6:12EST-SAT-3/30/2002
- How often do you answer the phone and not know who it is from the sound of their voice? It's different sounding on the phone so it's often deceiving. I've made a lot of women mad by guessing the wrong name because of things like that. That's probably why I am so reluctant to use the phone anymore. Phones are naturally bad for duplicating sound very well. They are even worse than the vast majority of home theatre equipment that I find in any but the most extravagant specialty electronics stores. Car stereo setups are often a lot better sounding and can be significantly less expensive to achieve the same rich sound quality. You can even get a pair of really good sounding headphones for around a hundred dollars or so if you look hard enough. Concert halls, however, have alwas sounded like ass to me. That is why it was always very difficult to be a sound tech for the theatre. It's all about sound fields. It's very hard to make a wide open area sound good. I guess that's why bathrooms sound so good. Have you ever been in a bathroom and not liked the way your own voice sounded? It's great. Probably why we sing so often when we're in there. I know I do. Especially when I've been drinking. The Barber of Seville is my personal favorite. I think that's why people get mad when you take the cordless phone into the bathroom with you. They wanted to be there for the performance and have to settle for bootleg.
7:19EST-SAT-3/23/2002
- I like to claim to be an asshole in good humor, but it pains me when someone believes it. I remember when I first started working for Bellsouth.net doing their internet help desk thing in Atlanta back in 1998. Sure, at the time it was only analog support, but it was a new field for me. My first step on a doomed career path. It started out great because I was able to help people all day long and make them happy in some small way. I would walk out of work with a smile on my face feeling happy about it every day. Sometimes, I would try to help someone but their problem would be beyond my ability to resolve so I would ask one of the local technical gurus for their assistance. Naturally, they would ask what I had done and I would tell them everything. Along the way, I would occasionally think of something that I had missed and knowing full well that it was what they would tell me to do, I would say I had done it already so they could tell me something else to do in case that last thing would not work. I felt smart at first for trying to be efficient and save a trip to bother them again in five minutes. After a while, I found more and more cases that I could not resolve and each time I asked the gurus what to do and they came up blank, I felt somewhat vindicated like if they couldn't figure it out, no shame in my not being able to figure it out. Either that, or they wre not the gurus I thought them to be. That part was the killer. I was purposefully hiding or altering facts just to try to baffle the gurus. I started checking back on the ones I couldn't get fixed and had to hand it off to the gurus. They always seemed to fix the issue with a step that I had missed, or done wrong. That was quite a blow so I forced myself to get better. One day, I realized that many of the same people I was trying to help on the phones were doing the very same thing to me that I had done to the gurus. They wanted to feel vindicated more than they wanted to get the situation fixed. That was disheartening as well. Several promotions later, I found myself in the position of the gurus and once again, I realized that many of the techies who I was trying to help with their calls were trying to alter the facts to suit their needs. What a viscious circle. Sure enough, whenever I had to take over their calls, I would invariably fix it by doing trivial things and then delighting in my cleverness afterwards. What a horrible chain where nobody wants to admit modesty, and I was at the top. I was not a guru to help them solve their problems, I was an effigy to make them feel better about them selves. Fuck that. I quit on Thursday night. It's time for some radical changes in my life again.
18:09EST-WED-3/20/2002
- I had a very erotic dream last night involving my favorite ex-girlfriend. I guess I should not be surprised. Shortly before bed, one of my conversations on AIM was really heavy flirting to drive her insane (lots of fun) and another was nothing short of cyber sex. If one of the conversations had been with the object of my dream, it would have made more sense. What's funny is that the dream started out normal enough until I found out (in the dream) that she was engaged to marry a frat-boy. This made me incredibly jealous and I gave it my best shot at keeping her form getting married to him. I did so by trying to seduce her. Luckily, I succeeded (it was -my- dream after all) but got into an odd car chase and fist fight in the middle of a busy road with the frat-boy in question. I don't know why I didn't have a really neat gun on me at the time. Come to think of it, there wasn't a gun in the entire dream. That is very out of the ordinary for my dreams, but at least there was rowdy sex with a really sexy woman (who doesn't read this page in case you're wondering) so it was still cool. Just as it seemed like I was going to see how things turned out, the alarm woke me up. If she reads this, she'll probably be pissed. She dislikes frat-boys just as much as I do.
