Fear and Loathing in Wisconsin

November 30, 2009

2009-12-01T01:27:00.003-06:00

I am depressed. I have no idea what I'm doing in Seattle, or in general. When I made the plans to come here, I was half-mad with grief after Megan moved out. I'd been planning to restart our relationship once I got here, but things haven't worked out that way.

For reasons I don't really understand, Megan volunteered to fly out to Madison, then help me drive to Seattle. The night I went to pick her up, I was physically crushed by stress and weariness. I was so exhausted that the only joy I felt in waiting for her arrival came in the form of gratitude for any excuse to stop packing.

When she walked out of the terminal, bag in hand, she looked as haggard as I felt. Probably selfishly, I had expected that she'd have done her makeup, or her hair, or something to make herself look good. She was wearing the shapeless brown polo required for her massage clinic hours and no makeup. As she walked towards my car, not smiling, I felt only a vague worry that I was too dangerously exhausted to drive back to the empty apartment we used to share. Looking back now, it was in that moment that I realized that our romantic relationship was gone forever.

We made the drive together, which was uneventful and extremely expensive. I've been here for nearly a month now. I have a storage locker, a borrowed bedroom, no job, and very little else. I spent two hours on Monster today without finding a single job I was qualified for, or hadn't already applied to. The rest of the day was spent obsessively searching for an SD card reader I've lost, sharing a joyless meal with my roommates/hosts where the only brief topic of conversation was the lunatic who murdered some cops yesterday, and lying on the floor staring at the ceiling fan blades.

At the moment, I'm listening to Elliott Smith's Needle in the Hay. It's part of my oh-so-pleasant depression mix. I've been working on perfecting it tonight.

August 26, 2009

2009-08-26T10:50:00.005-05:00

I finished the online weekly claims form for Unemployment, and it informed me that since I'd quit my job, I needed to call and talk to an actual human being. Sighing with annoyance, I did so.

"Unemployment," A tired voice said. "Can I have your social security number, please?"

I rattled it off.

"I'm sorry, sir," The voice said, now clearly annoyed. "There's no record of a claim for you for this week."

I looked more carefully at the form telling me to call, and noticed that it said to wait two or three hours before doing so. Apparently it takes a while for data from the online system to trickle into the phone operators' system. I explained my error, and said I would call back in a few hours.

"Don't bother," said the voice. "It's a Monday, and the system is really slow because of all the claims coming in. I wouldn't try back until tomorrow if I were you."

I did so. This time, the "unemployment specialist" had my info available to her. I explained my reasons for quitting my job--bounced and missing paychecks--and she dully informed me that someone would get back to me within twenty-one days.

"Ok, thank you." I said, about to end the phone call. "...did you say twenty-one days?!"

"Yes, sir." She responded, betraying only the barest trace of interest in the conversation. "Someone will call you, or you will receive a letter in the mail."

Inwardly viciously cursing, I again thanked her and got off the line.

Twenty-one days, I thought. And that's not even until I get paid. That's when someone will begin investigating my claim.

That was two weeks ago, yesterday. My only response from unemployment thus far has been automated responses from the online claims system. I've continued to file for benefits in the interim, and each letter I receive in the mail informs me that my benefits are being held pending the results of the investigation.

Meanwhile, my savings are dwindling. I'm spending as little money as possible, but I still have bills to pay. My former employer owes me more than two thousand dollars, and shows absolutely no signs that she'll be giving it to me without a lawsuit.

I'm to the point that I'm selling things I don't need to make some extra cash. Megan, a friend, and I had a garage sale on Saturday, where I made about a hundred dollars. I sold a Wii game yesterday for a fiver at PrePlayed, and I sold a box of books to Half Price Books this morning for another fifteen. I've been searching through closets and boxes to find things of value I don't mind parting with, but I'm starting to run low on them.

August 16, 2009

2009-08-16T14:06:00.004-05:00

I'd just finished reading The Dead Zone by Stephen King. I got up from my bed, which is the only piece of furniture in the apartment comfortable enough for me to read in, and walked into the living room.

Even though I knew Megan had gone to watch movies at a friend's house a few hours ago, I thought she was sitting at the computer in the nook we use as an office. I felt a shock when I realized the chair was empty. Her half-full water glass was still sitting on the desk, in the same place she'd forgotten another yesterday. I sighed with annoyance and picked it up. If left to sit long enough, one of the cats will stick its head in the glass to drink the rest of the water, then shatter the glass on the floor when it's done.

I dumped in the kitchen sink, and a sudden wave of tears blinded me. It had nothing to do with the the melancholy ending of the book I'd just finished. The ending is moderately sad, and the main character dies, but I never really identified with him enough to really care.

Very soon, I'm going to see Megan's shadow hundred ways every day. The ugly pink makeup case hanging from the towel bar that I've always hated, missing. Her chaise lounge gone from the living room and replaced with my ugly, worn recliner. Her friendly, funny cat no longer leaning against me, watching her adoringly. No more quiet Sunday breakfasts sitting across from each other at the greasy spoon down the street, where the food is cheap and the coffee is terrible. Even the damned half-empty glasses of water I keep reminding her not to leave out.

She's moving to Seattle next month.

I sat down at the computer desk and began to cry. The last time I cried hard was when Megan and I "broke up" nearly two years ago. I say "broke up" because our relationship has never become just "friends" or "roommates." She's still my best friend. I still kiss her goodbye and give her a backrub when she's feeling sore. I still ask her how her day was while we make dinner together. We get drunk together and laugh at bad zombie movies.

I don't think I'm crazy for still thinking of her as my girlfriend. For brevity's sake, I'll sometimes refer to her as such with people I don't know very well, rather than waste time explaining things. "Roommate" is someone you split the rent with, and it doesn't encompass anything close to how much she means to me. It is, however, the way she introduces me to people. I don't think she's noticed that I wince slightly every time she does it. Maybe she has, and that ought to be a clue for me.

The crying became sobbing... and I can't even remember the last time I did that. I put my head down between my elbows and let my tears drip down my face and onto the desk.

"What am I going to do if I lose her?" I thought desperately.

"You already did, idiot." An angry part of my mind replied. "A long time ago. You broke up with her, remember? It's been years. You think she'll take you back now? Is that even what you want? Would that ever even work?!"

I cried for a few minutes, hoping that she would surprise me by coming home early and seeing me looking like hell. I was equally horrified by the idea.

Does she love me? Do I love her? I don't know. They're questions I've been afraid to ask, things I'm not sure if I can handle. I do know that the thought of having most of a continent between us is more than I can take.

She moved across the country for me once, leaving behind her friends, family, and job. It's time that I did the same thing for her. I don't know if it will work out. But I know I have to try.

If you'll excuse me, I need to send a few hundred resumés out to the Seattle area.

August 11, 2009

2009-08-11T10:32:00.004-05:00

I quit my job on Wednesday. I don't feel that I had any choice.

