I put my hand on top of the soap dispenser, soap is dispensed into my other hand and I WASH MY HANDS WITH SOAP. Holy crap, people. Unless you've got an automatic faucet, you probably pick more germs up from turning off your faucet than you would from the pump on the soap dispenser.

That word looks wrong. You know when you say or write something multiple times and it just looks wrong? The number '1' looks and sounds wrong at the end of my shift because I say it so much. Whatever. Back to my rant.

Lysol kills germs. That's fine. Except that telling people there are germs on their liquid soap bottle on the spot they use to dispense soap isn't really a useful observation. And really, there didn't need to be a 'fix' for that for consumers. Life wasn't meant to be lived in a sterile operating theater. it was meant to be lived alongside and in opposition to the rest of the living things that live around us.

Gah.

So "that day" is coming up on Sunday. You know, February 14th. We normally don't celebrate with what you would call 'normal' gifts. Ben said he'd have gotten me 'flours' but he didn't want to go to Whole Foods. He was going to get some white, wheat and rye, and some yeast, and it would be a bouquet of flours. I'd have loved that.

But no, what he did was awesomer. He bought me a decent point-n-shoot, which I've been wanting for a while now, and a microwave (because our last one was sold with the house -- it was mounted over the stove), and three paperback novels. I've been wanting to read "Stupid reading" for a little while now, too. You know, the kind of thing you read when you just want to read something. Mysteries, mostly. He got me a Jonathan Kellerman and a Dean Koontz Odd Thomas book, and an Iris Schrier, I believe. Those were the sweetest gifts he could've gotten for me. Not anything sentimental, not something that will be dead in a week. Something useful and something I've been wanting, actually wanting.

I'm not recommending that everyone get their SO a microwave and a camera and three paperbacks. Or that you get them Chick-fil-a and leave it in the car clipped to their badge for them to take to work. But they were the perfect thing, and the most romantic thing (for me) that could happen on or around v-day.

I'm obviously easily impressed, though. :P

This week has kinda sucked for me sleepwise. I was up until 2pm on Sunday and Monday, as we were looking for places to rent and moving into the one we liked. For normal sleepers, this is staying up from 6am one day until 4am the next day. Two days in a row. I got maybe 8 hours sleep between the two days (or I guess three days, if you want to look at it that way).

But!

We got a cute place in Sedalia, CO. It's on a guy's HUUUGE tract of land (he has a polo field on it. and the horses to go with that.) and is a small house, but we've met our neighbors, well.. one of them. She's a spinner and a weaver (which is cool), and she and her husband have 4 rather large dogs. Nulla played a little with them, but she's not allowed off her little cable because, well, she's a shiba. Shibas are notorious for deciding to run and run and run and laugh at you when you call them. She zipped out the door when we were staying with a friend and into the busy road (2 lanes each way with a median) -- Wadsworth around 470 for those of you in/near denver.

We spent Monday digging through boxes looking for the &^#*@ remote to the bed -- It's a sleep number bed, which we've had absolutely zero issues with, which seems to be the exception, as I've seen many many bad reviews online. Our stuff is in storage in the springs, which makes it kind of irritating to get our stuff, but whatever. We won't be taking a whole lot out of storage, as the house is only about 700-ish square feet, but we got Benny's big chair, and the bed, and the dining room table. We picked up a few boxes of kitchen stuff, but this'll be one of those long drawn out things where we pick things up piecemeal. There's not going to be much time to set up housekeeping this week, since I'm working and then we're headed down to the ranch to build skeinwinders on Sunday. It'll be interesting to see if Ben installs the shower before we leave... the landlord bought the shower and is paying Ben to install it, but we'll definitely benefit from that, since what's in the bathroom now is a claw-foot tub with a shower sprayer (and no shower curtain) which makes a HUGE mess. We've been un-synchronized sleepwise because of the moving and the going-to-home-depot-with-the-landlord, and will probably stay un-synched for another week or so while he does things like get firewood from the guy down the road, and working at the ranch. It sucks, but you do what you can.

All I can think tonight is

Well-well look. I already told you: I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?

but maybe that's because I've seen office space too many times.