1:33EST-WED-3/20/2002
This quiz says absolutely nothing about your personality. Take it!
23:37EST-TUE-3/19/2002
- Yep. Went to the Goth club on Sunday and had a great deal of fun. At first, it was kind of slow but I ran into more and more people that I knew and I began to have a blast. Oddly enough, after we were calling it a night, I found myself sitting outside talking to a couple of women about their Everquest characters. Funny in a way, disheartening in another. It's only natural. You play a game because it is fun, and the more fun you have doing it, the more you play it. The more you play with something, the more it becomes familiar and you find that when you meet someone else who has this on common with you, they can understand all the funny stories and other EQ humor or horror stories. If they ever have an EQ convention in or around Knoxville (or any large gathering of players) I want to run in, find a small group of them who are standing around talking, pull down the pants of the most likely candidate and then run for the door shouting TRAIN TO ZONE!!!
8:19EST-SAT-3/16/2002
- I wonder if Chuck has done anything exciting with his page yet... I wonder if I'll ever stop getting distracted by people walking into the house with car parts, companies calling on the phone for Patrick's first born child, the fire department telling me to stop trying to cook, the urge to play EQ again, and DotNet whining for a piece of action long enough for me to finish reading Great Expectations. I wonder why every time I talk to Jessica on AIM, I realize too late that my writing style changes dramatically. I wonder if she thinks I sound as pretentious as I think I do when I re-read what I'd typed. I wonder if I'll learn how to spell. I wonder if I'll make it to bed soon. Stop nagging me!
8:11EST-SAT-3/16/2002
- OH GOD YES! In my humble opinion (IMHO for short) there is nothing quite so perfect as listing to The Wall right now while in a drowsy pre-sleep state of being. Ok, so I'm not -quite- listening to The Wall, per se, but I could be with very little effort. I'm actually listening to an interesting remix by Aphex Twin of Underworld's Born Slippy. It seems to have quite a bit of The Wall thrown in. Interestingly done. No, I haven't gone to bed yet. I guess I should do that.
8:01EST-SAT-3/16/2002
- Tarnation! It's Saturday morning already and I have another wedding to attend. Perhaps I should have slept. I dare not nap for fear of being unable to rouse myself. I'm already yawning uncontrollably and although I keep sucking down more and more Dr. Pepper, I cannot keep from yawning uncontrollably. That's it, I'm going to take what Richard Marcinko calls a 'combat nap' and entrust my pager and Eric (who is killing time on a golfing game) can wake me in time for deployment. The war games of the wedding rehearsal last night was a losing battle on several fronts. I was one of only three guys who showed up, and one of them is the groom. Naturally, every woman even remotely involved in the occasion was there so Spam and I were outnumbered. Poor LaMount. I've gotta remember to... uh... screw it. I'm obviously in need of a few REM Cycles. Damn, I hate that band.
2:42EST-TUE-3/12/2002
- I can't make this shit up! Patrick, Chuck, Zak, and I were terrorizing a particularly tasty Chinese buffet tonight and on the way out I noticed one of my old friends. A Thrifty Nickle. I used to LOVE these things! The reasons are numerous, but I'll spare you. It's an insight into a particularly red side of our local culture. One one of the pages, I found the add that said 'FREE NASCAR TICKETS with purchase of mobile home'. I just -had- to share.