My paycheck from July 10th bounced. Because I deposit my checks at ATMs instead of actually going to a bank, it takes nine days between an ATM deposit and the bank yanking the money back out of my account.

I didn't notice that my paycheck had bounced until several days after it happened. At the same time, I realized I hadn't gotten paid the day before. Until then, I'd had my weeks mixed up, and thought I was getting paid next week.

A coworker and I showed up at the office the next day to confront the owner, who was in on a Sunday for some reason. My coworker hadn't received his paycheck either--in fact, no one had. Instead, the owner had given him a $20 bill and said she hoped it would tide him over for the weekend.

She had been expecting my coworker, but not me. This was intentional, we were trying to throw her off guard and outnumber her. I showed her the NSF paycheck the bank had mailed me and demanded a replacement. She spent some time lying to us, which we tolerated with blank, unconvinced stares. After she seemed to finish, I told her that I didn't care why my checks were bouncing. She reprinted my previous paycheck plus an additional $25 to cover bank fees for the returned check, my missed paycheck from the previous Friday, and my coworker's missed paycheck. Both were post-dated for the following day, and she warned us not to deposit them before then because the funds wouldn't be in the account yet. We left without thanking her.

On the way back to my car, my coworker said that he was never coming back. I couldn't blame him. If it had been possible, I would never have gone back either. But unfortunately, in order to get back on full unemployment benefits I needed iron-clad proof that I was fully justified in quitting. There was still a small chance that these checks would clear. If they did, I'd be unemployed without any income whatsoever. I had no choice but to return to work the following Monday.

I deposited my checks at the ATM down the street from my apartment the next morning. I called my now-former coworker to see if he'd had any luck cashing his check--he'd first brought it to an Associated Bank, the bank NobleLogic uses, and they refused to cash it because of insufficient funds. He eventually managed to cash it at Wal-Mart. If his check was no good, my checks were almost certainly rubber, too. Still, I had no proof. I finished out the week.

By this point, the office had all the vitality and energy of three-day-old roadkill. Everyone's paychecks had either bounced or never arrived at all, and we knew we were going to be out of a job very, very soon. We grudgingly worked, expecting that we wouldn't be paid for our efforts.

Nine days went by. Late on Wednesday afternoon, I performed a now-daily ritual of logging in to my online banking account to see if my checks had bounced yet. They had. I was now fully justified in quitting. I was free. Poor, angry, and cheated... but free. I packed up the few belongings from my office I hadn't already taken home, and left.

June 9, 2009

2009-06-09T11:54:00.003-05:00

Correction to my last post... I've gone on partial unemployment because my employer can't afford to pay me what I'm worth. I missed a few hours of work two weeks ago because of Memorial Day, which caused some kind of snafu relating to how much they're willing to pay me for the week. I had to call to speak to a claims representative in order to iron out the details.

It took me 33 calls before I could even be placed on hold. Their system is so overburdened with claimants they don't even have room in the queue for everyone trying to call in. It took me 15 minutes on hold to find out that they don't have an answer for me, and that someone will call me back in a few days.

I'm still looking for a new job, this time in Seattle.

April 2, 2009

2009-04-02T17:06:00.003-05:00

"Look at that," Megan said, nodding towards the TV. "Those used to be for little brown children."

I looked up from my laptop to see the end of a commercial soliciting donations for an aid organization--one that works entirely within the United States, providing food and aid for to Americans.

This was yet another ominous first for me. Living in the richest nation on the planet, I never suspected for a moment I'd see commercials entreating me to "Feed the Virginians... before it's too late." That's not a direct quote--I didn't see the entire ad--but it was disquieting nonetheless.

It's been nearly a month since my last post, mostly because there have been glimmers of hope on the horizon. The Dow is over 8,000 today, and I got a job three weeks ago.

It pays significantly less than my last job and (at the moment) has zero benefits. I'm going to start looking for another job in the near future. At the moment, I'm somewhat pleased to be off of unemployment and slowly paying up the taxes I accrued. Since taxes aren't automatically deducted from unemployment payments, it's easy to rack up significant taxes in a hurry.

As for the "somewhat pleased" bit--the pay at my new job is insultingly low. The position is good for my career since I'm a manager, but I was making more money sitting on my ass.

A post on The Consumerist today offered a simple solution to reduce monthly bills--ask. So many consumers are dropping services that providers are willing to make a deal to keep a client.

With nothing to lose, I called Charter Cable and went straight to the disconnection department. I had no intention of dropping service, but they would have the best deals available to offer customers. A few minutes later, I'd dropped my bill by $20 a month with no reduction in service. I tried AT&T as well. They were willing to drop my bill by $10 a month, but I would have lost a lot of minutes from my plan. It wasn't worth the tradeoff.

Megan and I tried to go to brew pub on the west side of town on Sunday to get a beer and some food. Every time we've gone in, it's been half-full. This time, it was out of business.

The first casualty of the depression: pride.

2009-03-01T21:29:00.005-06:00

Megan, a friend, and I were at a coffee hangout down the street from our apartment today, and I saw the following sign.

The text of the sign reads:

Help Escape during this time of Economic Crisis
Invest in the Community by Donating to Escape
Checks can be written to: Escape Java Joint

Never in my life have I seen a business openly beg for donations to stay afloat. There were definitely fewer customers around, but I think that's in part due to their new wifi policy: when you buy something, you can get a password good for two hours of wifi use. Normally, there's a room full of people on laptops. Today, only a couple. It's most likely that the people not there were the ones who weren't buying anything anyhow, but it was still a significant decrease.

There are four hip, urban coffee shops within a few blocks of my apartment. This economy can't support all of them. I'm really hoping that if someone goes, it's the place on the corner, Mother Fool's. It's Vegan, so all their bakery is made without dairy (even though you can get cream for your coffee...) and tastes horrible. Their scones are mealy paste. I rarely carry cash, and they don't take credit cards. This means that nine times out of ten I can't buy anything from them anyway. No credit cards? Seriously? What is this, 1974?

After we left Escape, Megan and her friend walked down the street to a great little restaurant called Bab's French Quarter Kitchen. They were planning to get a snack and have a couple beers. I ducked back into the apartment so Megan could have some "girl time" with her friend--but mostly because I wasn't hungry.

A few minutes after I'd taken off my shoes and jacket, Megan called my phone. Bab's was closing at 3pm today... and never opening again. If I wanted anything off their menu, this was the last time I'd ever be able to get it. Their pastalaya, a jambalaya made with pasta, was delicious. I figured I could get it to go and have it for lunch tomorrow one more time.

I hit the street again, and walked in and sat down. By the time I got there, the kitchen had closed.

Old blog, new tricks

2009-02-27T21:59:00.006-06:00

Well, I guess I'll welcome myself back to this old Blogspot account. It's been years since I posted here. Since I had my own server and domain at my old job, so I had no use for this account.

As some of you may know, I was fired the Friday after Obama's inauguration. I find it ironic that just as things were looking up for the United States, things went to hell for me.

