New blog!

You've probably noticed it's been a while since I posted--there's a reason for that.

I've been working on building a new blog on my server, which until now has basically been worthless.

It's just about complete now. I've copied over all my old entries from Blogger, as well as all the old Diary-X entries I managed to salvage after their server went completely to hell.

There are a few things to fix yet--there's a missing image on the main page (it needed to die. It was an animated rotating skull and crossbones GIF) and some "Hi! Look how generic and uncustomized I am!" looking things scattered about. I'll get to these pretty soon.

I'm also not 100% I want to keep the theme. It's cool, but it's very dark.

If you have any comments, recommendations, or hey-this-here-don't-work, drop me a line at marc.teale@gmail.com.

You can find the new blog at www.PoweredByOrphans.net.

Career Day

[This is just more whining. I'd skip it if I were you.]

I am, ostensibly, a network engineer at a small Internet server provider here in Madison. Up until last weekend, I had pretty strange hours: 9:00am-6:00pm on weekends, and 3:00pm-12:00am Monday through Wednesday.

Now, however, I've switched to 3:00pm-12:00am Sunday through Thursday. I was looking forward to it before it happened, because now I actually have a weekend for the first time in well over a year. What I didn't realize is just how boring my job is going to be because of this.

On Saturdays and Sundays, I'd basically get to run the place myself all day. It was actually fun a lot of the time. It made me feel important. As it is now, the only things I'll be doing are what can't be done during the day. I get notes saying "so-and-so will be coming in to do something around 8:00" and "replace this item after 10:00." And that's it. I read through a hundred and fifty emails when I got in today, and the only one that pertained to me was to reboot something after 11:00pm.

I get no projects to work on and nothing to do. I feel isolated from the rest of the staff, (did I mention there's no one else here for 55% of my work week?) and I feel completely useless. The only reason I'm here at all is because the company is trying to go 24/7 to compete with the big guys, and they need someone to fill hours. That's not much for job security. If the economy ever went to hell, I'd be first or second on the chopping block.

I'm going to start keeping an eye out for another job. This is ridiculous.

Censorship

I mentioned in passing in my last post about how "subconscious mental blocks in my vocabulary dissolve after a few whiskey and cokes." I suppose I should I explain that.

I grew up in a tiny town that was, to put it politely, anti-intellectual. A more succinct phrase might be "aggressively ignorant." In the school I attended from kindergarten to 12th grade (all in one building, I might add) there was a pervasive atmosphere of "I will only do as much as I need to do to get by."

Personal expression--quashed.
Creativity--quashed.
Anything that didn't involve tractors, beer, or pot--quashed.

It was even considered effeminate for guys to join the choir. However, that this was not the fault of the teaching staff. I did, and still do, have a great deal of respect for anyone in the teaching profession. I hope to be a teacher myself some day. The student body had a character all its own that they could do nothing to change.

Anyway, I'm trying to set the stage for the rest of this story. I hope you have some inkling of how intellectually repressive my hometown was.

When I was in elementary school, I did everything I could to prove to everyone just how much smarter I was than they were. While everyone else was reading 100-page novels for class, I read 1000-page epics on my own. I excelled at everything academic I laid my hands on, and I rubbed it in everyone's face--This is how much smarter I am than you. This is how much better I am than you.

As you may have guessed, this behavior never won me any friends. Quite the opposite: most of my childhood was very, very lonely. It wasn't uncommon for entire summer vacations to go by without me doing anything with someone my age. I never made any real friends until high school.

Somewhere around middle school age, I finally realized that my behavior was insulting to others, and that they didn't want to be my friend because of the way I behaved towards them. How did this escape me for so long? To this day I believe that I am to some extent, socially retarded. (You'll excuse the connotations of the word "retarded." I mean it in its denotative sense.) I suppose you could call it a mild case of Asperger's syndrome. I simply didn't understand the rules of social interaction. In a lot of ways, I still don't.

When this finally dawned on me, I did everything I could to hide my intellect. Like every adolescent, I just wanted to fit in. To be one of the crowd. To be liked.

If there's a moment that sums this up better than any other, it's this: I was in the school library with two classmates. I don't remember the context, but I do remember saying something similar to:

"Oh, man, I thought he was going to have an aneurysm!"

To a pair of blank, hostile stares.

"...it's like a heart attack." I muttered apologetically. Aneurysms aren't like heart attacks, obviously, but the point is that I was attempting to once again show off my brilliance by using a big word. I'm absolutely certain that my classmates didn't know the definition of aneurysm, much less that I was wrong.