3:41EST-SAT-3/9/2002
- Sheesh! What a week. I hope it is over tonight, and doesn't keep up with it's trend tomorrow. Five minutes before I was to get out of work tonight, Sean runs up to me and tells me that my car was broken into. Ausgezeichnet. Wundervoll. Whatever. A couple of people in a white coupe backed into a parking space beside my car and bashed the passenger window in. The car alarm and the guy standing nearby who saw it happen must have scared them off. The police showed up in record time. Not even three minutes after being called, a cruiser showed up. It took them something like three hours to get to my house when I had four thousand dollars worth of guns stolen. Actually, it was a $3700 dollar sniper rifle and a shotgun, but close enough. At least I can take comfort in the thought that this happened when I had enough money to cover it. I refuse to stoop to cardboard or plastic windows. At least DotNet still loves me.
23:29EST-FRI-3/8/2002
21:12EST-FRI-3/8/2002
- Sheesh! If it weren't Friday I would be -really- tempted to just quit and walk out the door right now. These past two days have been incredible tests of patience and forgiveness. I am neither. This isn't good. Every time I suspect I'm going to get to read more than two words in my book, I get another angry escalation. I can deal with the friendly ones that just need technical expertise. I rather enjoy those most times, but it's when I have to bow down and kiss ass to apologize for the mistakes of someone else that I have problems. I'm not very good at kissing ass. People who are kind of make me uncomfortable. You know what I mean? It's not bad to see them kiss someone else's ass. It's rather funny at times. Just so long as it isn't mine. I hope you can see how this can make my job especially difficult at times. Especially since this company is in a perpetual SNAFU. I daydream about jobs that are more rewarding than this one. Zak and I even talked about going back to work at Fazoli's if they offered to pay us more than we make here. I'd be there in half a heartbeat. This job is so mentally draining that after a day or two here, I feel so mentally taxed that I just don't want to think at all and start watching the Southpark episodes I have on the server. Luckily, we have a party tomorrow so that should be fun. Many people are in town for Spring Break so it'll be fun to play with them again. The weather outside has been marvelous these past couple of days and I hope it continues this weekend as well. Lemme check... Darn. Not looking good. I'll keep my fingers crossed. They are threatening thunderstorms. Don't get me wrong, I love a good thunderstorm as much (or more) than the next person but that puts a damper (literally) on the hopes to have a bon-fire. It's almost springtime. Time for thoughts to turn to meandering around the great out-doors with a frame pack and a sleeping bag. And a gun!
2:42EST-FRI-3/8/2002
- I've read somewhere that when a friend is planning on committing suicide, they get really emotional and give everyone strange things as a reminder of their friendship. Does the Finger count? If so, I'm going to have to be more suspicious of my friends.
0:42EST-THU-3/7/2002
- Well, it's really easy to keep up with all the goings-on that my friends get into while I'm off at 'werk'. It looks like nobody has had the energy or inspiration (or spare time, perhaps) to update their pages except for Nick and I. Yeah, Chuck, I know you updated your page but you don't count. <smile> Today at 'werk' has been rather slow so I've had time to read everything that I could stand on the local Goth forum, and read a years worth of FARK PhotoShop threads. What a time consuming waste of bandwidth. I guess it's time to get back to reading Dickens.
18:12EST-WED-3/6/2002
- OH GOD YES!!!
17:37EST-WED-3/6/2002
- Must... fight... urge... to... spam... No, really. It appears that I'm -still- getting emails from ecrushes and that whole ilk of web sites. Answering the first one was my biggest mistake. First they make you sign up by giving them your email address. That gets sold off and you get spam from then on until the day you (or your email address) dies. After you sign up and they verify that the email address you gave them is spamable, you give them all the email addresses you can think of and hope that one of them matches up with the one that listed you. All the email addresses you put in trying desperately for a match get spammed with the same offer you did hoping they will further expand their list of email addresses to spam and sell off to other spammers. Quite an ingenious method, I agree. Nobody can resist the temptation of someone wanting to love them. Even if they just want to luv them. I, however, CAN and will resist the urge to pass on more spam. Consider this my way of taking one for the team. Heh heh heh, just this afternoon I talked to three people about relationships and it was unanimously regarded that we suck at them. Unfortunately, I also found out that the one person I really hoped would be at the next party would not. I was more than mildly disheartened by that since a lot of signs are indicating this will be the last party I should hold. Oh well, more than a year is a pretty decent run of pushing our luck. Atlanta is looking like more and more of an attractive option.