I'm hoping to keep this blog sort of quiet, and have a different focus for it. I'm not planning to send links to anyone, and I'm turning off commenting. I'm sure some people will find it, and that's fine. I think I'm writing this for my children or grandchildren, which is why I'll refer to events that are in the constantly in the news as if they're obscure. When you read, imagine you've picked up a dusty, moldering book in your grandparents' attic, and you learn something about your granddad's life you'd never guessed at. My main purpose is going to be a first-person, personal documentation of America's decline and the beginning of the second great depression.

Right now, the jury's still out on the depression. A massive, $700 billion stimulus package was passed a few weeks ago that's supposed to lift us out of this "recession" by the end of 2010. I doubt it will work. All the signs point heavily to the public digging in deep, and preparing for the worst.

Personally, I've never seen anything remotely like this. Massive, nationwide chain stores--the sort of businesses that seem far too large to die--are shutting down operations and liquidating their inventories. Driving down one of the main streets here in Madison, East Washington Avenue, is shocking. Block after block of closed businesses, space for rent, and boarded up windows. I heard on the radio this morning that Wisconsin's unemployment rate has shot up to 7.6%. A year ago, it was 4.9%. Everyday the news gets worse. Today, the Dow closed at its lowest since 1997.

I grew up during the Clinton 90's, which were a boom time. I saw the dot com bust, but it was a blip, and anyone with half a brain could see it coming. This... this is terrifying. I have no idea where the bottom could be. I don't think anyone does.

As for my statement about America's decline... the facts are plain. People like to scream that America is number one, but we haven't been anywhere close for decades.

In Adult literacy, the US is tied for 17th place with (among others) Guyana. Moldova is beating us. (source)
We are 45th in the world for life expectancy, trailing Macau and Andorra--two countries I've never heard of because they were never mentioned in my lousy public school education. (source)
As of Darwin's 200th birthday (February 12th, 2009) only 39% of Americans believed in evolution. (source)
Our infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births is 6.3. Countries with better rates: South Korea. Cuba. Slovenia. Malta. (source)
We are by a very wide margin the world's greatest debtor nation.
The big three auto manufacturers, once the greatest in the world, are now on the brink of bankruptcy. They recently went to Washington to beg for enough money to keep making cars no one wants. We can't even compete in a market we created.
We are embroiled in two pointless wars which we cannot, or will not, extricate ourselves from. They are a massive waste of money and human life. Because medical technology has managed to save far more soldiers in this war than in previous ones, the cost of their benefits and long-term care will be staggering.
The list goes on and on. I'll post more as I think of them, and as they occur.

We're still the world's economic and military superpower, but this will not be another American century. The 21st century will be the Chinese century, or (more optimistically) an international century, powered by the growth of regional coalitions like the European Union. Our decline will mirror the Roman Empire's. Slow, steady, and brick by brick, the American empire will be reduced to a memory.

That's enough for now. This idea has been brewing for a while, and the list of depression symptoms is long and growing daily. I'll have plenty to write about.

New blog!

2007-01-29T20:39:00.000-06:00

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

2007-01-14T21:58:00.000-06:00

[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

2007-01-11T00:53:00.000-06:00

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)

2007-01-08T01:13:00.000-06:00

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!

2007-01-03T12:33:00.000-06:00

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!

An Open Challenge to Meh

2006-12-19T01:41:00.000-06:00

There's been a rise in graffiti in Madison over the last few years--nothing particularly serious, just some taggers trying to impress people by writing their pseudonyms all over town.

To be honest, it all looks like shit. I haven't seen anything anywhere in this town that was inspired by anything but four cans of Red Bull and having borrowed Dad's minivan.

Meh has scrawled his tag all over town in a juvenile attempt to make a name for himself. Well, Meh, I've seen your "work"--and it sucks. Simply writing your name all over everything doesn't make you an underground artist, it just makes you a vandal. Here's a chance to redeem yourself.

I hate my car. It's a piece of shit, and it looks the part. So here's my challenge: prove you're not some useless little punk shit by actually making something people want to look at. My car is an open canvas, waiting for you to make your mark.

I drive a black '93 Ford Tempo, and it's parked on or near the 1000 block of Willy St just about every night. Go ahead, do anything you want with it--so long as I can still see through the windows.

I fucking dare you.

Going for a reaction

2006-12-11T20:43:00.000-06:00

I printed out the picture below and put it up in my cube at work. I'm hoping it will offend someone. (Clicky pop)

As a follow up, I haven't seen Barefoot Broom Lady since I talked with her a few weeks ago. I'm hoping she's someplace warm.

Barefoot Broom Lady

2006-12-01T21:41:00.000-06:00

We have a number of interesting characters in our new neighborhood... so far Megan and I have discovered Barefoot Broom Lady and Drunken Patrick. Drunken Patrick will eventually get his own post, but Barefoot Broom Lady is today's subject.

Barefoot Broom Lady is a woman who wanders the Willy Street neighborhood with a broom tucked under her arm and (as you may have already guessed) wears no shoes. She seems to be a neighborhood fixture. I saw her the first day I was walking around the area looking for apartments for rent, and many times afterward. Megan has run into her into her at the laundromat, and dutifully reported to me that she smells bad.

As I was walked to the hardware store today, I saw her industriously shoveling snow in front of Grandpa's Gun Shop. (Seriously. There's a store called "Grandpa's Gun Shop.") As I approached, I couldn't help but stare directly at her feet. It was well below freezing, but she was still barefoot. I couldn't believe it. She was either oblivious to the pain or the nerves in her foot had already been destroyed by frostbite.

I stared directly at her feet as I walked by--amazingly, her feet didn't appear to be frostbitten. Even after being outdoors presumably all day, her feet were of normal flesh tone. There was none of the blue-black coloring that one would expect from severe frostbite. The toenail of her right big toe was pure black and her toenails needed a trim--but other than that, her feet looked relatively normal.

I went into Ace and purchased two window insulation kits. On the way back, I started to feel guilty about not offering to help her. After all, the St. Vincent de Paul was on my way home, and they have shoes for sale. I could spend 15 minutes and $10 and she'd be far better off for it. What if her feet got so severely frostbitten that they had to be amputated? Could I live with myself knowing I could have prevented that?

The other side of my brain argued back. It's been shown by feral children that the human body is more than capable of dealing with such harsh temperatures with no protection. Temperature tolerances are learned, not inborn. Buddhist monks spend frigid nights meditating high in the Himalayas, clothed in only a thin robe. They generate such incredible internal heat that they actually melt the ice and snow that they sit on. Maybe this woman is crazy or focused enough that she can do the same. So I don't need to help her... I can just take the easy way out, avoid her, and let her be. She's fine.

Bullshit. She's a nutter, and she needs some kind of help.

Dammit.

I continued walking down the street, and found her not far down the way shoveling the walk for the Willy St. Coop grocery store. Her familiar broom rode atop a snow shovel as she pushed the slush from the parking lot crosswalk. Never having had a skill for diplomacy or tact, I came straight out with it.