Part of why I've been away is Ravelry. If you're not a knitter/crocheter/spinner/weaver/dyer, you've probably never heard of it. It's a pretty nifty site, and one of the things it has is forums. In spades, but that's beyond the point. The forums were designed by someone who didn't really participate in forums previously, so they are more or less flat, no nesting comments (but you can get to replied-to posts appearing via magic by clicking). The cool thing about them is that under each post are "buttons". They're labelled "educational" "interesting" "funny" "agree" "disagree" and "love". The concept is that you click on a button for a post and it increments a counter. Only one click per person. This makes it so you don't get a page or three of "me too"s, and you can generally judge the quality of a post by the agree/disagree ratio. Of course, with the buttons, there is the inevitable button wank, which the coder has tried to get around by allowing you to hide individual buttons, or all of the buttons. My problem with this is that I keep looking for buttons on posts on other forums. And blogs. And everywhere else.

It's like moderating, but everyone has points all the time.

So, work. Work is... well, it's like everywhere else I've worked in that they have too many tools that kinda mostly but not all the time work together. It's a 12 hour shift, which mostly sucks, but I'm getting used to it, oddly enough. Something about it not being full daylight makes it somewhat easier to sleep. I'm keeping myself entertained by tracking ticket stats, as we have to announce in a group chat who's taking care of which ticket. The 'newbies' -- me and my 3 same-day-training-started compatriots are kicking the asses of the contractors who were here before. Usually outclassing them by 2-3x. I'm keeping my resume out, and looking for something else, but the pay's decent.

I must be gettin' old if I can't figure out how to write in my own frickin' journal.

I know it's been... almost 3 years since I showed my text here. Let's see if I can catch y'all up.

About the time I stopped journaling, the company for which I was working cracked down on communications about the company. Feb 08 I left the company's warm embrace as they hired a "15-year windows admin" instead of either me or my co-worker who used to work for SUN to be a Solaris admin. The hubster and I were working on our business as the economy spiraled into the toilet. Short sale of the house, bought 70 acres near Rye, CO. Went to Sock Summit as vendors.

Now I'm working as a contractor at a company in north Denver. I'm going to refuse to mention which contract company or which company I'm contracted to, because I'm somewhat unimpressed by the actual work. I will mention that I hate interviewing, and I'm not cheerful enough for Apple retail. Or something. I don't know. I think I failed when I told them my "wow" moment with my mac was when I opened the terminal and found a fully functioning UNIX underneath.

Anyway, working with tech has re-kindles my sheer loathing of poorly implemented and documented tech and I thought this would be a good place to vent my rage somewhat.

XOXO
--the one and only kshgoddess.

About time, i hope his only justification is "someone needed to do it."

Edit: Looks like he wasn't just shooting abortion protesters :(

So what is it with this crown icon Slashdot uses for the "Government" category? Where do I complain or take exception to this? Haven't Slashdot's editors noticed that monarchy is, if not globally deprecated, clearly on it's way out?

My suspicion is that some form of classic tech geek libertarianism is at work here. Libertarians are always trying to demonize government by separating it from the people whom government is of, by, and for these days, in any even loosely representative form. Libertarians tell us that government is the problem, trying to avoid the rather sensitive issue that WE are the government, or at least, are trying to be.

Putting a crown on it does the trick of disconnecting it from accountability, de-personalizing it into something out of our control. It discourages participation. This is the effect libertarians of most stripes want it to have, insisting that democracy should be nothing more than a fad on the way to some individualistic libertopia that looks suspiciously less egalitarian, and thus more like the authoritarian feudalism we left for democracy to begin with. You won't find many libertarians admitting this, however; those who do tend not to be libertarians of any large degree of faith.

But aside from the rhetorical political subtext, the simpler problem is that it's an anachronism. Monarchies dominated in centuries past - but we don't live there anymore.

Which demonstrates how I still don't get the whole message board form of communication. In a conversation, it would have been an obvious a joke. Perhaps I should have used a little winking emoticon, but I find them really stupid.

It's funny - I'm in the technology business, but I'm always behind the curve on the internet and whatever latest and greatest gadgets are out there. Somewhere along the line I've lost my appreciation for gadgets, and new and cool websites hold very little interest for me. Show me a big piece of industrial equipment, on the other hand...