13:36EST-WED-3/6/2002
- Interesting day. I found a forum for the local goth scene and signed up. I found several people on it that I used to know from the clubs when they were good. Looks like they may have a new place starting full-time. I'll be all about that. It's been a while since I had a day of the week to look forward to for a chance to get out and play with other black clothing and leather obsessed friends. While I was there, I noticed several flash sites I've shared with you before, but this one is new: Fuck Shit Piss. Not work safe.
5:43EST-TUE-3/5/2002
- 63.2 years. The New York Times likes to tell us that the last study done in 1996 showed that the average male life span is 72 years (women 79) but a little add-on that didn't make it into their report was that life spans in the south were significantly lower. 63.2 years for men. I find this both somewhat depressing and yet at the same time I laugh my ass off every time I think about the reason -I- think it must be. Why, you ask? I'll spare you the details, but I'll bet it starts with 'Hey Bubba, watch this...' Scary thought, isn't it? At time of writing, I am 26 years old. Almost two years of my life are kept on this page. I am scared shitless at times that I am nearing the revised expected middle of my life, and have little to show for it in respect to life goals. Well, let me rephrase that part. Life goals are relevant. I have wanted little more than to be able to die (again) and know that I enjoyed the hell out of my personal gift of life. If I'm not busy trying to have fun with my friends (even at work), I try to think of other ways to regain the lost innocence of our youths before we were worried about marriages, mortgages, medication, and mortality. Think back to the days before your realization of our sands slipping away. Wasn't it neat? There are still certain icons of our past that still hold meaning to us and we treasure them. Naturally, these are different for everyone. Mine are varied and expect yours are as well. I found another song tonight that I loved so much when I was 4. I thought a few years ago that it could only have been a song by the Beatles. I was 1/4 right. Solo effort by McCartney. Brought a tear to my eye to hear again after two decades. I have a small list of songs that I've found recently that I remember from being young and they are -very- bizarre like Boy Named Sue, My Dingaling, and Music Box Dancer. Don't laugh. I'll bet you still like some of the songs they forced us to sing in school when we were just kids. Most of which I would love to hear redone by a punk or speedmetal band because I think it would be fun. Humor is a very powerful tool. It's effects are priceless. No wonder the entertainment industry makes so much money. Many many times more than what our government gets from us in the form of taxes. Say... That's an idea! The Ministry of Entertainment. Nah, they would probably screw it up. Still, we often think back to our earlier school days for innocent fun. At work, I sit by Zak, Steve, and Dave. We are loud, disrespectful, immature, and love every minute of it. No, I mean -really- immature. We steal free stuff and useless table decorations, then go back to work and laugh as we try to fart on each other to keep ourselves from letting the job get us down. It's the only thing that keeps me sane some days. I want to take a couple of those great big 3 gallon cans of baked beans on our next camping trip. That's got to be worth a couple of stories right there. You might find the thought of guys trying to out gas each other to be incredibly stupid and sophomoric. Yes. It is. I will not deny it, but I keep finding that no matter how long I spend listening to Prairie Home Companion on NPR (and I do quite enjoy it as well) we cannot overlook the basic fact that fart jokes are a part of our childhood and that makes it precious. I'm pretty sure that all the guys can understand where I'm coming from on this one, but the women probably aren't too keen on me trying to encourage us to act like kindergartners. I'll try to make it up to you by reminding the guys to PLEASE resist the urge to hot-box your girlfriends. It's just not worth the repercussion. <sigh> Well, it's late and I have a long way to go until I finish reading Great Expectations.