"Aren't your feet cold?" I asked, trying to sound nonchalant.

"You only lose a third of the heat through the tops of your feet than you do through your head." She replied immediately.

I was momentarily taken aback--this was absolutely true. I wasn't sure what I had been expecting in response, but it certainly wasn't a reasonable scientific fact. Nevertheless, I sojourned on.

"Ok," I said, still failing to sound casual, "How come you're not wearing any shoes?"

"Oh, I can't stand the way that sweat freezes between the toes. Not worth it."

"Oh." I replied, unsure how to respond. Fortunately, she continued the thread of the conversation for me.

"I stopped wearing shoes in protest of strip searches," She continued, as though we were merely discussing the weather. "The shoes are the first thing they make you take off when they strip search you."

I nodded dumbly, wholly unprepared for the conversation I was now engaged in. I suspect my mouth hung agape. It's not that she was terribly nonsensical... BBL was surprisingly lucid and approachable for a barefoot homeless person of debatable sanity. Quite simply, I'm not a good conversationalist, and I'm easily confused when the topic turns to something I'm utterly at a loss to discuss. Among these topics are first-hand accounts of strip searches.

"I don't think it's right that anyone should have the right to strip you naked that you're not married to."

My brain, by this point, had stopped processing any new data. As much as I may have wanted to listen to anything she was saying, it was simply rejected outright in favor of desperately churning over the question What the fuck can I possibly say in response to this?

After she concluded her statements on the the evils of strip searches, I nodded in agreement with... whatever she had just said.

My mouth forged ahead where my brain was still unready to go.

"So... you don't want shoes?" I asked, stupidly. This was really the crux of my conversation with her. If she said yes, we'd go to St. Vinnie's and I'd buy her some shoes, or boots, or slippers, or... something. Whatever her crazy broom-toting heart desired. If she said no, I could walk away with my conscience assuaged, knowing that she didn't want shoes and that no amount of rational arguments could persuade her otherwise.

I have no recollection whatsoever of what she said in response to my question. None. I believe my brain was still attempting to formulate some sort of cogent response to the topic of strip searches, because it was certainly making no attempt to record whatever it was that she said next.

Since I immediately turned and walked back down the street towards my apartment, I can only assume that her response was in the negative, and that she neither desired nor missed shoes.

Even so, the next time I see her on the street I want to offer her a pair of shoes on me at St. Vinnie's. I don't want her to lose her feet because I didn't know how to offer to buy her some footwear.

Church Signs

2006-11-17T01:19:00.000-06:00

Anyone else seen this? The Church Sign Generator?

I think I might have unintentionally stolen this from The Simpsons. It seems familiar for some reason.

This is cheap, but funny...

No comment.

First, apologies to Danulai, who is a devout Catholic. Then apologies to everyone else for referring to an obscure practice of the Catholic church dating back to the middle ages.

Yeah... I don't know.

I had a few other ideas I had and rejected...
"Now with 50% more Jesus!"
"Does this look infected to you?"
"Buy one baptism, get your next funeral free."

You'll notice I steered clear of child molestation jokes. They're not funny. Stop making them.

Dear Sony

2006-11-15T13:19:00.000-06:00

Dear Sony,

It's over.

I used to be so loyal to you--the first boom box I ever got was an inexpensive Sony cassette player that worked beautifully from day 1, until I accidentally dropped it down a flight of stairs. My first pair of headphones were equally inexpensive, and did their job beautifully. I was hooked. I was impressed by the quality of even the cheapest of your equipment. I swore by you, and would buy from you whenever I could. Even if your stuff was a little more expensive, I'd buy it because, hey--it was you. I trusted you. It was worth the extra 10-20% in the price.

Then I bought a Sony Clie PDA from you. It cost $40 more than an equivalent Palm Inc. model, but it was worth it, because, hey--it's was you. Or so I thought. In the first few months of ownership, I ran into completely random lockups that would erase every bit of data... taking with it my appointments, class assignments, and other irretrievable bits of data. The Memory Stick format it takes cost 20% more than any other memory card on the market because you try to force your customers to use only your proprietary formats. After six months, the screen backlight failed completely and I had to wait two weeks for you to replace it. While it was covered under a recall and was free to me, that's really no excuse for poor manufacturing in the first place.

I was losing my faith in you.

Then, not too long ago, under the guise of digital rights management, you put rootkit software on your music CDs--installing hidden backdoor software on the computers of anyone who inserted your music into their computer. My reaction--and a lot of other people--was what the fuck were you thinking?! Your rootkit is so malicious that Microsoft released software to remove it. Otherwise, removal would nuke the entire Windows installation and completely trash the operating system.

How could you betray my trust like that? It's like you stopped respecting me.

I'm sure you've heard about the Apple and Dell laptops using your batteries that have been banned from flights... because of the piffling fact that several of them have burst into flame. The battery recall is causing you to hemorrhage money so terribly that the the only profitable bit of your business is your Playstation division, which you seem determined to sodomize with the PS3.

You're tying to force the Blu-Ray video format on me with the PS3. If you hadn't figured it out when Betamax, Memory Stick, and the PSP's UMD format all died pathetic whimpering deaths in the marketplace, no one is interested in your proprietary media formats. Demanding that Blu-Ray be put into the PS3 has increased the price well out of the reach of the casual gamer, and has limited production so much that it will be mostly unavailable for the holiday season. $499 for the non-upgradable base model? $599 for the premium model? Are you fucking insane?! No thanks. Nintendo and Microsoft have been trying to get my attention for years now, and I have to say that I'm finally going to give them their chance. I can get a Nintendo Wii and an Xbox 360 for the price of one of your premium PS3s.

Look, Sony, it was great for a while. I really loved you for a long time, but you've just got way too many problems. I can't see myself being with you now or ever again. You need to get your affairs in order, or you're headed for an early death. Maybe Microsoft will take you when that happens, I don't know. Frankly, I don't care any more. I just hope that when you hit rock bottom, you'll start working for the people who care for you, instead of forcing what you want on them.

Sincerely,
Marc

Marriage in Catholicism

2006-10-20T23:52:00.000-05:00

While driving back from dropping off a carload of stuff at the new apartment, I caught a news report on the top of the hour: A Kenyan Archbishop by the name of Milingo was excommunicated for getting married, and ordaining other married men as bishops without papal authority. (Article)

For those of you who weren't brought up Catholic, excommunication is a sort of religious censure imposed by the church. Until and unless the excommunicated are willing to admit their guilt and repent, they are not permitted to take part in any sacrament. If the excommunicant is unwilling to repent, this essentially condemns them to hell. The inability to attend confession = stains on the soul at death = eternal damnation. It was used as a weapon during the Middle Ages in order to exact obedience from those who would challenge the authority of the church. If a king dared to disobey, entire countries could be excommunicated--the entirety of Scotland has been excommunicated on more than one occasion. To me, this has always seemed like man attempting to impose his will upon God, and completely illegitimate.