"Then why didn't you just say heart attack?" One classmate replied, contemptuously.

I have no idea what I said next, but I can say for certain that I was abashed and humiliated. From that point on, I did my best to muzzle myself and only use words that I knew virtually everyone would understand.

Sadly, it's been so long since I began doing this that it's no longer a conscious decision to restrict myself. The only time I feel I fully express myself is after I've had a few drinks. The subconscious filter I've placed upon myself is apparently alcohol soluble... it dissolves in the booze flowing through my blood, leaving me able to write and speak without the impositions of a restricted vocabulary.

I firmly believe that all of the best writing I've ever done has been done in the interim between the first sip of booze and the brink of drunken incoherency. When I wrote about my fight at Turner Hall (an entry now lost to history, fuck-you-very-much Diary-X.com) I made a point of drinking while I was writing. I knew that my description would be a pale, ineffective shadow of the events unless I drank as I wrote.

The words, quite simply, flowed halfway into my first Canadian Club and Coke. It was some of the best writing I ever did, and I was damn proud of it. I was deeply hurt when it was lost along with my original blog.

I can feel bits of my original speech seeping back into me as the years go by. I hope eventually I'll be able to use sober what I can now only access while drinking.

Starting over (again)

If any of you used to read my Diary-X blog, you'd know that I used to blog significantly more frequently, and my posts were more... significant. Virtually everything I've written in this miserable abortion of a blog have been tidbits of meaningless crap. Even I don't want to read most of what I've written.

There are a few reasons for this, ordered for you in a lovely and totally unnecessary list:

• I don't really have much to write about. My life is increasingly banal. Describing how I bought and installed an under-counter light above the kitchen sink to disinterested third parties--that would be you--seems rather pointless.


• I spend way too much time watching TV, and nowhere near enough time reading. Seriously. It's all I do, and it's really sad. I decided tonight that if something isn't worth recording on my DVR, why waste time watching it? The more I read, the more I want to write. It's already the eighth, and I don't think I've picked up a book yet this year.


• I've been reticent about being overly personal in my posts. Blogs have become the essential means of saying either "Hey world, look how fucking great I am," or "I have so much pain to unload on the world. Thank god I have my blog to vent in... or I'd need to go cut myself while listening to Dashboard."
  
  I've been shying away from these stereotypes for quite some time, though I don't really know why. On my last blog, I let total strangers see my psyche laid bare on the asphalt. I think the reason I was so comfortable there was because I knew no one was reading it. When I belatedly found I had a small audience, I felt the need to censor myself. Well, fuck it. If I've got something to say, I'll say it. I'm tired of pulling punches. From now on, I write for me, and any readers are incidental.


• Most of the work I take pride in is unintelligible and uninteresting to readers. When I'm at work, I spend my time doing seriously technical work. A good deal of it is in-depth enough that even Microsoft Mikey doesn't know what the hell I'm talking about.
  
  I could easily post an entry proudly describing how I put third party firmware on a WRT54G, hacked it to act as a wireless bridge with 128-bit WEP encryption, had issues with the ARP proxying not working when I tried to netboot a headless FreeBSD client--but who's going to understand that?


• I spend less time drinking alone. This is a good thing, obviously. Unfortunately, I've always done my best writing while half in the bag. The words flow smoothly and the subconscious mental blocks in my vocabulary dissolve after a few whiskey and cokes.


• I have very few friends in Madison. Or anywhere, for that matter. I've always had a hard time making and keeping friends. No friends means I spend most of my time in my apartment, means I spend too much time watching TV, means I do nothing and have nothing to talk about.


• I've spent too much time making this list. What the hell was I talking about when I started this whining?
  
  :: scrolls up ::
  
  Oh, right. Explaining why my posts have been crap for the last year.

So I'm starting over. A fresh start for a new year. I'm going to blog more often, about whatever the hell I feel like that day, and just write because I want to write.

I hope you'll continue to read. Chances are pretty good that my quality and quantity will increase in the near future. I appreciate people reading my writing, but that doesn't mean I'm going to stop myself from saying things you may find offensive.

Fuck Yeah Seagate!

I bought a Seagate 120GB drive a while ago from Best Buy. It was on special for $50, and the drive in my current workstation is slowly dying. I figured it was time to upgrade.

Unfortunately, the drive was b0rked when I got it. I mailed it off to Seagate for repairs, and lo and behold, I received a new drive in the mail today--a 160GB drive. I didn't even have to waste any time talking to a "technician" in India. I told them my drive was fucked, they believed me, and I got a better drive in exchange a few weeks later.

Therefore the headline: Fuck Yeah Seagate!