2:37EST-TUE-3/5/2002
- HOLY SHIT!!! You simply -must- click here to see about disabling many of those annoying cookies which guide scripts in generating pop-up adds. If it works, you just click on all the links and follow their steps to opt-out of their advertising. Some are one time deals, others are limited time opt-outs. In any case, it sounds groovy to me. I'm trying it out. I'll let you know later if I find it not working. Only one good way to test it...
23:36EST-MON-3/4/2002
- NOOOO!!! It appears that when our service providers switched over, all the party photos we had accumulated in the past year and a half were lost. I have been searching for backups of the photos but only managed to salvage three or four of the parties. All the others are gone until I can find out whether they were deleted or just moved to a new directory. Since I can’t access the Comcast member services section with my user name and password, I am guessing that they are deleted. Kind of makes me want to give up on the whole project.
23:16EST-MON-3/4/2002
- KAZAA must die. I realize that now. The more and more I mess with it, the more and more it becomes a royal pain in m'knob. Gone are the days of indiscriminately downloading entire genres of music and video, because we are now fighting to keep the server with at least 4 gigs of free space on each drive, and this never happens. Same thing on my workstation. That's not the problem though. The problem I have is that the program itself is a pop-up happy memory leak. I have doubled my CPU speed, tripled my RAM, and lately I have even put on WinderzXP for it's superior memory management. Now Kazaa can crash in half the time, but not force me to reboot the whole machine each time. It doesn't have the ability to search by user, it doesn't have the ability to set better advanced search parameters, and it keeps trying to tell me that I need gator and banzi buddy. Hell no, I don't want more spyware on my box crashing my winsocks every fifteen minutes. I have been trying to find three movies for the past couple of days but had disappointing success. After fighting with the program for a long time, it finally allowed me to search for my first query. Naked Lunch. I had the urge to watch that again the other day and figured it would make a good collection to our VCD collection. Zilch. Nobody had it. Darn. I then checked for Clockwork Orange with the same results. SLC Punk finally turned up a full version of it but whoever ripped it was wonderful for ripping it in wide-screen, but in need of an ass-whipping for choosing the worst possible quality settings. Artifacts left and right. Bah! Not worth having. I deleted it before anyone else tried to upload it from me and suffer the same tragedy. I struck a deal with Lucas. If he buys the DVD drive for his computer again, I will throw down the hundreds of dollars for the 160gb HD I've been dreaming about all these months. He's definitely getting the better end of the deal financially, but I'll constantly be harassing him to rip things where I can just slap in the drive and not do a damned thing again until it's full and time to get more drives like it. RAID!
22:15EST-MON-3/4/2002
- I like to think that Chuck was a decent kid until I got ahold of him and tried to teach him how to be a self-righteous asshole. Usually he excels at being a supreme prick (in a good way) and is able to harass me with better skill than I can harass him. Sometimes, however, he forgets that he has come to the dark side and is both friendly and caring. I speak most recently of this Saturday. Saturday was preceded by the usual Friday night of working that ended with a cast party at Holly's house. I had a great deal of fun enjoying the new people, Rhys' hair, and fixing Holly's printer. This required a few technical tangents like updating the security holes inherent in XP, and creating a hidden L2TP tunnel to her hard drive so I can rename and replace all of her BT songs with polkas greatest hits. I remember discovering that my flask of Ice 101 was not as leak-proof as I would have liked. I discovered how it feels to reach into a pocket coated in drying sugar-liquor. I discovered how vile warm 101 can be. I went home and laughed like an idiot for half an hour with Patrick as he was getting up and he was going to work. One of us said something funny, but I can't remember what it was. I -do- remember thinking that as drunk as I was, it would have been wise to drink a whole lot of water before going to bed, but my big green bed beast ate me before I got to that point. I missed a chance to go watch Japanimation all night because I slept through 5 phone calls and 4 pages, but managed to make my way to the door when Chuck showed up with some groovy DVDs. I laughed. I cried. I had an incredible headache. It was better than Cats. I will go to see it again and again. Apparently Chuck passed up something potentially amusing but decided that it was more fun to sit around and make fun of me and my hang-over. I can't say it wasn't amusing.