This news story set off alarm bells in my head, particularly after hearing the punishment meted out to the priest who admitted to fondling former Representative Mark Foley in the 1960s. The priest, Anthony Mercieca, has been banned from the priesthood, stripped of the ability to celebrate Mass, and may no longer wear vestments... and that's it. (Article)

Where's the eternal damnation for this asshole? How can anyone justify this as a reasonable course of action? Let's break this down: if you ordain a bishop without the Pope's permission, because you believe priests should be permitted to take part in one of Catholicism's seven sacraments--eternal damnation. Fuck a thirteen-year-old boy--lose the robes and you're all good.

To be fair, either Milingo or Mercieca could be redeemed in the eyes of the church by admitting their guilt and repenting. However, I don't think that the punishments fit either of the crimes presented here.

By allowing priests beneath him to marry, Milingo is attempting to infuse new life into the waning Catholic priesthood. Yes, he may be working against Papal authority, but he's doing what he believes to be best for the religion as a whole. Mercieca, on the other hand, used his role as a trusted member of the clergy to exploit and sexually abuse at least one child. If that doesn't merit damnation, I don't know what does.

Don't try to convince me of Papal infallibility in this case--I'm a Buddhist, and I don't believe for a second that the Dalai Lama has never done anything he's later regretted. You show me a man who refuses to admit he's ever made a mistake, and I'll show you George W. Bush.

All in all, the hypocrisy of these cases reek. To paraphrase Archbishop Milingo (from a different article), something is wrong in the Catholic church.

Johnny Cash - Hurt

2006-10-20T13:35:00.000-05:00

A while ago, Karyn showed Johnny Cash's cover of Nine Inch Nails' Hurt. It made the front page of Digg Videos today, and I was reminded how emotionally powerful it is.

I've always loved cover songs, provided a few caveats: the coverer has to add their own distinctive style to the song, and they have to improve upon the original. Cash easily does both. Trent Reznor even said the following about the video:

I pop the video in, and wow… Tears welling, silence, goose-bumps... Wow. I just lost my girlfriend, because that song isn't mine anymore... It really made me think about how powerful music is as a medium and art form. I wrote some words and music in my bedroom as a way of staying sane, about a bleak and desperate place I was in, totally isolated and alone. [Somehow] that winds up reinterpreted by a music legend from a radically different era/genre and still retains sincerity and meaning--different, but every bit as pure.

Although the song was released on his 2002 album, American IV: The Man Comes Around, the video is interpreted as after his wife's death--Johhny followed his wife into the grave four short months later. It's heartbreaking to watch Johnny's shaking hands spill a glass of wine on a feast table as images of June and his life flicker on the screen.

I couldn't help but tear up watching an old man mourn for his wife, waiting for death to take him so that they could be reunited.

You can find the video here.

Change of Plans

2006-10-16T03:29:00.000-05:00

I realized that I have some pretty huge changes coming up that I haven't actually mentioned here... mostly for the reason that the only people who actually read this are people I would have already told.

Megan and I have done a complete 180° on the Seattle-based plans: I was under the impression that my lease expires at the end of November--wrongo. It expires at the end of this month. Therefore, the job search was cut much shorter than I had been anticipating, and I wasn't able to find a Seattle-area position during the brief window that could have allowed me to flee the dairy state.

Instead, Megan is coming to live in Madison. We're getting the second floor of a triplex in a really cool section of town. If you're interested, you can take a little tour here. Have you ever seen the Chad Vader shorts on YouTube? They're filmed a couple blocks away.

I'm flying out on 24 October so we can load up her car and drive back to Wisconsin... and it's going to be an adventure. Driving a '95 Toyota Tercel across most of the country is enough of a challenge: now add a hopefully-drugged-up-cat, a trailer full of all of Megan's worldly possessions, and the fact that long car trips tend to make me completely batshit insane.

Well, it's nearly 3:30AM, and I have a lease to sign tomorrow morning.

Congratulations Christine and Mike!

2006-10-16T02:49:00.000-05:00

Christine got married on Saturday! For those of you who don't know, Christine and I dated for something close to a year, split between two semi-functional relationships. And in what I'm sure sounds like a very backhanded compliment, I've never been so glad that she and I broke up.

That requires some explanation--watching her and her new husband last night at the reception, it was obvious that she was very much in love, very happy, and very excited. The two of them were adorable. Never in all the time we dated were we anywhere near that happy; we weren't even close to right for each other. She and Mike definitely are. (Not this Mike, who shall henceforth only be known only as "Mikey" to reduce confusion.) If she'd never had the good sense to break it off with me, she never would have found Mike.

I'm doing my best to make this sound complimentary to the two of them, and not sound bitter or resentful. It's not really working. Unfortunately, I do my best writing when half in the bag, and I'm stone sober at the moment. So, trust me until I have a few drinks and revise this--there's no envy, bitterness, or resentment here. I'm genuinely happy for them.

Anyhow... congratulations, Mike and Christine. All my best to both of you.

Post-Partum Depression *

2006-10-13T17:44:00.000-05:00

If I were the pizza guy, I'd be offended by the coupon on the lower right.

^* Get it? It's a delivery joke.

Generic Blog Post

2006-10-09T21:17:00.000-05:00

No real purpose for this one, other than the fact that I haven't posted in quite some time.

I had a dream the other night that involved knife fighting a pair of shoes. As you would logically assume, this ended in receiving head from a woman who had been hiding in a pile of crates covered by a canvas dropcloth.

Microsoft Exchange vs. Unix Sendmail - Rant and Comparison

2006-09-25T19:59:00.000-05:00

[Microsoft Exchange and Sendmail are server programs for sending email. You have almost certainly sent mail to one or the other before, and there's a pretty good chance that your email service is using one and you don't know it. They operate behind the scenes, so most people don't even notice them.]

I absolutely loathe Microsoft's server software. There has yet to be a single occasion where I have said, "Wow, that was way easier than doing the same thing in Unix."

This is not to say that I believe that all Unix systems are superior to all Microsoft systems. That would be a broad generalization, and a stupid one at that. I'm sure there are applications where Microsoft server products outperform equivalent open source and Unix offerings.

I just haven't found any.

Case in point: minor changes, the focus of this rant, are far easier to deal with in Unix. Tonight, I had to change the address that some guy's email was being forwarded to. Sounds simple enough, right?

This is a link to how to change someone's forwarding address in Microsoft Exchange. Look at it. Don't bother to read it, that's not really important. Just take a look at the number of steps necessary to do something this simple.

Go ahead, I'll still be here when you get back.

You didn't read it, did you? Is it really so much work to click the link, and then click "Back?"

Fine, here's the synopsis: you need five printed pages of explanation.

Now, here's how you do the same thing in Sendmail, a Unix email server program. (You don't really need to read these either, but I'll write it out for the sake of completeness.)

Open /etc/mail/virtusers in a text editor.
Find the email address for the guy that wants to change his forwarding address. It will be in the format
someguy@here.com forwarded@somewhereelse.com
.
Replace forwarded@somewhereelse.com with the new forwarding address.
Save and exit the text editor.
Restart Sendmail so it knows about the change.

Seriously, that's it. Five steps as opposed to five pages. I don't think I'm wrong here.

I'm sure some Microsoft fanboys will say, "But Exchange has so many more features than Sendmail! It has to be more complex." Let me take that argument apart here.

I really don't think that complexity is an excuse for really, really terrible user experience.
Simple tasks are the tasks most likely to be performed on a regular basis. If you know that a task is a pain in the ass to do, find a way to make it easier. Add a wizard, find a way to obfuscate the complexity, do something that doesn't make your admins want to cut your throat.
Most Exchange users don't use the extended features offered. (The server I was using today did email services for three people. It's in a closet behind the receptionist's desk.) If they're not in use, disable them until they are. It will not only speed up the system, it will eliminate the painful need for five pages of text to do a simple task.

I'm well aware of the fact that a good user interface is difficult to write, and that the more complex something is, the harder it becomes... but come on, Microsoft. You are the premiere software developer in the world. Is this actually the best you can do?

Adaptations

2006-09-13T12:58:00.000-05:00

I come almost entirely from northern European stock--there's rumor of some Cherokee heritage in my background somewhere, but it certainly hasn't manifested itself in me--blonde hair, blue eyes, tall and lean.

As such, my body seems to be adapted for long, cold winters. I generate heat like a furnace, and I'm comfortable walking around in a T-shirt in weather that would make most people run for a parka. I typically keep the heat in my apartment set at 50 degrees in winter.

These are nice benefits to have, but there are weird side effects. Every fall, when the days start to get shorter and the weather gets colder, my body becomes convinced that there's a famine-stricken Artic Circle winter coming. It tries to adapt accordingly, apparently by making it very easy to put on a massive amount of fat.

For the third day in a row, I've had to force myself to get out of bed after twelve hours of uninterrupted sleep--presumably because bodies at rest don't burn any calories.

I'm hungry all the time--even when I've just finished a meal.

All this seems especially pointless when you consider the fact that I'm hoping I won't have to be anywhere near Wisconsin when winter sets in for real.

Old English

2006-09-10T11:37:00.000-05:00

I just finished reading the Wikipedia article on Old English.

Why? I'm not entirely sure. I stumbled across the link in a discussion thread on digg.com.

There were a few sections I couldn't understand without some familiarity with linguistics (which I don't have), but I found the article fascinating. I've always been amazed by other languages--and seeing the roots of my own language laid out is amazing to see.

For those of you who won't read the article--which I suspect is all of you--here a couple interesting tidbits:

Since Old English was considered to be a language of the common man, very little was recorded in it--if records or stories were kept, they were written in Latin or of the language of whoever had most recently conquered the region. Because of this, many of the English words were being written down for the first time, and were written phonetically in the dialect of the scribe.

Thus, many of the unusual and horrific spellings in Modern English can be traced back to Old and Middle English. Letters that have become silent in Modern English were actually pronounced in Old English.

For example, cniht, the old English equivalent of knight, was pronounced with a hard c sound. The pronunciations of the words changed over time, but the spellings eventually became static and ceased to reflect these changes.

Old English contained a concept known as dual plurals, where there is a separate plural form indicating exactly two of something. To give an example, say that the suffix a is added to a word to indicate the dual plural.

man = One man
mana = Two men
men = Any number greater than two men.

This concept survives in many of the languages that also share Germanic roots, such as modern Icelandic.

What really surprised me was the last, seemingly tacked-on section of the article: the Lord's Prayer in Old English. The similarities between Modern English and Old English are striking. Many of the same pronouns are still in use, and it's easy to see earlier forms of common words in the text.

Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum,
Si þin nama gehalgod.
To becume þin rice,
gewurþe ðin willa, on eorðan swa swa on heofonum.
urne gedæghwamlican hlaf syle us todæg,
and forgyf us ure gyltas, swa swa we forgyfað urum gyltendum.
and ne gelæd þu us on costnunge, ac alys us of yfele. soþlice.

Our father who art in heaven,
Hallowed by thy name.
Thy kingdom come,
Thy will be done, on earth as it as in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread,
And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who have trespassed against us.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen.

If any of you actually do read the article, you'll find that some of what I've mentioned isn't in it. I've drawn from my memory of high school English and other research for some of the info.

Mirror

2006-08-24T22:43:00.000-05:00

[Fiction, obviously --ed.]

Shoving back the shower curtain, I grabbed for my towel and dried myself off. Groaning slightly, I lurched towards the sink and toweled the condensation from the mirror. Through the haze of alcohol and sleep deprivation, I miserably wondered why I had drunk so much the night before, and just how terrible a hangover I should expect to deal with for the next eight hours.

I leaned in close to the mirror, and blearily eyed the familiar scars on my right cheek and eyebrow. They were, respectively, the results of a childhood neighbor's fingernails and an unprovoked attack by a drunk. I rarely notice them anymore, but they seemed more prominent this painful morning.

I brushed the hair back from my forehead. Then, disapproving of the results, brushed it back down. Sighing, I concluded that nothing short of a haircut was going to improve its appearance and resigned myself to looking at bad as I felt. I turned to open the door, intending to eat some of last night's delivery pizza before driving to work.

I turned back, stopped for a moment, and stared into the mirror.

I'm not sure what caught my eye, exactly... perhaps a gleam I didn't recognize in the eye of my reflection. Maybe it was a slight difference in the way I looked back at me. Perhaps the person looking back through the glass didn't seem as familiar as he should have. I don't know what it was. Something just felt out of place, different...

I leaned in again, staring into my reflected eyes. Wondering how many brain cells had drowned in whiskey the night before, I grunted and stood up straight again.

It was nothing, I thought, trying to convince myself. It has to be. I've just got a case of the alkie stupids.

But...

I slowly reached out to the mirror, my index and middle fingers extended. I pressed them against the reflection.

I felt flesh. Other fingertips. My fingertips against other fingertips. I gasped and jerked my hand back, rubbing my fingers with my other hand in disbelief.

"What..." I whispered. "What the hell was that?"

I reached out again, this time pressing my entire hand flat against the mirror.

Nothing but cold, smooth glass. A trickle of condensation slid from my outstretched thumb to the countertop below. My familiar reflection looked back at me through bloodshot, half-lidded eyes.

My hand still pressed against the glass, I muttered "But... I felt it... I know I did... they were there..."

Carfuck follow-up

2006-08-24T17:27:00.000-05:00

I called Meineke back today to calmly and politely explain the problems I was having with my brakes. (When you're complaining , never start by screaming. That just pisses off the other person and makes them not want to help you.) The manager, Tad, offered to take another look at my car. I brought it in, and he fixed the problem that their brake check had created yesterday. He apologized for needing to bring my car back in.