21:21EST-MON-3/4/2002
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| I've always known that the Smurfs were communists, and had my own theories, but they are nothing compared to the wonderful exposition that this guy has put into it. Obviously this guy has spent a great deal of time working on polishing his theories. I really enjoy the image on the hat. I've wanted a pic like that for some time and apparently I'm not the only one. It's my new desktop theme on my work computer. I do not use a screen saver since they asked me nicely to not use the last one which was all about HK firearms in action. Wonderful stills from various SAS, GSG, SEAL, and SWAT teams dashing about with their assortment of HK weaponry. I think the guy who sat next to me and liked flower and puppy screen savers complained to management. I could have made a great reverse case argument but decided to hold my tongue since I was getting away with so much other crap. I digress... He didn't figure in the presence of Smurfette, but she wasn't in there for quite some time. They added her later, for marketing I'm sure, since she made it onto the show in time for the lunch boxes to hit store shelves. In fact, if I recall correctly, she was created by Gargamel to wreak havoc on the Smurfs’ society but they converted her. Worth researching. One of the people who commented on his page mentioned a theory involving Scrubbing Bubbles. THAT, I would like to see.
|
1:07EST-SAT-3/2/2002
- I'd like to entitle todays chapter:Oh My God, What Did He Ever Do To You?
In case you really want to know, I'll tell you. Jar Jar Binks. No sir, I don't like it. The Episode I Star Wars movie was decent, but not great. It was a movie that went from concept to geeks wet dream overnight. It already had a loyal and devoted fan base who would do anything to see the movie and live the dream for even a mere 90 minutes. The last thing it needed was to piss off the very people who worship the genre by trying to include the older family oriented crowd and the little kids with the addition of some sort of comic relief marketing pawn. The kids were sold by the racing and fighting, not the Gungans. They tried that with the Ewoks and had an amazing success, but that was part of the plot line. They were not annoying sidekick figures. They were dirty little fur balls with sharp sticks and you could not understand a word they said. Sounds like many of the red necks that live all around me.
0:35EST-SAT-3/2/2002
- When I read the Illuminatus books, I found them profoundly absurd and yet very enlightened between parables and someone having sex. One of the more memorable lines (not in German) was You know it's true when it makes you laugh, but you don't really understand it unless it makes you cry. Well, here is something for you folks with water works.
18:27EST-FRI-3/1/2002
- Holy Shnikes (sh-ny-kee-s) Lucas updated his page! I honestly didn't think that he even had a journal portion to his page. Well, that just tears it. Now I feel bad that I had to discover that MY OWN ARCH NEMESIS AND RESIDENT COUCH MONKEY (post-couch) has been putting effort into his page and I didn't know about it. I found out through Holly's collection of links. Shows how much we talk, right? I talked to Patrick on the phone just a few minutes ago. First time I've had a casual conversation with him in a while. Oh, wait... I think we talked about his new cell-phone last night... Yes. We did. Mostly I just walk in from work and he's asleep. Lucas too. Usually on a couch with a DVD just barely started and playing loud enough that I can't hear myself spell poorly. After I finish enjoying the movie that they started, I go to sleep and they are gone when I wake up. The same thing happened in both Mine and Lucas' versions of our household in The Sims.
16:39EST-FRI-3/1/2002
- I have a lot more respect for marine photographers. It's impossible to take good photos of fish. I tried snapping off a few pics of my tank and found it amazingly difficult. I snapped through a hundred or so but have almost nothing to show for it. That would be a neat job to have though. Swimming around coral reefs all day with a camera. I've heard of worse jobs. I have one right now, in fact. I know it could have frustrating parts as well. Getting my fish to do what I wanted them to do nearly drove me bonkers. Good thing it was digital. I'd hate to think I had wasted ten rolls of film just trying to come up with three blury pictures. Little punks kept moving around and being camera shy. They're worse than kids.
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