So, will I go back to Meineke? No. While I have to admit that their customer service was quite good, that doesn't make up for the fact that they screwed up my brakes, charged me an arm and a leg to do it, and it required two return trips to fix the problem.

I kicked a large dent in my car...

2006-08-23T17:21:00.000-05:00

Added to my list of businesses never to patronize again: Meineke Car Care Center.

I brought my car in to be repaired today, due to the fact that something had gotten lodged in the left front disk brake a few weeks ago. (It nearly started on fire, and I was in Milwaukee. I ended up having to burden my friends with my car problems in order to get to Madison and back. Thanks, Danulai!) In the process of removing the smoking chunk of debris, I accidentally stripped one of the lug studs. This left me with only three lug nuts holding the wheel on. As you may imagine this (in addition to the smoking wheel) doesn't make for the most terror-free driving experience.

So, today, I finally brought my car to the Meineke down the street from my apartment. I knew that it would be more expensive than taking it to a small non-chain store shop, but it was close enough to my place that I could drive there and walk home while it was being worked on. Plus, I don't know of any small, non-chain shops on my side of town. Around here, it's corporate chain stores or nothing.

Predictably, they found $700 worth of recommended repairs, far more than the actual value of the car. I had them evaluate the brakes, do an oil change, and replace the lug stud and lug nuts. That was it. They didn't even touch the brakes.

Yet, somehow, they managed to fuck them up so completely that I was afraid to drive it a half mile back to my apartment.

As I left the Meineke parking lot, I was surprised and terrified to learn that my formerly squishy brakes were now my very-nearly nonexistent brakes. I went across the street to Taco Bell for some drive-through and pumped on the brakes while in line. It was possible, but unlikely, that the grease monkey hadn't pumped up the pressure before returning it to me. Predictably, this didn't work. I drove it back across the street and walked back to complain and make them fix it.

A mechanic took the key, and I munched my burritos and read The Onion while they pulled it in to take another look at it. Fifteen minutes later, a man with "James" embroidered on a blue workshirt slouched into the waiting room.

"Black Tempo?" he said, dangling the key in front of him.

"That's me." I reached out and took the key from him.

"We couldn't find anything wrong with it. That's the way it was when you brought it in."

"Oh, no it wasn't," I replied angrily. "My brakes weren't great when I brought it in, but they worked a lot better than that."

We continued in this vein for a few minutes--I, insisting that my brakes had been serviceable as recently as the moment I left it in their care; and he, falling back on that old chestnut, "It was like that when you brought it in."

Eventually, he just shrugged and made it clear that he had nothing to say other than his new mantra. I gave up and left, and called my dad from my car. He's on his way with $75 in parts to do about half the recommended repairs. The rest can wait. Probably until Armageddon. If it's not immediately life threatening, I'm not fixing it.

I can understand if someone accidentally screws something up in the process of working on something; I do it on a regular basis. But the incompetence required to trash something as critical as my brakes, have no idea how, then refuse to admit a problem is staggering.

I have no intention of ever going back to Meineke. Keep this in mind next time your car needs work done. I know I will.

Bike Messenger

2006-08-20T21:32:00.000-05:00

I'm planning on applying at Scram! Couriers tomorrow for a part time bike messenger job. I basically do nothing on Mondays and Wednesdays before work, so I think it would be a lot of fun to have a reason to bike all over the city. Not to mention getting in great shape, having fun doing it, and hopefully making enough cash to buy myself a new bike.

The bike I've got now is a Giant Sedona ST, and I love it. It's a great bike, and it takes the abuse I throw at it, but it's not made for road conditions. I don't do any mountain biking, and it's a mountain bike. With a top pedaling speed of around 15mph, it's not exactly made to break any speed records--when I go out on a long ride, I like to be able to fly. This bike simply wasn't designed for that.

So, wish me luck. I hope I get the job.

Journalism

2006-08-13T19:07:00.000-05:00

I was just watching 60 Minutes. Mike Wallace was interviewing Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: I saw something there completely foreign to American politics. Wallace asked questions of a sitting head of state, and Ahmadinejad predictably attempted to dodge the questions.

However, Wallace refused the evasions as par for the course and persisted in his line of questioning, asking questions three and four times until he got some sort of answer from Ahmadinejad.

Can you imagine a reporter having this sort of tact interviewing President Bush? For that matter, can you imagine Bush answering a difficult question posed to him?

It's a sad reflection on the state of American politics and journalism when the idea of forcing an elected official to answer a question with any degree of honesty is a surprising event.

Comments

2006-08-07T00:51:00.000-05:00

I disabled comment moderation. I thought it worked differently than it does. I'd rather get the odd comment spam than discourage actual human beings from responding to my drivel.

When I Grow Up

2006-08-06T23:24:00.000-05:00

I finally realized what I wanted to be when I grew up.

I've always been fascinated by abandoned, lost, places. When I was young, I used to go exploring the woods surrounding my house. I discovered an illegal junkyard with a dozen cars in it. Most had been there for decades, and I investigated every one of them. It wasn't the cars themselves that interested me; every single one of them had a story. Every one had something that they could tell me about who had been in them, what kind of lives they had led. Surrounding them on all sides was someone's junk, the heaped and forgotten detritus of an anonymous life. Baby carriages. Bird cages. Long forgotten toys. I knew that everything there had meant something to someone once.

Less than a mile away, I also discovered the remains of an old homestead. Almost nothing remained of it, just a clearing overgrown with long grass. In the center stood the crumbling remains of a foundation and an electric pole, sans wires to the power grid. I wanted to know who had lived there, when, why they had left, and when they had gotten there.

This interest in the forgotten never left me. For me, there's mystery, dignity, and an exciting sense of uncovering the unknown. Christine and I biked out to an abandoned hotel to poke through the ruins. Megan, Mike and I toured the underground tunnels in downtown Seattle. I would love to become an urban explorer, but it's a dangerous hobby and not the sort of thing one wants to do on his own if he values his life.

I wish that I'd realized that there could have been a future and a career for me in archeology and exploration. I think it would have been a far more interesting and rewarding life than the one I'm leading now.

I Dream of Being an Underwear Model

2006-08-04T22:13:00.000-05:00

So, you know that dream where you're somewhere important, but you're in your underwear? I had that dream a few nights ago. Normally, this wouldn't be such an odd thing, except for the following:

It was at my old job, a department store in the mall. I was hiding next to the shoe department and hoping no one would see me.

An stodgy, uptight, Jehovah's-Witness-type-religious friend from high school was with me. I haven't seen him in seven years.

He was also in his underwear.

Being in his underwear didn't phase him one bit.

Once someone gave me my winter leather jacket, I no longer felt embarrassed about my junk being a sixteenth of an inch of fabric from public display.

I haven't had one of these dreams since I was in fourth grade.

I'm going to chalk this one up to a sore back and a rude awakening by a gasoline-powered pressure washer sitting in front of my windows. Hopefully it won't repeat itself.

Givin' away my junk

2006-07-20T21:13:00.000-05:00

I have far too much junk cluttering up my apartment, and certainly a lot more than I want to move with me to Washington. Here's the thing, though... people are actually coming to my front door and taking this stuff off my hands for me. Tonight I gave away an old NES (I had two) and some RAM that I couldn't use.

If you haven't heard of freecycling, I'd highly recommend it. Go to freecycle.org and find a local group for your area. People advertise what they have and what they want in mailing list, then make arrangements for pick up.

Some of the requests can be fairly inane: "I want a laptop computer!" and "Who wants to give me their car?" are actually quite common. I'm not sure why the moderators don't just block the messages.

Similarly, so are some of the offers: "I've got a coupon for 20% at Bed Bath and Beyond!" was one a while ago. Oh, you mean the coupon they mailed to everyone in Madison, including me? Yeah, we'll pass. But thanks.

I'm thinking I should start clearing the crap out of my storage space with freecycling. It seems to be the place that my things go to die... once something goes down there, the odds that I'll ever want it again shrink to close to zero.

PDF Viewers, anyone?

2006-07-20T20:25:00.000-05:00

Adobe Reader can eat my ass, and here's why:

It's slow and ugly.

It integrates itself into my browser without asking me during install.

The Adobe browser plugin will pop up dialog boxes under multiple other windows, making the entire browser unresponsive until I can find it and tell it to just open the damn PDF.

It begs to be updated constantly, frequently trying to get me to download other Adobe products I don't want and don't need.

There are a slew of screen-cluttering icons taking up precious screen real estate across the top of the screen.

Here's a shocker for you, Adobe... I hate your damn PDF files. I hate them. Give me straight HTML any day. It's faster to search and scroll through, usually easier on the eyes, and easily created and modified.

However, I'm frequently required to deal with your damn PDF files.

All I want is from your reader is for it to read PDF files. That's it. Your installer downloads 20MB of data to do a task that could be done with overkill in 5MB.

So, I'm wondering--what alternative PDF readers do people use? I can't be the only person unwilling to deal with Adobe's atrocious Reader. If you have an opinion, please let me know.

Update: In case you care (and I'm sure you don't) I found this on Digg not long after I posted. Strangely, I'd already downloaded and installed the program in the blog post by the time I found the review.

I have nothing to say.

2006-07-19T22:38:00.000-05:00

Seriously... nothing to say. I'm just stunningly bored at work, and I thought this might entertain me for a bit.

:: indifferent shrug ::

I have Thursdays and Fridays off (weird schedule, remember?) so I'm going to be spending my "weekend" rewriting my resume. Mikey offered to try to get in contact with a Google or Amazon recruiter for me; hopefully he'll be able to do that.

So, at the moment, here's the master plan:

Update my resume.

Get a fantastic job on the other side of the country.

Move to Washington.

Get a two bedroom apartment with Megan.

Be happy.

<geekspeak>
My server is coming along quite nicely. I'm still getting some errors on boot from the hard drives, but they seem to be ok. I installed Fedora Core 5 today with software RAID1 across two 40GB drives. I might get a third just because I don't trust either very much.

Mikey gave me an old stick of 256MB PC133 RAM which, if it still works, would max out the server at 512MB. The odds of it still being good are slim at best... he didn't know if it worked when he gave it to me, and I threw it sans anti-static bag into the front pocket of my luggage. Assuming it wasn't destroyed by baggage handling or static (and was good to begin with), the bottle of massage oil on the opposite side of the pocket burst open, soaked through the dividing fabric, and coated it. I'm concerned that even testing it might trash the motherboard I put it in.
</geekspeak>

That is all. Go about your business.

Temporary

2006-07-16T17:34:00.000-05:00

Officially, this blog doesn't exist.

You see, I had been planning to wait on creating a blog until I after I had built myself a server, installed it at work (free server colocation as a perk for working at a small ISP--w00t!), and designed a site for it.

That was the plan when Diary-X went under about half a year ago. As of now, I have a server built entirely from second-hand, third-rate hardware that doesn't work for shit. It needs a lot of work and testing before I consider hosting anything on it. Though I could be designing a site for it while it's in progress... meh. One thing at a time. Hopefully, I'll get my server up and running soon enough, and this will become a redirect page to my new server.

I also thought it would be nice to have a blogger ID so that I can comment on Christine, Jason and Richard's blogs.

About me, in general:

I used to blog at fuzzymarc.diary-x.com before the server died, which I'm still a bit angry about. I managed to retrieve about sixty of my entries through various sources, but lost several of my favorites anyway. Who runs a server with no backups or redundancy of any kind? That's just stunningly, amazingly irresponsible and stupid. I won't even consider putting my server into production without a software RAID 1 array.

I'm a professional geek working at a small ISP in Wisconsin, which may or may not change in the near future. My lovely girlfriend Megan is current about 1,300 miles away in Idaho, and I miss her a great deal. (Long story. Suffice it to say that she hasn't always been that far away.) I've decided recently--today, in fact--that I'm going to update my resume and start applying to jobs in the Seattle area. "Seattle," you say, "isn't that in Washington, and not so much in Idaho?" Yes, it is. However, I've been to Megan's town. The odds of finding a job I won't loathe are very small indeed. Seattle is the nearest place I think it will be easy for me to settle in. My good friend Mikey lives there, and has offered to let me live on his couch long enough to get my shit together.

I have no social life whatsoever. I can't remember the last time I did anything on a Friday or Saturday night. This is due in equal parts to having very few friends, a significantly decreased desire to drink myself retarded on a regular basis, and the fact that I work unpleasant, weird hours.

On the increasingly rare occasions I leave my apartment for reasons other than work or errands, I go to the Buddhist temple in Oregon, about twenty minutes from my place. I haven't actually been there in months. I practice Tae Soo Do, a martial art style created as an introduction to the more hardcore Hwa Rang Do. If done quickly, it's possible to get a black belt in Tae Soo Do in about two years. Upon graduating into Hwa Rang Do, this translates into an orange sash (second-from-bottom ranking).

I bike to work when I can, which is most days during the summer. Any jokes relating to the 40-Year-Old Virgin are not appreciated. It may not be the most glamorous way to get to work, but I only have to fill my car's tank once a month, suckers.

I'm blogging from my cube. I'm actually done for the day, but frankly, I don't really want to go back to my apartment. It has no air conditioning, and it is unmercifully, soul-crushingly hot today. Not to mention the fact that I have mice--apparently, I have a lot of them. I caught mouse number six the other night. I've been forcing the saga of my battle against vermin on anyone who will listen. Granted, I know it's something that no one wants to hear... but I have the unsavory habit of unloading my problems on others. More that likely, I'll do my fair share of bitching here.

I think I'm done rambling for now. Expect more nonsense in the near future.